If you spend a great deal of your time staring into a computer screen doing your work—whether from a corporate office or home office—then you probably have felt disconnected at times from your co-workers or the teams you are engaging with. It’s an uncomfortable feeling. Most people prefer the camaraderie of bantering with colleagues around the coffee machine. But today many people don’t have face-to-face access to others or the precious time to spend with them. How then can organizations deal with the sense of isolation and dislocation that this can cause and the impact it has on productivity and innovation?

We all know how hard it is to get coworkers to share their knowledge with their colleagues. That’s less of an issue when people are on the same team, but if they are not they might closely guard the insights they have learned from others in their organization. Why do people do that? It could be for competitive reasons or it could be due to other factors. Two Canadian professors decided to study the issue to learn more about the complexities behind knowledge sharing. Their work was recently published in MIT Sloan Management Review.

Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe: "Nothing happens until it gets sold."

The latest Technology Quarterly in the December 12 issue of The Economist profiles the career of Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Ambitious IT executives would do well to take a thoughtful read, because here is a larger-than-life example of someone who, though not an IT chief, embodies that magical combination of qualities that makes a CIO in demand. A brilliant technologist who invented the Ethernet at the tender age of 27, Metcalfe was enterprising (he founded 3Com Corp.) and adroit in communication. Indeed, he understood that communication was what turned great technology into money. For Metcalfe that money was his personal fortune, but the same concept applies to technology and business profitability.  "Nothing happens until it gets sold," he tells The Economist. Even a technology as compelling as the Ethernet didn't make Metcalfe a zillionaire until he got the likes of Digital Equipment, Intel, Xerox, Sun, and even Microsoft behind it. (Incidentally, before settling on "Ethernet," names batted around for the networking technology included "Bulletin Board," "Parliamentary Procedure," and "Lazy Susan.")

Companies throw around buzz words like collaboration, open innovation and transparency with ease. But the task of implementing a new form of management based on the principles of the open source movement is daunting. Any company that thinks they can do it without a significant change in the way that knowledge is shared and controlled is fooling itself. Getting it right, however, could provide a company with a winning edge over their competition.

You'd think the economic crisis of the past few years has put employees'-grateful just to have jobs-in the palms of employers' hands. You'd be wrong, according to research by the consulting firm Booz & Co. In fact, companies that still resort to traditional, and outmoded, approaches to talent management aren't just missing out on opportunities; they're actually making themselves weaker competitors in the marketplace.

We would all like to see things get back to normal—whatever normal means to you. It could be a job with a sense of security, a retirement fund that is achieving robust gains, or a house that is appreciating steadily year after year. But many observers doubt that the current downturn is just another business cycle adjustment. In a McKinsey Quarterly  article published in March, Ian Davis, the worldwide managing director of McKinsey & Company, said we are witnessing a “restructuring of the economic order” and we are not likely to return to the normal of recent years. He called this the “new normal” that will be “shaped by a confluence of powerful forces—some arising directly from the financial crisis and some that were at work long before it began.”