Technorati’s David Sifry has released his latest quarterly State of the Blogosphere report. Take note senior executives and communication leads everywhere: The blogosphere continues to double every 5 1/2 months. Technorati is now tracking 27.5 million blogs and counting. David’s summary:
- Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs [Note: 300,000 new blogs since he compiled his report)
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
- Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
- Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
- Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers
While doing some client research on intercultural communications, I found this simple article from HBR’s Working Knowledge. The author offers tips for communicating with a diverse workforce:
1. Learn how the source culture best receives communications.
2. Train international employees early and often.
3. Train the non-foreign-born, too.
4. Assign mentors and take care of the spouses.
5. Practice open-door communication–carefully.
6. In company-wide communications, avoid jargon and slang.
7. Play by the rules and stick to business.
Some of these tips remind me of what we take away in business from uncertainty reduction theory, a seminal theory in intercultural communication. The theory proposes that we seek to reduce uncertainty in our communication interactions. We do this automatically by making predictions at the cultural, sociocultural, and psychocultural level. In other words, we make assumptions about other people based on prior experiences. When we communicate with people we don’t know or with individuals from an unfamiliar culture, it’s critical that we check our assumptions and seek to learn about one another by making factual observations, asking questions, and disclosing personal information that prompts a reciprocal response.
“Regular employment” may be dying, making temporary labor a strategic concern. The world is getting “talent constrained” (India and China especially), and, as a result, labor arbitrage may be the wave of the past.
For a provocative view of the future of the global workplace, see a very interesting interview with Jeff Joerres, president and CEO of Manpower, recently published in the online edition of The McKinsey Quarterly.
If you’re thinking about re-designing your organization—remember, it’s all about aligning with your strategy. Strategy—which includes vision, mission and goals—should be the foundation for building your organization, and it should be front and center every time you make a decision about your organization.
Need to decide what your structure and reporting lines should look like? Revising your reward system? Considering how to attract, retain and develop the right people? Trying to foster better collaboration and networking across groups? If you’re tackling any of these challenging issues, you should refer to your strategy as a guidepost for making organizational design decisions.
Jay Galbraith created the star model as a framework for thinking holistically about the major components of organizational design. It’s a great visual and helpful reminder about how all of the pieces of your organization fit together.
An excellent resource on organizational design is Designing Dynamic Organizations by Galbraith, Downey and Kates; it’s user-friendly, a comfortable read and provides a place to dig into details on the star model. Download it here.
