What's keeping you up at night?

As with many of my posts, this one will bounce around, but the general idea is that ideas are everywhere and that communications should flow up and down and in and out  and out and in as oppsed to them flowing down from the top and spewed out by marketing and pr.

Work worries are giving bosses sleepless nights, from Management Issues, "Anxiety about job prospects, staff performance and the increasingly demanding performance targets they are subject to is leading to a wave of uncertainty and sleepless nights for the UK's business leaders."

I suppose these guys think they are the only ones that see the big picture and thus, make the big decisions. May I have your attenion?  - information has become democratized and it is ubiquitous.

"Half of executives (55 per cent) agree that lack of sleep has a serious impact on their abilities at work, with decision-making one of the key 'business brain' faculties to suffer through lack of sleep. The biggest issues playing on the minds of those surveyed were overwhelmingly internal management issues such as 'change/strategy', 'time and workload management' and 'project issues', rather than external factors such as the 'economy' or 'legislation'.

"...it's clear that senior executives spend most of their time grappling with company politics, staffing issues and poor organisation, to the extent which they find themselves unable to operate effectively."

In yet another high level report, Regina from bnet shreds to pieces a McKinsey's article Dearth of HR Talent in Europe - "Wake up and smell the management coffee - yes! senior leaders should realize that everything they do is a people-management issue. See this post, What is Worrying Global Executives? How do you think companies reduce time to launch products, increase customer satisfaction, reduce globalization costs, expand into new markets and control global brands? With the right people strategy!"

Is this a failure to communicate? I wrote a post, Got a Good Strategy? Now Try to Implement It about what gets in the way of implementing strategy and what to do about it. But you know, the problem is bigger than strategy. The real problem is the way businesses are organized. There are simply too few people at the top making decisions with all the wrong information.

James Cherkoff from Modern Marketing talks about using blogs for marketing in a "A Growing Voice" but much of what he says applies equally for internal blogging. "...it's the interaction between blogs that makes them so interesting and influential. A single blog can be akin to a ranting madman on the corner. However, when linked together into massive intertwining communities, they have the vibrancy and passion of a massive street market, with information, opinions and whispers exchanging hands at lightening speed. " 

Bonus: Weinberger at Reboot also from Modern Marketing. If you're wanting to know what and how things are really changing in the digital world, check out the podcasts from the reboot 2 conference.  Thank you James.