As I mentioned in my previous post , over the past few months, more than 600 members of the MIX community from around the world have participated in the Management 2.0 Hackathon .

The hackathon is a hands-on, collaborative effort focused on generating fresh and practical answers to one of today's critical challenges: creating organizations that are fit for the 21st century. Our work is deeply inspired by the Web—one of the most adaptable, innovative, and inspiring things humans have ever created.

In our latest hackathon sprint, which ended a few days ago, the group generated more than 65 "mini hacks." A mini hack is essentially the beginnings of a hack like those that you see here on the MIX . Our goal for this sprint was to generate as many innovative hack ideas as we could quickly. Then we'd each review the full list of contributions and choose which of them we wanted to collaboratively develop into full, "shovel-ready" hacks that could be added to the MIX and eventually implemented within real organizations (if you'd like to learn more about what makes a great management hack, consider...

Hipparchus was a Greek astronomer and mathematician whose work surfaced last week, as we recognized the Autumnal Equinox.

Twice a year, the hours of daylight and the hours of darkness are equal across the land. On the day of the fall equinox, the sun crosses the equator, providing the earth with 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness. This event initiates the changes that result in winter for the northern hemisphere and summer in the south. After the fall equinox, the northern hemisphere of the earth begins to tilt ever so slightly away from the sun, slowly decreasing the amount of sunshine received until the winter solstice, after which the days begin to lengthen again.

Persephone, of Greek mythology, kicks off the start of autumn when, according to her agreement with Zeus' brother Hades, and her mother, the harvest goddess Demeter--she goes to live with her husband Hades in the underworld for half a year. Demeter suspends all growth and regeneration of the earth's vegetation while her daughter is away.

The September 23rd fall equinox is a time of balance--where the length of the day equals that of the night. According to myth, it is...

2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor was a mechanical engineer who, according to Peter Drucker, “was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study.” Taylor holds forty-two patents , including several for golf and tennis related inventions .

Taylor wrote at a time when the average worker was viewed as inefficient and sluggish. There was a fear among workers that if they were more productive, there would be less work to go around. His Principles of Scientific Management was directed at improving worker efficiency. He felt that the “the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man.”:

Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250). Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the...

You can't give a smile away; it always comes back. - Susan RoAne

With such power in your smile, sure a stone you'd beguile,
And there's never a teardrop should fall,
When your sweet lilting laughter's like some fairy song
And your eyes sparkle bright as can be.
You should laugh all the while and all other times smile,
So now smile a smile for me.

When Irish Eyes are Smiling

In The Brief History of the Smile , author Angus Trumble writes

Every smile is the product of physical processes common to all humans. But since the dawn of civilization, the upward movement of the muscles of the face has carried a bewildering range of meanings. Supreme enlightenment is reflected in the holy smile of the Buddha, yet the Victorians thought of open-mouthed smiling as obscene, and nineteenth-century English and American slang equated "smiling" with drinking whisky.

In the early 1960s State Mutual Life Assurance of Worcester, MA initiated a merger that had bad effects on company morale. In 1964, State Mutual...

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A few weeks ago, we kicked off the Hackathon Pilot, an experiment enabling passionate MIXers to collaboratively "write the chapter" on how to enable communities of passion within our organizations (learn more about the pilot here and here ). During Sprint #2, our pilot team was tasked with defining what a community of passion is and how exactly you might enable one. This is the third of three posts where pilot members synthesize the ideas from Sprint #2. Today's synthesis post comes from Alyson Huntington-Jones .
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Defining a Community of Passion
by Alyson Huntington-Jones

What is a community of passion and what does it mean to enable one? Defining an answer should be an easy enough exercise one may think, but the sheer diversity of ideas generated during the Hackathon Pilot Sprint #2 belies any such notion.

However, after much work, I arrived at the following definitions:

A community of passion is a unified group of individuals who regularly interact in a common area or location and share a strong liking, desire for or devotion to some activity, interest,...

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A few weeks ago, we kicked off the Hackathon Pilot, an experiment enabling passionate MIXers to collaboratively "write the chapter" on how to enable communities of passion within our organizations (learn more about the pilot here and here ). During Sprint #2, our pilot team was tasked with defining what a community of passion is and how exactly you might enable one. This is the first of three posts where pilot members synthesize the ideas from Sprint #2. Today's synthesis post comes from Steve Todd .
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Passionate Analytics
by Steve Todd

When Chris Grams challenged us to come up with a concise definition of “community of passion,” we outdid ourselves.There was simply too much information to process. MIXers contributed passionate (and long) opinions. As I scrolled through pages of comments, I realized that I simply did not have the time to form a meaningful conclusion.

IT departments know this problem all too well. In fact, there’s a trendy new phrase for it: “ Big Data ”. This phrase even has its own conference . Art is the...

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A few weeks ago, we kicked off the Hackathon Pilot, an experiment enabling passionate MIXers to collaboratively "write the chapter" on how to enable communities of passion within our organizations (learn more about the pilot here and here ). This is the fourth post in a series where pilot members have synthesized some of our learnings from Sprint #1. Today's synthesis post comes from Alberto Blanco .
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Passion within Organizations and Communities within Communities
by Alberto Blanco

The Hackathon Pilot began a few weeks ago and started with a pair of questions: name five successful communities of passion and two to five communities of passion to which you belong. A simple copy-and-paste task, isn't it? Well, not at all.

What happened when most of our pilot members--including myself--attempted to answer those little questions was that we had some difficulty articulating good examples of a successful communities of passion. In my mind, this confirmed a disturbing truth: we are still surrounded and even immersed in a dispassionate world of grey furniture and unproductive meetings.

However, the more we chewed up the...