In response to my last post (Clearing the Air About Corporate Blogging), Andrew Meyer of ‘Inquiries Into Alignment‘ commented about the problem of getting contributors. He points out that the number of active bloggers within a firm is typically low. In fact, in one of the research papers that I included in my post, the authors found that in a… Read more →
Blogs have been around more than a decade now, but corporate blogging, or the use of blogs within firms, is still limited. From my teaching of business executives and professionals, I believe that this is probably due to a general lack of understanding of blogs and how they can improve social relationships and task performance. In this post, I focus… Read more →
What: New York Times article on how to manage e-mail overload Posts it is related to: Freeing Yourself From Email , Emergent Collaboration: Why Email Should Not Be Used for Collaboration Bottom line: In this Personal Tech article, the author gives some good ideas for getting our overwhelming amounts of email under control. His suggestion–an in-box that is always empty… Read more →
I have several email addresses, and I use them each for different purposes. I never receive personal emails on my work account. The account that came with my Internet at home has been sacrificed to spam since I use that account for every website registration. I keep an old email address that’s hardly used just in case someone I haven’t spoken to in 10 years… Read more →
What: Research article on communication in virtual product development teams Posts it is related to: Freeing Yourself from Email, The Evolution of Harmful Email Habits, How do I begin to Improve the Functioning of my Virtual Team? Bottom line: The authors of the article studied members of virtual teams engaged in new product development. Responses from 184 team members spread… Read more →
Surinder and I are currently attending the Mardi Gras conference on virtual worlds in Baton Rouge along with our colleague Rui Huang. We are here to present our paper that I discussed in last week’s post and also to hear the exciting work that others are pursuing in and around virtual worlds. I am amazed by the breadth of interests… Read more →
What: Story on NPR about the use of video conferencing in immigration courts. Posts to which it is related: Supportive and Critical Communication in Virtual Teams, Lessons from Victorian Technology Bottom line: This piece demonstrates some of the issues that arise when a form of virtual collaboration is used strictly for efficiency with no adjustments made for interacting virtually instead of… Read more →
Effective communication in electronic environments can be vexing to virtual teams. We know intuitively that we need proper communication to achieve high quality and efficient outcomes, but we are not always sure how to best achieve effective communication or even what effective communication is for the task at hand. We have mentioned issues around communication in past posts, such as… Read more →
What: Financial Times special report about the current downturn offering opportunities for distributing leadership and the use of flexible virtual teams Posts to which it is related: What President Obama Teaches Us For Leading Virtually, So Far And Yet So Near, Leading Virtual Communities: Do We Have the Answers, Are Casual Virtual Team Participants Endangering Virtual Teams Bottom line: According… Read more →
Recently, warfare expert P. W. Singer appeared on several shows (NPR’s Fresh Air, The Daily Show) to talk about his new book Wired for War. While not necessarily the central focus of the book, one point he made caught my attention for its relation to virtual teams. Singer talked about a drone pilot who engages in war, but from afar… Read more →