Conquering Digital Overload: Leadership Strategies That Build Engaging Work Cultures

This book examines the impact of the digital deluge on employees and organizations and sets out the leadership actions needed to create a corporate culture fit for the digital age.

In the digital world executives are presented with exponentially more information than their predecessors were a generation ago – and yet we’re not exponentially more productive. Why? Because we’re using twenty-first century technology with a twentieth century mindset. 

Excessive working hours, email overload and invasion of private life are all symptoms of a working culture that has used technology to simply amplify old management processes rather than enable and refine newer, more productive ones.

Instead of liberating us, technology has created a digital overload, accentuating the problems of presenteeism, unreasonable deadlines and management demands. Organizations need to stop using technology to turn up the volume and start using it to change the channel.

Written by aunique team of experts, this edited collection covers leadership, corporate culture, technology, wellness and workplace design. It argues that digital overload is a problem of corporate culture and a failure of leadership. As such it takes leadership to fix it. Leaders who have the courage to explore alternative ways of working with technology, the enlightenment to give employees more freedom and control over their own lives, and the humility to live and demonstrate the new culture personally. Those who do this have the power to transform their organizations so they can ride the digital wave rather than be swamped by it.

Peter Thomson is an expert on the future of work and co-author of the best-selling book Future Work. He is a director of Wisework Ltd and advises senior managers on adapting organization cultures to new ways of working. After a career in HR in the IT sector, he set up the Future Work Forum at Henley Business School and ran it for 16 years. He is now a Director of FutureWork Forum Ltd.

Mike Johnson is Chairman and Founder of the FutureWork Forum. He is a leading commentator, consultant and writer on the future of work, talent management, corporate communications and how to work as an independent. He is the author of 12 books on business and management issues. He has written several series of world-of-work studies for both The Economist and The Financial Times, as well as over 100 studies for international corporations and institutions.

J. Michael Devlin is a science and policy communication professional. For the past 15 years, he has led and managed teams for international research centers and consortia in the areas of agriculture, health research systems, forestry, environmental management and rural development. He is a co-founder of Sci4D – The Science for Development Platform, a new service which aims to make all ‘public goods’ research available in a standard format.