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Independent business blogs are blogs that aren't supported by an organization like a magazine, newspaper, company, or business school. Those people provide lots of great content, but they don't need any additional exposure. In this post, every week, I bring you posts of quality from excellent bloggers that don't get as much publicity.

This week, I'm pointing you to posts on what great 21st Century organizations will look like, making good decisions, working together (really), organizational culture, and blowing up complex business models.

From Weekly Leader: Fleshing Out the 7 Virtues of the 21st Century Organization
"Each of these virtues is a statement about organizational values and how they are to function in an organization. They build and support one another. Put all of them into practice, and the functioning of the organization changes.  The question that this raises is whether our conception of leadership is sufficient to meet the demands and opportunities that come with the practice of these virtues. I’ll leave that to you, dear reader, to decide."

Wally's Comment: Here's a view of what a successful organization will need to be like in the decades ahead. "Virtues" is a good term to use. In the original Greek a "virtue" is a "quality valued as being always good in and of itself."

From the Heart of Innovation: The Art of Good Decision Making
"A good decision that everyone owns and supports is better than a great decision that is only owned by the boss."

Wally's Comment: I think that one important shift that's happening now is the shift from conceiving of decision making as a process that ends with the decision to one that understands implementation and adaptation as parts of the process.

From Trusted Advisor: Apollo 13: A Love Song to Collaboration
"The mission, we know, was a ‘successful failure’ in that they didn’t reach the moon, but the three astronauts, Lovell, Swigert and Haise, got home safely. And they got home, I believe, because of collaboration in its purest sense."

Wally's Comment: In most organizations, concepts of collaboration often compete with individual ambition. But if you want to know what collaboration looks like in its unfettered form, this post gives you a first-rate example.

From Incentive Intelligence: Flipping Corporate Culture on Its Head
"Culture is what keeps us connected.  Culture is deep seated.  By definition culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution or organizations.  Key in that definition is “shared.”  If only one person has values, goals and practices it ain’t culture."

Wally's Comment: After reading the headline of this post, you may think you know what the post is about. You're probably wrong.

From Clay Shirky: The Collapse of Complex Business Models
"I gave a talk last year to a group of TV executives gathered for an annual conference. From the Q&A after, it was clear that for them, the question wasn’t whether the internet was going to alter their business, but about the mode and tempo of that alteration. Against that background, though, they were worried about a much more practical matter: When, they asked, would online video generate enough money to cover their current costs?"

Wally's Comment: This is a very rich post and you should take the time to read it in full, maybe more than once. I've spent the better part of the last year looking at companies with business strategies that have worked for a very long time, almost 200 years in one case. The companies we studied had stunningly simple business models which they executed ruthlessly.

Herb Kelleher said that once Southwest Airlines decided that it was going to be THE low fare airline, a lot of other decisions just came naturally. Simple models and strategies are easy to execute. Complex ones are a house of cards. It doesn’t take much of a breeze for them to come crashing down.

Wally's Working Supervisor's Support Kit is a collection of information and tools to help working supervisors do a better job. It's based on what Wally's learned in over twenty years of supervisory skills training. Click here to check it out.