The Big Question for 2011 - Will Gamification Change Social Media - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

It doesn't matter whether I'm talking to an investor, C-suiter, or an entrepreneur. Most of them — like most of the general public — answer the question, "What does social media mean to you?" with "It's stuff that helps you make 'friends, digitally!! Do you want to be my friend?" "Sure" I usually reply. And then I say: "But thinking of social tools that way is a little bit like using a positronic brain multiplier from the 25th century to tie your shoelaces faster. Here's a more powerful, resonant — and disruptive — way to think about social media.

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Leading Outside the Lines - How To Synthesise Metrics and Informal Communication - Jon Katzenbach and Zia Khan, s + b

Integrating formal metrics and informal communication can lead to new levels of performance. Ed Carolan knows a lot about making soup. He also is a master at using performance objectives to motivate frontline workers. From early 2007 through 2009, Carolan was the general manager for StockPot, a business group within the Campbell Soup Company that makes fresh refrigerated soup for the food-service industry. (He has since moved on to become senior vice president and general manager for the snacks division of Pepperidge Farm, another Campbell Soup brand.)

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Making Room for Reflection Is a Strategic Imperative - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

Business is, above all, busy. And maybe it's too busy. Let's face it. Most of us spend most of our time chasing the immediate reward, the short-run "objective," the near-term "goal — in short, the expedient and the convenient. But maybe business's obsessive focus on doing hasn't defused any of the following conflagrations, and is, instead, dumping Molotov cocktails on each: customers as detached, distrusting, and "disloyal," investors firing back at boardrooms, regulators with bloodlust a-burning in their eyes, and about a trillion low-cost factories who can do it all faster, quicker, and cheaper anyway.

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Game-Changing Innovations from Emerging Markets - Tarun Khanna - HBS Faculty - Harvard Business Review

President Obama's mission to Asia earlier this month was touted by US media primarily to highlight the 50,000 jobs created by deals signed in India during his visit. It's a shame Obama — and the Western press — didn't pay attention to the far bigger story happening in many of the countries on his visit: real, game-changing innovations from emerging markets that could point the way for currently stagnant Western firms. The good news for the world economy is that, with economic development occurring in a more dispersed fashion, experiments are underway in more diverse institutional settings than ever before. So, with the right attitude and mindset Western economies should expect to see the emergence of viable models from all over the world, not just their backyards.

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Creativity in Organizations - How can creativity become a prime contributor to the strategic objective of the organization? - Ralph Kerle

This article provides an historical overview over the last 100 years of the development and affects of applied creative thinking in organizations and asks the question why creativity has not been better understood as an organisational or business process; analysizes the findings of a 2008 major national research project entitled ‘Is Australian management creative and innovative?” in the context of contemporary creative practice in organisations and offers a benchmarking system – the Management Innovation Index™ as a way for organizations to model their creative ecology and over time, using the organisation’s key measures for success, to educate specifically to improve management innovation practice and productivity and ultimately to predict the outcomes of the organization’s creativity and innovation behaviours.

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