50 Posts and Articles that Made Me Think in 2011

Inspired by Jane Hart’s Top 100 Articles of 2011, I thought I should put down at least the top 50 that has made me reflect and ponder in the past one year, has changed the way I do things and shaped quite a bit of my work-life decisions. Not all the posts have been written in 2011, but since I either stumbled across them in 2011 or read them with greater appreciation this year, I thought it fair to include these in the list. In the past one year, I have made a career shift or should I say expanded my work portfolio (and I have described the move here), and these posts and articles have been instrumental in helping me make sense of the move and impart some value to the work I do.

I have divided them across five categories for easy reference. From the categories, you will be able to see what has influenced me the most in the past one year. At times, I have also had difficulty in “slotting” an article under a specific category. Many of the articles span groups and are interlinked. I have listed them in some sort of reading order or the way they made sense to me…

Social Business

1. The future is podular by Dave Gray
2. Putting Enterprise 2.0 into Context by Andrew McAfee
3. Factories: the original social businesses by Anne Marie McEwan
4. The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business: The Early Adoption Phase by Dion Hinchcliffe
5. Moving Beyond Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement by Dion Hinchcliffe
6. Seven Lessons Learned on Social Business by Dion Hinchcliffe
7. Systems Intelligence, Serendipity and Listening for the Better Decisions by Riitta Raesmaa
8. From social intranets to collaboration ecosystems by Fred Cavazza
9. What is a social intranet or an intranet 2.0 ? by Bertrand Duperrin
10. How Digital Business Will Evolve in 2012: 6 Big Ideas by Dion Hinchcliffe
11. Why social business is different - Part 1: Reusing stored collaboration by Dion Hinchcliffe
12. Social networks are becoming your personal operating system by Brian Solis
13. Five Emergent Strategies for Improving Social Business Performance by Dion Hinchcliffe
14. Open Work: Using Social Software To Make Our Work Visible Again by Dion Hinchcliffe
15. Why E2.0 and Social Business Initiatives Are Likely to Remain Difficult by Jon Husband

Community Management

1. Community Management: The Strategic New IT-Enabled Business Capability by Dion Hinchcliffe
2. Community management: The 'essential' capability of successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts by Dion Hinchcliffe
3. How to Build an Online Community by Vanessa DiMauro
4. 11 Social Media Yodas Define Community Management “Passion”by Baochi Nguyen
5. Who's To Blame For A Failed Community? by Claire Flanagan
6. Social Software Is Not Enough by Rachel Happe
7. Community Managers are Human Experience (HX) Professionals by Rachel Happe
8. Top 15 Ways to Kills an Online Community -- Again by Vanessa DiMauro
9. Community Managers’ Reading List: 27 Books fromQuiip
10. Why You Need to Foster Community at Work by Shawn Murphy

Content Strategy and Curation

1. Capitalizing On Curation: Why The New Curators Are Beating The Old by Drew Neisser
2. Manifesto For The Content Curator: The Next Big Social Media Job Of The Future? by Rohit Bhargava
3. Return of the Editor: Why Human Filters are the Future of the Web by  Karyn Campbell
4. Are curators the missing thing in enterprise 2.0 approaches? by Bertrand Duperrin
5. The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators by Robert Scoble
6. Curation in the Enterprise: Actionable information by JP Rangaswami
7. Curation and the enterprise: part 2 by JP Rangaswami
8. Curation and amplification will become much more sophisticated in 2012 by Vadim Lavrusik
9. The Future Of Journalism – By Ross Dawson
10. ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web  by Nick Bilton

Complexity and the changing face of 21^st C Workplace

1. Moving Beyond “Work as Usual” in a Complex World by Thierry de Baillon
2. Why Is Knowledge Sharing Important? A Matter of Survival by Luis Suarez
3. Essential Skills for 21st Century Survival: Part I: Pattern Recognition by Venessa Miemis
4. Connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets by Gordon Ross
5. Diversity, complexity, chaos and working smarter by Harold Jarche
6. The Satir Change Model by Steven M. Smith
7. Connecting Agile Business with Social Business by Dion Hinchcliffe
8. Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity? by Julie Hunt
9. The Collapse of Complex Business Models by Clay Shirky
10. The connected company by Dave Gray

Workplace Learning

1. Social Learning and Exception Handling
2. Disrupt Yourself by Whitney Johnson
3. The Five Failures of Workplace Learning Professionals by Will Thalheimer
4. Social Learning is NOT a new training trend by Jane Hart
5. Jobs, work and technology by Harold Jarche

There are plenty more but in the interest of keeping the list manageable, I have limited it to 50 articles. I have not included posts around learning and instructional design or elearning —still my first love—and will add a separate post with the links to resources I have found useful.