Morten Albæk, Senior Vice President of Group Marketing & Customer Insight at Danish wind-energy firm Vestas:

Today, we serve two and only two masters: revenue and reputation. The trick is to position your brand and build your reputation in the sweet spot between capitalism and humanism.

In an article titled Grok the Gestalt of Teams, Diego Rodriguez says effective teams often have common approaches to work habits:

An effective innovation team is composed of people who are really good at what they were put on earth to do, but also share a common way of getting things done in the world.

Princeton WordNet defines Gestalt as:

S: (n) gestalt (a configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it cannot be described merely as a sum of its parts).

How can a team take abstract, individual ideas about how to approach work, and put them in practice in a way that is stronger than the sum of those parts?

A shared collaboration platform can help team members put their approaches into practice in a non-abstract way, by making all of the pieces of work visible, trackable, and open to contribution. That reduces the friction associated with recording and sharing ideas, reviewing and refining them, adding details, speaking up if there’s a problem, getting clarification, and ultimately getting the finished, deliverable pieces of work done.

Rodriguez also says that to build strong teams, individuals’ strengths and weaknesses need to be visible:

If you’re good at something, we want to know so that we can you let you be the lead on that. And if you’re not so good at something, we want to know that too so that we can help you get better, or keep you from wasting time on that front.

People will voluntarily tell you what they perceive to be their strengths. But without seeing their work activity and the results, one doesn’t have any way of verifying that their perceptions are correct. Conversely, they won’t volunteer their weaknesses either, because of a fear that revealing them might hurt their chances for advancement.

With a shared collaboration platform, it’s easier to detect the patterns that emerge as a team works on various projects. These work patterns can help one see individuals’ strengths and weaknesses, and where in the work process they are most evident. Knowing that, teams can better balance individual members’ skills and strengths to maintain a strong, focused, and productive group.

Image Credit: Andrew Kator

Mark Yolton, Senior Vice President of the SAP Community Network, on the organic characteristics of what he describes as a borderless enterprise:

Rather than behaving according to narrow and restrictive “mechanical” processes or rigid practices, rules, and ideas, a borderless enterprise can respond more organically, the way our biological environment does, remaining flexible, fluid, and open to change.

In such a model, unusual individual customer needs and broader market changes don’t break fragile / brittle existing processes, but instead cause them to flex and re-form. The company can be more responsive to change, and eventually it doesn’t just bend to new requirements, but builds and grows organically as a result of interacting with its environment rather than according to some top-down longer-term centralized model.

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal reports on robust interest in the iPad from the business world, which was initially reluctant to consider the iPhone when it debuted three years ago:

Businesses are behaving differently with the iPad, in large part because the new device is starting out as more of a known quantity from a technical standpoint. The iPad runs the same operating software as the iPhone, which has been enhanced with a number of business-friendly features.

In addition to using the familiar and business-friendly iOS, the iPad has two big advantages that businesses can’t ignore. It is less expensive than a laptop, and better suited to certain tasks:

iPads, with list prices ranging from $499 to $829, are also less expensive than the laptop computers most companies buy. They also have advantages over laptops for certain chores, such as when employees work standing up or give demonstrations.

Worthen’s article looks at the current state of iPad use in four companies: Bausch & Lomb, Kaiser Permanente, Daimler (parent of Mercedes-Benz), and Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal.

Bausch & Lomb:

Bausch & Lomb Inc., which makes eye-care products, built its own iPad app for its salespeople. The company said it had about 50 employees using iPads in the field within a week and a half of the device’s release.

Kaiser Permanente:

But when the iPad was announced, Kaiser preordered a pair, and it has since been testing them in a 37,000-square-foot technology lab. Among the uses so far are viewing medical images such as X-rays and CT scans, and accessing medical records through a trial version of an iPad app developed by the electronic-record system’s maker.

Mercedes-Benz:

For example, Mercedes-Benz Financial, which provides loans and leases for Daimler AG, has equipped some dealerships with an iPad loaded with its app. The goal is to begin the credit-application process while customers are standing near a vehicle.

Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal:

“We made sure that we knew as much about these devices as possible,” said Michael Barnas, the firm’s director of application services. The technology department now offers access to its internal systems for more than 50 iPad-toting attorneys, and anticipates issuing iPads as an alternative to laptops as soon as next year.

Besides business, the iPad is popular with Senior Citizens. Which market will it win over next? Apple’s 4th Quarter earnings report, due out in October after back-to-school, should tell us a lot about the device’s reception in the education market.

Asa Raskin suggests that in many instances when we think we are multitasking, one of the tasks is just something automatic:

We can talk on a cell phone while driving to work, and we can compose complex sentences while typing. But, if you stop to reflect on it, you can only do those things at the same time because at least one of them is automatic. In the first case driving is automatic, and in the second case typing is automatic. You’ve done them so often that you’ve habituated to them: doing them doesn’t require any thinking.

Clark MacLeod points out the negative – and potentially disastrous – consequences of the behavior described in Raskin’s theory:

What you are actually doing is cycling through tasks in quick succession which he warns comes at the risk of losing your train of thought. This results in lower productivity, lower information retention, and in the case of driving while using your mobile, possible disaster.

In spite of the downsides, and even dangers, we as a society continue to multitask. Why? Paul Levinson, professor of media studies at Fordham University in New York, argues that there is a fundamental relationship between communication and transportation – every major advance in communication, he says, has been accompanied by an advance in transporation:

But the balance became unhinged in the last decades of the 20th century. The Web took us all over the world – in cyberspace. Being anywhere we pleased in information required us to be seated behind a desk in our home or office. Laptop computers allowed us to write on a park bench, but not telecommunicate.

