One of the things that’s a real chore when you get back from a trip is catching up with email. I got back late last night from a 3-day trip to the UK and encountered 248 emails when I turned on my PC this morning. And that total excludes the spam stuff my spam catcher, […]
Category: Workplace
Business cards that gape the void
Great! I’ve just received my repeat order for business cards featuring this Hugh McLeod cartoon on the back. I first ordered these cards just before last Christmas. Just like that original order, this repeat order exceeds my expectations in terms of good-value quality work, reliability of the vendor (StreetCards in London), and simply great and […]
The Dutch company where everyone’s a blogger
Fredrik Wackå posted a great report today about Macaw Nederland, a Dutch technology company and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, whose 110 employees all blog. Fredrik says: At Macaw all employees have their own internal blog. They get it when they get their network, intranet and e-mail account. Not only do they have blogs – they […]
Real organization transparency
Companies everywhere talk a lot about how important their employees are and the contribution they make to overall success. But most companies don’t do this with the public openness and transparency demonstrated by CMS Cameron McKenna, an international law firm headquartered in London. The Financial Times reports that CMS Cameron McKenna is believed to be […]
Broadband in the UK leads the world
Daily Telegraph: [In the UK,] Southern Railway and T-Mobile will unveil details [this] week of the world’s first train wireless broadband service. The T-Mobile HotSpot service will allow up to 8,000 daily commuters on the London to Brighton route to access the internet. It will be launched in the summer. This item in a Daily […]
Microsoft’s Channel 9 and cultural rules
Channel 9, the social networking blog and wiki for Microsoft’s developer community and the outside world run by ‘5 guys from Redmond’, celebrated its first birthday last Wednesday. One of those 5 guys, Robert Scoble, deserves much credit in driving Channel 9 to its current prominent success level as a one-of-a-kind place that video showcases […]
Nike breaks new ground in communication transparency
Communicating on corporate responsibility doesn’t get more transparent than this. The Financial Times reports: Today Nike breaks a three-year silence on social reporting as it publishes its 2004 corporate responsibility report. This is Nike’s first report since a 2002 California supreme court ruling that the company could be sued by Mark Kasky, a labour rights […]
Collaborative working with wikis
The Financial Times has an excellent report on why wikis (definition) are an effective collaborative tool for the workplace, quoting examples from three prominent companies: "It helps to think of [a wiki] as a sort of online whiteboard," says Gary Boone, research manager at Accenture‘s technology laboratories. "We set up a blog and wiki system […]
Podcasting: Adding the human and informal touch
Some say it’s a revolution that will change radio broadcasting and people’s listening habits for ever. Others say it’s a fad that’s of limited appeal and use beyond geeks and enthusiasts. Whatever anyone says, you’d have to admit that something that, in just eight months, has rocketed out of nowhere and today got big companies […]
IBM creating an army of evangelists
Silicon Valley Watcher: Early next week IBM will introduce the largest ever corporate blogging initiative in a bid to encourage any of its 130,000 staff to become online evangelists for the company. Tom Foremski’s report today in Silicon Valley Watcher makes for very interesting reading. He says IBM’s plan comes hot on the heels of […]
IBM publishes guidelines for employee bloggers
The news last Friday that IBM is introducing a large-scale corporate blogging initiative has attracted plenty of attention, both in the blogosphere and by mainstream media. Today, IBM published on its employee intranet its draft guidelines for corporate blogging. James Snell, a member of IBM’s Software Standards Strategy Group, has posted those guidelines on his […]
Interview: Mike Wing, IBM – May 20, 2005
For anyone with an opinion about corporate blogging, the big news this week was IBM’s dynamic step into the blogosphere with their initiative to enable employee blogging and making publicly available their detailed employee blogging guidelines. In this special edition of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, Shel and Neville enjoyed a 53-minute conversation with Mike […]
Orders of magnitude and overload
As I sat at my PC at gone midnight last night, doing email catchup, reviewing comments to various blog posts and RSS feed scanning, I thought – this is ridiculous. I have various software tools that are supposed to help me be more productive and all I’m doing is spending more time on a never-attainable […]
Survey: Engaged employees = engaged customers
A feature in the Financial Times last week on how to engage employees (paid sub access) referenced a study by the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement at Northwestern University in the US. Carried out last year, the study surveyed 100 US media companies to find out how engaged their staff were and whether […]
Now 3,600 internal blogs at IBM
Fredrik Wacka posted a great snapshot report yesterday on internal blogging at IBM: Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers. As of June 13 there were 3,612 internal blogs with 30,429 posts. Internal blogging is still at a stage of testing […]
A pretty cool place to work
If you ever wondered what the workplace environment would be like if you worked for Microsoft, wonder no more. If you want a glimpse into the types of colleagues and others you’d likely mix with in some Microsoft locations, what kinds of really cool equipment and gadgets employees can get their hands on, even what […]
Blogs: No substitute for personal communication and trust in the workplace
PR Week published a pretty good piece about policies and guidelines for employee blogging last week. The article includes much of the type of counsel and advice on why companies should have polices or guidelines that you’d expect to see now, given previous media reporting on this topic as well as the widely-reported examples of […]
Interview: Angela Sinickas and Tudor Williams – June 22, 2005
In this edition of For Immediate Release podcast interviews, Shel enjoyed a 49-minute conversation with Angela Sinickas, ABC and Tudor Williams, ABC, two of the leading internal communications measurement authorities in the business. About our conversation partners: A pioneer in the field of organizational communication measurement, Angela Sinickas has been measuring the effectiveness of communications […]
Is this a record for HP toner longevity?
Printing out a draft this morning of a rather lengthy document I’d written and edited gave me pause for thought about my printer. My default printer is a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4L. Black and white, a basic laser printer. I bought it on 17 November 1994 (I can recall the precise date because there’s a little […]
Future Tense and the confluence of forces
Congratulations to Elizabeth Albrycht and the team at Corante for the latest thought-leading resource – the Future Tense blog which, Elizabeth as editor notes, is now live. What will we expect from Future Tense? From Elizabeth’s introductory post yesterday: […] It is [a confluence of forces including technology, science, population demographics, globalization, education, society and […]