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This post marks a change in direction for the blog. Up until now I have been focusing on content around smart working and social business.

So what, though? What does it all mean in practice? What would you do with all this content, frameworks, tools and methods?

Well, I am late to the MOOC party. Or rather late to the acronym. What it implies, Massive Open Online Courses, is exactly the direction I have been planning for the Smart Work Company: an online business school.

I have a problem with the 'course' bit of MOOC. I propose an alternative: Massive Open Online Experiment.

This is the second part of a reflection on two enduring management obsessions: control and engagement.

At the same time as trying to control and micro-manage people’s behaviour, another dominant focus over the decades has been on trying to get people to do stuff - apparently without appreciating that one influences the other.

Topics include:

Engagement

Systems of leadership

High-performance work systems

This post is the first in a two-part reflection on two enduring management obsessions: control and employee engagement. Themes include:

• Legacy of insight
• What people need
• Control
• Behaviour control
• Output control
• Autonomy and control
• Distributed
• Control not a zero-sum game

Way back in the 1980’s I worked in the UK textile manufacturing industry. Those were the days when selling british made products and the Made in Great Britain brand was simply what we did and sitting in a tiny showroom on Regent Street ...

This post is a quick summary of a work-based approach to executive development.

This next post in the Campus Workplace / Learning Workplace series shifts from the physical environment to learning environments as systems of people and place. The post has become too long so the role of technology is considered in the next one.

The Smart Work Framework summarises four profiles of learning workplaces according to structure, global reach, knowledge type, workstyle and social complexity. These broad categories are described and offered as work-in-progress.

This is the second in a three-part series on The Campus Workplace. Topics touched on in this post are:

• creating atmospheres
• enhanced conversation
• workplace design
• abandoned spaces
• place as cultural phenomenon

This post is the first of two that explore the concept and growing reality of the Campus Workplace (aka the Learning Workplace). Themes mentioned include:

• distributed cognition
• spatial design
• the workplace
• knowledge is socially constructed
• GSK as an example
• the Campus Workplace

The book I have been writing is academic and will be expensive. 

What I am therefore doing is chunking some of the content into Smart Basics, which are short snippets that are hopefully easy to access.

This post continues my thoughts on the learning journey I experienced in writing a book. The topics covered include:

• emotional challenge
• time for reflection
• serendipity
• going on a learning journey