GigaOM Pro

In any given week, at least a few of the posts in the Social channel here at GigaOM Research touch on the coordinates of change in business, but this week it seemed to be the major theme. I thought I’d take the opportunity to recapitulate some of the most critical aspects of the discussion here, [...] Read more »

A number of posts last week pointed to the rapid changes in the nature of work in American business, partly because of the strategic adoption of social technologies, but also because of more fundamental changes in the larger economy. Researchers as the New York Federal Reserve sliced a large collection of census data, attempting to [...] Read more »

Two stories last week that indicate how the internal motivations of large enterprise software vendors can lead to problems, because they are trying to solve their own problems and not those of users. Yammer is clearly becoming the premier social interface in Microsoft’s plans for the workplace (as I discussed in Yammer is becoming the social [...] Read more »

At the very best Marissa Mayer is trying to create a single culture at Yahoo; at the worst, she'll succeed. Read more »

From one perspective. last week’s ‘big story’ was the continuing fall-out and discourse about Marissa Mayer’s ‘no remote work’ diktat. I added a bit of fuel to the fire with Cultural change is really complex contagion, Why are disengaged employees disengaged?, and Why work doesn’t happen at work. But since I analyzed that issue at some length last week, I’ve decided to [...] Read more »

The big story of the week was Marissa Mayer’s ‘no remote work’ dictate at Yahoo, hands down. That sparked a huge conversation in the tech world, ranging across Yahoo’s troubles, feminism, Silicon Valley, work culture, and the good, bad, and ugly of remote work. Or maybe it’s really about the polarization in thinking about work [...] Read more »

Winston Churchill was searching for a phrase to capture the sense of a turning tide in the war with Nazi Germany after the defeat of Rommel in North Africa, and came up with ‘the end of the beginning’. In the past week a number of events and observations combined to give me the sense that we are, [...] Read more »

There is an important paradox looming behind all the discussions of social tools in business. Yes, a social business is one in which people communicate and coordinate their work activities more fluidly, based on the flow of updates and shared objects in streams implemented by social platforms, and likewise, the same premises of socialized communication [...] Read more »

This past week had me uncovering a long thread of research — unplanned actually — that confirm the central and powerful role of bosses in the workplace. Setting that context, in one post (In a social world, management’s new role is teaching social literacy) I quoted from The Value Of Bosses (Edward Lazear et al): A [...] Read more »

I attended the IBM Connection conference this week, and it led to a slew of thoughts about the role of social business in innovation, many of which will simmer in the back of my mind for some time, but some of which showed up on GigaOM Pro immediately. In particular, I was struck by the [...] Read more »