BusinessWeek: Best of 2005

The December 19th issue of BusinessWeek has a terrific look back at the best of the year, highlighting Best Products (My favorite: M&Ms with custom messages!), Best Leaders and Best Ideas. Check out the Best Products for pure entertainment. Read the Best Ideas to make the wheels turn.

Some of my favorites from that section include one (#14) on reaching the simultaneous media multitasking consumer and a discussion (#18) that we're finally starting to think green. I applaud idea #3, What Business Really Craves: Simplicity. It reports: "The new trend is to strip things down to their basics and make products intuitive." Thank heavens.

I had to smile at idea #1,Treat Your Children Well But Limit Their Inheritance. (Yeah, we lose a lot of sleep over that.)

Last, idea #10: The Power And Promise Of The Open-Source Workplace, speaks to the healthy evolution to an employee-empowered workplace. I'd like to think this is the environment we've always tried to foster here.

In the old gray-flannel organization, the executive suite was where the action was. In what’s now known as the open-source workplace, power is distributed. The ceo is no longer omnipotent -- and the truly effective ones don’t want to be. The best ideas may evolve from the bottom up and sometimes from the outside in. New technologies such as private workplace wikis and blogs are disrupting command-and-control corporate structures. Any employee can create, edit, refine, comment on, or fix an idea. What some used to dismiss as a recipe for chaos is more likely a path to greater productivity.

The workplace becomes more transparent as power and information are instantly shared.