The mobile phone came to the rescue. It is not of course a device of transport, but communication. But unlike the Internet, the mobile phone puts us back into the real world, and allows us to use every mode of transport, go anywhere physically, while we keep in touch with the rest of the world of information.

The iPad 3G might be the ultimate example of Levinson’s argument, because it combines the ability to access information anywhere, with the power and capability associated with a computer, not a phone. It has all the portability of a mobile phone, but really functions as a reasonably powerful computer.

At a recent MIT Communications Forum, James Katz, professor of communication and director of Rutgers University’s Center for Mobile Communications Studies, suggested that the ability to carry such powerful communication tools with us everywhere we go has created a new set of behaviors that are widespread, even before they have been accepted as social norms:

Cell phones seem to prioritize communication with distant people over those sharing one’s space, and the ethics of this new behavior are not universally agreed upon.

Image Credit: San Diego Shooter

The iPad is helping to bring computing to senior citizens, a group traditionally overlooked by technology marketers and for whom traditional computers present a challenging learning curve.

The iPad’s intuitive interface makes it appealing to senior citizens around the world, says Takahiro Miura, a researcher at the University of Tokyo: “The iPad is a good tool for the elderly because it’s very forgiving of mistakes.” Miura’s team uses computers to help train senior citizens to rejoin the workforce. “Unlike the PC, it doesn’t require prior knowledge,” he says.

Since the iPad is brand new as a mainsteam technology, seniors are on equal ground with their children and grandchildren right now, which means the conditions are right for the iPad to be a shared learning experience across generations. Here’s what seniors themselves have to say:

Hikosaburo Yasuda, 95:

Hikosaburo Yasuda of Nakano, Japan, plans to buy an iPad to keep up with junior members in his computer club. “It’s important to always try new things, otherwise you get left behind,” he says.

Motoo Kitamura, 78, retired salesman:

Motoo Kitamura, 78, a former gas salesman, bought an iPad to help him communicate with his 2-year-old grandson and stave off dementia. “Trying new things like that is a good mental exercise,” he says.

Elmo Pascale, 87, reverend:

“This ‘book-sized’ pad has become my news and entertainment source,” her father, the Reverend Elmo Pascale, raved in a comment on [his daughter ] Weston’s blog.

Toshihiro Okada, 79, retired architect:

“Seniors these days have the trifecta of time, money, and curiosity,” says Okada. “The iPad is never out of my hands.”

Okada makes a good point about seniors’ combination of time, money, and curiosity. The elderly In Japan, 22% of the population, spend more on technology than any other group, except for those under 30.

A debate is taking place here in New York over a proposed office tower across from Madison Square Garden. 15 Penn Plaza would bring 67 stories of Class A office space to the doorstep of Penn Station, the nation’s busiest rail hub, as well as much needed transit improvements to the subway stations around Penn. However, the owners of the Empire State Building say the new tower will obstruct views of one of New York’s best-known buildings.

The City Planning Commission has already approved the project, and in advance of a vote by the City Council this week – one of the last major approvals needed – 15 Penn Plaza’s developer and the Empire State Building’s owner have released renderings that alternately make the new tower look like a glowing new icon, or a massive behemoth:

You can see in the renderings above how each side envisions the future of the skyline. In Vornado’s (left), each tower is clearly visible in all its illuminated splendor. Co-existence, hooray! But in the Empire State Building’s (right), it’s like 15 Penn Plaza has obliviously and obnoxiously lumbered in front of the Empire State Building while you were taking a photo. “Um, excuse me, sir — sir? — you are right in our way.”

After the 2001 Treaty of Nice established Brussels as capital of the European Union, European Commission president Romano Prodi and Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt commenced a series of discussions on the architectural and functional needs of the capital city.

Dutch architect Rem Koolhas’ firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was invited to participate, and recommended strengthening the union’s visual language with EU Barcode, a concept flag that merged the flags of member states, and could be expanded as new states joined.

Koolhas explained the concept behind the flag’s design to The New York Times in 2002:

Lining up all the individual flags, starting with Ireland in the west and ending with Greece in the east, we simply started synthesizing them into this larger entity. It means that each nation has its own abstraction of its flag as a component of the bar code flag. As the community is extended, the flag will just become richer.

Turkish designer Beste Miray Dogan makes envelopes lined with a map showing where the letter originated. A clever way to advertise the location of a shop, restaurant, or office.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter explains why we, as a nation, should create a new norm where everyone works from home at least one day a week.

Social and environmental effects of commuting:

During this time of economic crisis and reinvention of global capitalism, one of the things crying out for reinvention is the rigid workplace of the last century. It is amazing in the digital age that most work is still associated with industrial age work rhythms and the symbolic chains that tie workers, knowledge and otherwise, to fixed locations. Flexible workplaces with flexible hours and days are long in coming.

The shift away from 9-5:

It is a 24/7 world of work anyway. Somebody is always awake and working somewhere in the world at any time, and he might be your customer, vendor, or teammate. If a professional can have a conference call in her pajamas in the evening after the kids are in bed, why shouldn’t she spend the next day at home, finishing the report while they play nearby? Free agents and independent contractors have this privilege but at the cost of security and fringe benefits.

Family and personal balance:

Many women leave high-powered corporate and professional careers when they have children, frequently starting their own businesses they can run from home, because there is no flexibility and no middle ground between the all-out grind at a workplace demanding physical presence or opting out. A norm of remote work for everyone would ease the strain.