Bold decisions that drastically change what is taken for granted have always been traits of leaders that attract and inspire people. The rise of social media and other means of online communication such as blogs, online communities and intranets allow leaders to spread bold ideas and big plans easier than ever before to their target audience and the wider public. On the one hand, this tremendous speed of communication is a powerful lever to mobilize people and initiate change on a level and magnitude never seen before. On the other hand, change is always accompanied with unintended consequences that backfire, if not handled properly.
A growing number of organizations are focusing on caring for their employees in a holistic, wellbeing-focused manner. Particularly among tech companies and start-ups, employee benefits now surpass simple health and retirement benefits, and include physical health programs, continuing education credits, and even on-site wellness facilities such as yoga rooms (Dailey & Zhu, 2017).
Concepts like efficiency vs. creativity or stability vs. flexibility are deeply engraved in our vocabulary as opposites rather than synergies. A similar contrast is the distinction between startups and companies. While startups amid current debates about disruptive innovations, digitalization, and industry 4.0 are generally associated with speed and agility, terms like bureaucracy and heaviness come to mind when we are thinking about companies
We have already arrived there. Long lost are the days where achievement, wealth, and position relied solely on an individual, or entity’s, capacity to rival against another to obtain the optimum available resources for themselves. Such an orientation primarily defined material success in the industrial and post-industrial eras and had its remnants extended into the beginning of the 21st century. It served its purpose in the frame of reference of the predominant capitalist’s value-system that prevailed in societies. But as we already entered the knowledge economy, recognized by its rapid technological advances, globalization, and extended communications networking and infrastructure, we cannot help to become increasingly aware of rapidly changing trends that kick dust in the eyes of the rat-race that once was.
Strategy is a term usually connected to top management, long-term planning, goals, and consulting. This view dominated strategic management in theory and practice since the middle of the last century. Strategy as practice, SAP in short, is a new approach that questions this dominance. In this blog we present to you what’s actually behind SAP.
Working in distributed teams is one of the major trends in the 21st century. Many technology start-ups are spearheading this development with teams distributed across different countries and time zones working on one and the same project. Traditional companies are heading in the same direction with an increasing share of employees working from home and international project teams collaborating across departments and sites. On top of this, corporate intranets are on the way to becoming the tool of choice for company internal collaboration.
Lean and Agile approaches are currently on everyone's lips. While Lean is still often associated with production optimization and the automotive industry, Agile appears to be closely linked to software development and IT. This understanding has, however, changed since Lean and Agile are successfully applied in areas such as Lean start-up, marketing and project management. In this blog, we would like to introduce you to both approaches and present a new learning model based on Lean and Agile or "Leagile Learning", which can be implemented quickly and efficiently.
We’ve all had positive moments in our lives that you just won’t forget. It doesn’t matter if those moments were part of personal life or professional life, occurred during studies or other forms of education: Situations that are associated with fun, inspiration, hope, interest, admiration, and pride are etched into our memory and can be recalled in great detail and with great emotional depth many years later. This is in strong contrast to a large number of lectures, meetings, trainings, etc. whose content we are only able to memorize after multiple repetitions and great effort, for a short period at most.
