Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jun 22, 2012

Article of the Week
8 Steps To Knock Out An Impossible Punch List (Fast Company)
Big Idea: To win whatever game we are playing, we must push people past complacency, steer clear of destructive urgency, and land in the constructive urgency zone.  So how do you create constructive urgency? Upon reading articles and books and interviewing experts, Krippendorff offers an eight-step summary.

Editor’s Choice Articles
Will Gen Y Deliver Body Blow to Fortune 500? (Innovation Excellence)
Big Idea: How are you harnessing these extraordinary combinations in your innovation efforts?  Are you allowing Gen Y employees to reach into the depths of social networks, or explore the expanses of digital territory that can bring your team innovative new ideas, or unearth new patterns? If not, you’re dampening a key connection with progress that Gen Y views as crucially important to their workplace engagement – and to your innovation success.

On Bubbles, Facebook, and Playing for Keeps: 10 Questions With Clay Shirky (Wired)
Big Idea: Writer and NYU professor Clay Shirky’s prescient essays and books about online group formation and social software made him a guru to a generation of web entrepreneurs. He talked with Wired Business about the rise of GitHub, Facebook’s weak spot, the regression of online politics, his mistaken trust in large tech companies, and his all-time favorite email service.

Best Way to Motivate Employees? Get Rid of the Bosses (Inc.)Big Idea: Managers, VPs, executives… they all need to go. Here’s how one company reorganized itself for maximum employee satisfaction. Instead of a rigid hierarchy, leadership flattened the structure, threw out fancy titles, and reorganized the whole company into teams that self-manage. There’s no need for bosses or management to nag and tell people what to do. And productivity and motivation are through the roof.

Before You Take a Risk, Lay Out the Logic (HBR Blog Network)
Big Idea: Bottom line, risk management predicated on a mix of standardized risk tracking and cultural norms falls short. The only way for risky behavior to create value is if it is logically and precisely directed. If you learn how to do that successfully, you’ll soon find that you’ll actually be able to take on bigger risks than you might have thought possible.

Design to Handle the Exception – Not for the Exception (Innovation Excellence)
Big Idea: Design to handle the exception, not for the exception. That is, don’t design your business model around the most complicated case. Instead, design it so that the exceptions can be addressed, even if their efficiency is impacted.