Many Executives Hesitant to “Friend” on Facebook

Thinking about “friending” your boss on Facebook? You may want to reconsider. According to a recent survey, nearly half of executives are uncomfortable being friended by the employees they manage (48%) or their bosses (47%). The survey was developed by OfficeTeam, a staffing service specializing in the placement of highly skilled administrative professionals. It was…

A Manager’s Guide to Surviving Layoffs

In this economy it is the lucky few managers who do not have to inform colleagues that their services are no longer needed. Most managers are having to layoff people they know and like; people, who through no fault of their own, must be set adrift on a very uncertain economic sea. This takes its…

Five Mentors Every CIO Needs

Compared to people who have mastered the art of getting help from others, if you rely too much on your talents and energy alone, you are at an extreme disadvantage. Mentors can have a bigger impact on your success than virtually anything outside your own efforts. There are five types of mentors that every CIO…

5 Hot Trends for 2009

Columns like this are a bit formulaic. I know it, you know it, yet we all read them: “10 best movies of 2008”, “10 best books of 2008”, “10 worst technologies”, and on and on. Heck, Fox Sports devotes half of its programming to those annoying Best Damn countdowns. What most of us balk at…

Social Networks Are Risky Business

Why does it seem that most IT departments are woefully un-prepared for IT innovation? Why are they usually viewed as the detractors and inhibitors of technology rather than the innovators and enablers? My own analysis is that the IT department is saddled with processes based on project management that do not allow for innovation. The…

Human Centricity, Social Media and the Knowledge Enterprise

As a young discipline, KM has many definitions and interpretations. Most efforts to date have misinterpreted knowledge management and equated it with content or information management. The term “management” brings about an illusion of exercising control and creating defined processes which automatically extracts the knowledge from people and puts it into searchable repositories within a…

Social Networking and the Business: Friend or Foe?

Anyone who has teenagers is well aware that social networking sites are becoming a primary communications vehicle. EMarketer.com reports that 37% of adult and 70% of teen Internet users access a social networking site at least once a month. Meanwhile, advertising on such sites is growing as well, with worldwide spending in 2008 estimated at…

The Trend Skeptic: Social Networking is a Benign Technology

The trend is social networking, and conventional wisdom says that the enterprise needs to figure out how to take advantage of it—and quick. The trouble is the hype surrounding social networking focuses only on the upside while ignoring some pretty obvious risks. Yes, social networking opens up new marketing opportunities; it provides more immediate customer…