Overview: Business

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

" Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don't appear in the report, it's clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the o…

"They went out and interviewed a bunch of companies that do remote work... useful tips for making the case for remote work ... - In today’s economy, the quest for talent is so great that organizations can no longer afford to merely look at individuals co-located in their physical presence ... - It is easier than ever to coordinate the work of ind…

"‘social desking’, where personal workspaces are geared to co-work as well as solitary work. This involves rethinking the office as a shared space, that should be organized around something other than optimizing square meters per employees. Ultimately, it has to be judged by productivity and worker engagement. And the tricky part is not space, but…

"Innovation is challenging because to innovate we must seek out uncertainty. For most people, this isn't comfortable - that's why we don't like "this might not work." Nevertheless, if we want to do work that makes a difference, that's where we need to be. To grow we have to try, stumble, and learn."

"Innovation is the process of idea management - so, yes, you need great ideas to innovate, but that is only part of it. You also need to be able to select ideas. Once you've done that, you need the ability to execute them. While all this is going on, you have to keep people inside your organization enthusiastic about the ideas. And at the end …

File this under “Next time someone says they do it better in America”... “Everything about the way the government builds large technical projects contrasts unfavorably”... a management not a technology failure. Obama’s error was not to empower technologists to tell him the truth

Great article on Medium. Best part comes at the end: "This week we launched an initiative that aims to ease the conflict between these opposing forces. Each of our team members gets to study a subject of their choice over the period of a year. It's a long term study initiative that resembles a PhD. Think of it more like a thesis than project wo…

"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."

the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!

" social marketers mistakenly equate the strength of their community with the size of their following. They establish fans on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks as key performance indicators and then blast them with brand messages. The truth is that the strength of your community has much less to do with how consumers are connected to y…

"Idiots come in 3 types. The first type is what I call the politician, the second type is the spectator and then last but not least there is the the whiner. Every business I’ve worked with has them either in or around them."

"the process we use here at Fractl to come up with ideas that we feel confident will find viral success. "

I used to refer to great-websites-for-the-wrong-audience as Meatball Sundaes, but this visual metaphor is much better... using Sharepoint to deliver social intranets for organisations that don’t want social intranets, due to the passionate conviction that they need a social intranet.

Two posts addressing innovation in large organisations in my stream this morning:Innovations from the edgeRisk and reward: Joi Ito on what news orgs could learn from tech companies about innovationThe director of the MIT Media Lab compares the worlds of media and tech, and says “When you’re sinking, you have two ways to go: You can bet the house o…

"This is the first course in Google's newly launched Analytics Academy -- which will feature a variety of self-paced video lessons. The course includes 22 video lessons, each 3-10 minutes long, and provides learning activities. Google estimates this course will take a total of 4-6 hours to complete. The first three units of this course cover indu…

"The way it works is pretty simple: You paste data from a table (this can be a spreadsheet or even a web page), choose from a handful of visualization types (Raw explains what each one is best for) and then drag the variables you want to analyze into the predefined mapping categories (as you can see below, it’s really self-explanatory). Then you d…

"The Databoard lets you explore insights from Google research studies, share them with others, and create your own custom infographics." via @chandlertwilson

"he and his Stanford colleagues have been focusing on phrases and sentences, and aside from sentiment analysis, he says their models are pushing the state of the art in areas such as machine translation, grammatical analysis and logical reasoning." Bloggingportal with automated sentiment analysis - what's not to like?

"That’s why today we’re excited to announce Analytics Academy -- a new hub for you and your colleagues to participate in free, online, community-based video courses about digital analytics and Google Analytics. With Analytics Academy, we aim to provide you with a guided learning experience to become an analytics expert in no time. Our first cours…

"The entwined rise of Big Data and predictive analytics virtually guarantees that — just as structured and semi-structured data are being fused — informal gossip and formal ratings systems will be collected, correlated, and converted into business rules designed to make badly-behaved customers pay more or go away." Interesting insight into an upc…

"Beacons are a small wireless sensors placed inside any physical space that transmit data to your iPhone using Bluetooth Low Energy (aka Bluetooth 4.0, Bluetooth Smart). ... Smartphones that are in an iBeacon zone will benefit from personalized microlocation-based notification and actions." - huge potential for conferences, exhibitions, network…

A great article on preventing the data tail wagging the editorial dog. " It turns out that what loyal audiences care about is what good editorial teams care about too: great articles that capture time and attention."

"Smartsheet, a project and work management platform based on the spreadsheet user experience, announced integrations with Dropbox, and Zapier today. Dropbox is the well-known file sync-and-platofmr, used by millions. Zapier is an integration clearing house that allows users to connect participating applications in dozens of inventive ways. Smartsh…

"Since most issues are, by their nature, unexpected, how do you make sure you'll be able to deal with them quickly and effectively? Ideally, you need an issue resolution process in place before you start your project – to make sure that you stay on schedule, and meet your objectives."

"Trello is a to-do list manager and project management webapp that’s based on the metaphor of index cards pinned to a board. The cards each flip over, giving you a workspace where you can discuss the task, create smaller checklists, assign responsibility, or add other notes. To change the status of a task, move it to a different list on your board…

Worth a read, food for thought: "But while we love reading up on how these leaders turned the tide in their industry or organization, recent research suggests that most creative people aren't given the opportunity to lead. We love stories of creative people; we just don't want to be led by them."

"When a crisis like this happens, and you’re in the wrong, the mob is in charge of your brand. " - good advice for handling a crisis, and good techniques for monitoring sentiment