Stories give the list of what needs to be done a personality, passion, meaning, and connection to the work we do. People act when the story makes not only business sense but emotional sense. Great companies execute. Simpler companies work backwards from what people need to execute. Although unfettered collaboration among teammates has huge upsides, it also creates an amazing amount of clutter and noise.
Business has to do a lot more to make information useful to people.
At most companies, performance management isn't even pretending to be user centered. If you have a performance management system and you want it to be trusted, it must provide real-time and customized feedback to 100 percent of your associates. Working smarter means more than creating collaborative workspaces-places where people can customize their own conversations and information. Working smarter means that any and all corporate data relevant to an individual's work should be in available in formats that can be customized. When you make it easy for people to jump between knowledge and performance systems, you make a huge leap in smartness.