The Spice of Life ?

Variety.

It's been a busy ol' week in Corporate Services world....talking to a creative agency about what we want to achieve with podcast programming; a series of long-list interviews; exec team meeting considering property investment decisions; internal communication mechanism briefing; meeting an architect who's interested in working for us; chairing a disciplinary panel hearing; meeting with the trainer who's delivering our "train the trainers" programme for active learning sets; participating in a workshop on how we use email and whether we can use it more effectively; and last but not least, analysing the various test/questionnaire results for the appointment for a new exec director... and that's just the scheduled meetings. So, never a dull moment in the back-office !

Aside from the stuff I've been "doing", there's the stuff I've been "thinking". Three things came together with a bit of serendipity this week ....

I've been reading a compelling book "The Future of Management" by Gary Hamel (thanks to Richie T - you're so right - it's completely up my street). If you have even a passing interest in making work a more rewarding experience, and creating value - read it. I'm not going to attempt to review it at length (go here for that) as I haven't finished yet. The punchline so far is that if organisations don't innovate, they stagnate - and traditional management strictures don't enable innovation, they stifle it. If we fail to pay attention to the fact that corporations are made up of humans and not automatons, we're doomed to mediocrity. Some of the examples are truly radical, like the organisation where managers are not appointed by more senior managers, but elected by their team member peers. But one common demoninator across the various exemplars seems to be effective internal communication....

Pilar, one of my colleagues in Communication team has been studying for a PG Dip in Internal Comms. This week she ran a fab briefing session for the team on what she's been learning - both the theory and more importantly, how we're going to apply it to developing our internal comms matrix at NHH. It's gotten me thinking about how we can generate some of the lively, two-way communications that feature in Hamel's book. Tecnhology has to be part of answer, but probably more fundamently, we must further foster the environment where colleagues want to contribute to the information exchange. I think we've made a good start, so now it's time for the web2.0 intranet...

Monkey, another one of the Comms gang circulated the spec for our new intranet this week. It's soooo exciting - I've been pinging around like Zebedee. It's early days yet, but the ideas are looking good. As well as bringing upto date the technical engine of our intranet (Nott.net), we're looking for web2.0 style functionality : user generated content. Nott.net is pretty well used and loved (ever since Monkey injected comedic value on the news items - but more about that on a future post). However, compare it to the functionality and user-engagement of a platform like FB, and it's looking rather long in the tooth. This has the potential to be a great enabling technology to take us forward. I'm really looking forward to working on it with the team.

J