Here are just three lessons from our management innovators about leveraging social technologies to create truly social organizations:

Trust your people with the future of the company
For all of the talk about empowering, involving, and engaging employees, why is it that so many organizations still tap into just a sliver of what individuals have to offer? According to Management 2.0 Challenge winner Jim Lavoie, it’s because too many leaders focus on what they can get out of their people rather than entrusting them with the future of the company.

There’s an emotional as well as a practical logic at work here. Only that level of trust, freedom, and responsibility can stir people to bring forth their full imagination, initiative,...

One of the things that attracted me to Red Hat in the first place was that it was a company with a strong sense of purpose. Red Hat was a company full of believers, people who felt that the open source development model was simply a better way.

During my first few months as CEO, I traveled to Red Hat offices around the world and was often floored by the passion people felt about the company. I began to ask myself, how can we bottle this passion? Can we channel all of this energy and point it in the same direction?

In my experience, one of the most important tools of management is a core company mission that helps the company point all of its resources and energy toward a set of positive outcomes. That mission should answer two questions—what we are trying to do and how we are going to do it— in a simple way that any employee can understand.

When I arrived at Red Hat, there was already a vision for the company (Red Hat called it a raison d'etre) and it read as follows:

"To be the defining technology company...

You've begun to make major changes at your company. Maybe you've decided to restructure your business to reach new markets or perhaps you're cutting costs in response to a crisis.

You know that rallying your employees is central to making this change work, and you've done a lot to engage them. They understand why change is necessary and offered their input into achieving these goals, for example. But now you need to sustain their energy and sense of ownership over the months or years it will take to see results. Too often, cynicism, parochialism, and exhaustion get in the way.

But when employees have a sense of personal ownership, they're much more likely to give their all to any organization. This is particularly important when you're going through a long-term, organization-wide change program.

Offering formal incentives and accountability are part of the answer, but a company's culture is equally important. The energy to actually change over months or years before seeing any results has to come from the grassroots.

We've seen tactics from the field of viral marketing help avoid what we sometimes call "the valley of desolation." Since viral communication...

What would it look like if the rapidly-evolving social world of Web 2.0 collided with the sterile and static corporate Intranet? What would happen if information flowed from the outside in, instead of inside out?

Those are the questions at the heart of an interesting experiment unfolding at global consulting firm Capgemini .

A few years ago, in response to disruptive changes in its operating environment, Capgemini began experimenting with Yammer , a private and secure enterprise social network that allows employees to hold conversations, read posts, and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. Chief Technology Officer Andy Mulholland says that activity is feeding the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."

Yammer is decentralising the information flow at Capgemini to create greater collaboration from the outside in. Far-flung IT consultants who work at client locations around the world make up about half of the firm's 110,000-person workforce. Those "edge-dwellers" are the most active users of Yammer. They're using it as a tool to help them deal with the variability they encounter in the field and to do more by tapping into a corporate knowledge bank in real time....

Only a third of excellent companies remain excellent over the long term. Even fewer change programs succeed. These are the facts, yet these need not be the odds of success for your organization. Insightful advice (beyond common sense) and pragmatic methods (readily applicable) are available to help almost any leader and organization create successful transformation and sustain excellence.

This post describes two counterintuitive insights about creating lasting change, based on more than a decade of research and client work, including input from more than 600,000 senior executives and employees in 500 organizations, hands-on work with more than 100 organizations, and research drawn from more than 900 books and academic articles. (For more detailed insights, please see our book Beyond Performance: How great organizations build ultimate competitive advantage .) Other posts in this series will describe how any organization can improve its performance and its health simultaneously, and a couple of useful tools for implementing change.

Much of current thinking on change management appeals to common sense. This should raise alarm bells. Leaders who rely on their common sense when influencing change typically spend time and energy on the wrong things,...

Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Simon Caulkin .

Employee engagement is, as they say, a no-brainer. There are stacks of literature showing that companies with committed employees who feel strongly about their organization do better financially than those with indifferent employees. In many cases, too, improvement is actually quite easy to achieve.

Large numbers of employees work in silos, with deep functional expertise but no line of sight to the person ultimately buying their product. Yet it turns out that exposure to customers can be a powerful source of insight and motivation.

That is what pharmaceutical giant Roche found when a team devised an experiment to put the engagement proposition to a test. But, in the end, it wasn't quite as simple as that.

The Roche team realized it would be easy to get stuck at a high level of abstraction in a study of this type, so they focused on a simple straightforward hypothesis: that a deeper emotional understanding of the company's real value to patients and society would deliver extra engagement among employees .

Now, the team believed its employees were already engaged...

In the new economy, employees are often perplexed by the disconnect between employee technology and corporate objectives. Executives talk about employee empowerment, the need for innovation, the importance of social media and new business models. But they provide employees with locked-down desktop computers, limit the use of employee-owned technology, and often ban the use of social media applications outright. How should employees respond?

Increasingly, employees are skirting IT restrictions and security rules in order to use their gadgets to help them do their job better. In response, forward-thinking CIOs are encouraging workers to use their own smartphones and tablets alongside corporate computing platforms. They are finding new ways to secure and manage employee-owned devices on the corporate network, an idea that was once unthinkable.

The trend is part of the rapid consumerization of corporate IT. It’s a way for companies to make their employees happy, enhance recruitment and take advantage of their workers’ professional networks.

As with all shifts of this magnitude, the transition has to be mindful. But for knowledge workers whose jobs involve collaboration, the right technology can make a big difference. While the best strategy typically starts with the right company-issued notebook and smartphone,...