As I started my day I tuned into to watch my friends on CBC News Morning and the lead story is about more massive cuts and layoffs at General Motors. While this is obviously an economic and labour story, Danielle Bochove at one point summed up the situation when she said, "It's become a story about speed."

GM had already made cuts and plans to respond to rising fuel prices, however they were clearly not enough. In fact GM found that the speed by which the economy is changing is far faster than expected, as is the speed by which consumers are buying smaller cars.

Unfortunately the Canadian Auto Workers had just concluded a new contract with GM, and these announcements effectively undermine it, showing the drastic measures GM is taking.

I work with organizations quite a bit smaller than GM, however my primary focus tends to be helping the client accelerate their corporate culture so as to be more responsive and capable of handling the pressures of our network age.

The ability for an organization to move quickly and respond to changing conditions is crucial, and yet there are many risks to speeding up, and I suspect increasingly we're going to see the wrong way far more often then not.

Take General Motors for example. While they definitely need to move faster in the direction of smaller and more fuel efficient vehicles, they also have a commitment to their workers and their families. So their ability to respond quickly and increase their overall speed as a company must also include working with their unions rather than negotiating in bad faith which they've done.

The old and obsolete school of seeing your workforce as hostile and expendable will only result in slowing down your ability to rapidly respond to changing conditions.

Successful organizations will unite the leadership structure with the combined intelligence and labour of all the diverse employees and customers/constituents that are part of the enterprise.

April seemed to fly by so quickly I was unable to post any of the reviews or thoughts I had over the last month. While I have been posting some items to my private network, I still have several posts I will be publishing on my blog in the days and weeks to come.

On Sundays I tend to spend my late afternoon and early evening going over my rss feeds and news sources in part to look at the week past but mostly to get a gauge on the week ahead.

The big news over the weekend of course is that Microsoft has backed off in their quest to buy Yahoo. The irony for me is that this past Thursday morning I did a series of interviews on CBC Radio in which I speculated that the merger was inevitable. I still believe this to be the case, however it seems the likelihood of my being right is getting lower and lower.

Check out this series of headlines from the New York Times:

• May 1st: Microsoft Outlines Its Yahoo Strategies
• May 2nd: Raising Yahoo Bid, Microsoft Steps up Talks
• May 2nd: Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table
• May 3rd: Microsoft Withdraws Bid for Yahoo
• May 4th: Will Microsoft Really Walk?

That's just the New York Times. The blogosphere as a whole is just exploding with posts, and even I am breaking a month long hiatus to post on the subject. Ironically a lot of the talk is on the death of Yahoo, and the degree to which their price will fall in the morning. This suggests to me that Microsoft may be doing all of this to drive the price lower so as to finally acquire Yahoo.

Yet who knows what will happen, and it goes to show that just when something appears to be certain it will quickly transform into something entirely different. Expect the unexpected!