The Seven Keys of Innovation Communities - An Employee Innovation Model - Wall Street Journal

Most great ideas for enhancing corporate growth and profits aren't discovered in the lab late at night, or in the isolation of the executive suite. They come from the people who daily fight the company's battles, who serve the customers, explore new markets and fend off the competition. In other words, the employees. Companies that have successfully made innovation part of their regular continuing strategy did so by harnessing the creative energies and the insights of their employees across functions and ranks. That's easy to say. But how, exactly, did they do it? One powerful answer, we found, is in what we like to call innovation communities.

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15 Foundations for Facilitating Creativity at Work - Michelle James

For the past several years, I've offered an annual Creative IStock_000005391301Medium Facilitation Program based on universal principles of creativity; education, research and application of creative process; and, most significantly, lessons learned and insights gleaned from the trial and error of facilitating creative process with hundreds of individuals and organizations over the past 12 years. (An ongoing exploration, with each iteration I refine the program). It requires a different focus, skill set, way of being and "container creation" than facilitating analytical processes. Below are some of the many principles and practices I've learned or discovered. Take what resonates and leave the rest :-)

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Helping As A Leadership Role - Edgar Schein, MIT School of Management

Leaders are increasingly finding themselves in situations where they need help from subordinates, and in which subordinates are asking for help in areas where leaders are not experts. To manage either situation effectively, a leader will have to develop a degree of humility and specific process skills. Readers will learn how to achieve those difficult goals in this article by the dean of organizational behaviour.

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Six Fundamental Shifts in the Way We Work - John Hagel III, John Seely Brown - Harvard Business Review

It's been a while since we posted here because of all the craziness surrounding the launch of our book, The Power of Pull, but we are happy to announce that we're going to be resuming a regular schedule of postings to build on the themes in our book. We thought we would kick off our new postings by summarizing some of the ideas from Pull that resonated the most in our many conversations from the last few months. from The Power of Pull. The Red Queen was optimistic. Nearly everybody in management is familiar with the Red Queen effect, taken from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass: this is the notion that "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

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Emotional Commitment at Work - Bury My Heart in Conference Room B | Change This

From the latest Change This, a nice short presentation by Stan Slap of "slap" entitled Bury My Heart in Conference Room B - Emotional Commitment at Work

The Abstract

“A manager’s emotional commitment is the ultimate trigger for their discretionary effort, worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. It’s the kind of commitment that solves unsolvable problems, creates energy when all energy has been expended, and ignites emotional commitment in others, like employees, teams and customers. Emotional commitment means unchecked, unvarnished devotion to the company and its success; any legendary organizational performance is the result of emotionally committed managers.”