What TOP Management Skills Do We All Need?

How To: Using Google Sites as a Project Portal

Systems Savvy: Do You Have It?

Transparency: The New How & E2.0 Expo
Transparency is the concept of the quarter. Transparency has always been an important management topic (how much, with whom, about what). But I think we’re entering an era where transparency may have a chance of going mainstream. Three big triggers for me: Comments by Eugene Lee suggesting that he’s seeing greater transparency in a variety of firms Nilofer Merchant’s new book The New How: Creating Business Solutions through Collaborative Strategy Series of comments at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week — Social media creates transpa

Eugene Lee: Getting to Know You 2.0
Many management books (for example, The First 90 Days, p. 45) suggest that you have structured interviews with your direct reports when you first join a new organization. Eugene Lee followed this advice when he become CEO 2.0 (that’s how Ross Mayfield, one of Socialtext’s founders, advertised the job on LinkedIn) for the collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 platform provider Socialtext. As suggested, he wrote down a set of questions like: how long have you been here, what are you most

Pressure for TOP Management is Increasing: Organizational Examples from Jonathan Zittrain’s Talk â
Organizations are global, partnered with other organizations, and more and more run via virtual teams with limited physical interaction… and those are the recognizable organizations. There are other organizations that remain on the fringe in that their work is done by freelancers so indirectly connected to the organization that it’s hard describe them in organizational terms. Wired’s recent article (by Daniel Roth), The Answer Factory describes one organization where clear decisions have been made to freelance some work, and turn other work over to compute

Budget as a Trigger for TOP Management: Examples from Eugene Lee of Socialtext
Eugene Lee is CEO of collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 platform provider Socialtext. His resume includes leadership roles at Adobe, Cisco, and the co-founding of Beyond, Inc. He was kind enough to provide me with several examples of how he’s been able to develop Systems Savvy and how this plays out as TOP Management at Socialtext.

TOP Management Research – Classic Study of Library Innovations
Really. Library innovations. In 1984 Damanpour and Evan published Organizational Innovation and Performance: The Problem of “Organizational Lag.” By organizational lag, they meant organizations adopt technical innovations faster than administrative ones — even though “a balanced rate of adoption of administrative and technical innovations is more effective in helping organizations to maintain or improve their level of performance than either administrative or technical innovations alone.” That is, T (technology) or O/P (organizational/people) innovations alone won’t cut it — you need to do them to