When organizations modernize or innovate, they use terms like broad based consensus, collaborative process that engages the whole company, which is code for small marginal changes, usually in form of cost saving maneuvers. The trap was in the first few words, consensus building, the term for delaying, diverting and homogenizing any innovative or modern ideas that may pop up by accident.  The act of reaching a consensus within large organizations requires all middle management to agree, this only happens when they have their signature on the product, ensuring that their personal section is not adversely effected, or to much power is given to any other middle manager within the organization. This drags the whole modernization initiative into a tactical turf struggle rather than the strategic vision document it started out to be. Consensus by it’s very nature is attracted to status quo and the comfort of bureaucracy and sameness.
Innovation teams must have the freedom and authority (firm backing from the boss) to bypass the middle managers when needed, they must engage, involve, consult and have empathy for the parts of the organization they will effect, but they should never need their consensus. Innovation by definition is to do something new, to change and disrupt, and the average worker or leader does not want that to happen. If they did, modernization teams wouldn’t be needed, there would be a constant state of modernization everywhere in the organization.
Everyone in the organization agrees that we should be more effective, efficient, modern, just no one wants it to happen to them and the consensus process ensures that sameness gets an annual paint job.

I preempted the last section by searching for the author / text online and found a number of linked resources. I have also found and contacted the author through Twitter.

The book I am reading is: The Three Levels of Leadership by James Scouller

I would like to thank James for his prompt response on Twitter and or passing on a link to clips on YouTube. This is a technical aspect of leadership communication that I will be passing onto colleagues.
http://m.youtube.com/3LevelsofLeadership
The web link is http://www.three-levels-of-leadership.com/

I will post the group’s feedback after we have met.

(Me and my younger brother)

When I was a kid my family would usually escape the New York City summers by road-tripping it to some New England rental home near a lake or the shore, some woods and a bunch of sweet little hamlets for a week or two. Without fail at least one roadside diner, lobster shack or family-run restaurant would set down a box or handful of crayons and paper placemats with a bunch of puzzles on them designed to keep us kids busy until the food arrived.

I have two brothers—one older, one younger—and invariably we’d compete to see who would solve the puzzles on their placemat first. Now, the maze was always my favorite because it seemed the simplest challenge, so I’d start there. I’d just look at the center of the maze and, with my eyes, backward engineer my way to the starting point; then I’d use my crayon to trace the trail back to the center. When my younger brother wondered aloud how I always seemed to get the maze right on the first try, I explained my approach to him. “That’s cheating,” he said. “Why?” I asked.

You’re welcome to decide for yourself whether this is, in fact, cheating when it comes to solving a maze, but I, for one, would still ask, “Why?” The answer is in plain sight: so why make it harder than it has to be to arrive at the correct answer? But, that’s a debate for another day or another blog altogether.

The point is: You have to know where you want to end-up to create a successful strategy that will get you there. That’s true whether you’re a business owner or a job seeker. What’s also true is that your past can reveal a lot about what works for you—backward engineering is a “solution strategy” that has served me, and my clients, extraordinarily well over the course of my entire career, and continues to do so.

But, the world has changed a lot in the intervening years since my childhood vacations, and it keeps on changing faster and faster. While some things may, indeed, stay the same, there are many things that simply do not. So, it’s just as critical to ensure your goals are in line with today’s marketplace and that the systems you put in place to advance your progress keep pace with the changing times.

Case in point
I continue to notice that a lot of middle management-level professionals in their late-30’s-to-early-50’s often revert to prior job-seeking ways of thinking when looking for new employment opportunities, as though they can’t quite shake the standard definitions and job descriptions for careers that they grew up with, or assigned to themselves, or were assigned to them in college or in their formative years just after graduating.

Even while they’re using all the modern social media tools to conduct and manage their networking and searches, they’re still thinking about career opportunities, job titles and keyword searches in the same old way they did before their last job and perhaps the job before that. But, that’s the past and, depending upon how long ago that last job search took place, the past probably doesn’t apply any more in today’s job market.

For so many in that age- and experience-range the traditional career categories have been redefined for a younger generation, or they’ve been completely obliterated and just don’t exist at all. Experienced professionals need to learn how to search for new opportunities in a different way, because so many of the variables they know and associate themselves with have changed. The opportunities that will suit their skills sets and level of experience won’t be found using outdated lexicons or strategies.

What do you think? Have you implemented a successful employment search using tried and true methods that have served you well throughout your career? Or, do you agree that it’s been difficult to navigate the new marketplace to find opportunities that mesh with your professional background, skills and interests?

Zombie expert Jesse Petersen warns women not to date zombies. “Aim for the head,” she says. “Protect your brain.”

It’s no secret that dating a zombie isn’t for everyone, and here at the Girls’ Guide we pride ourselves in embracing dissenting views. In the following, zombie expert Jesse Petersen, author of the supremely funny Living with the Dead trilogy, shares why she thinks dating a zombie isn’t such a good idea. She’s written three books on the subject, so perhaps she knows something we don’t!

First off, thanks so much to Lynn for having me today as a guest on the blog. I especially thank her since my topic is one so very far from her own opinion on this subject. I mean, date a zombie?? I’ve always thought my first reaction (and the reactions of all my characters) would be to kill a zombie and think about dating last. So I would like to offer a bit of an alternative advice to those considering dating a zombie.

5 Reasons Not to Date a Zombie (Out of 50,000)

1. Lack of upward mobility
Once the zombie apocalypse comes, there are going to be a lot of zombies. Really, it will be the “it” thing to do, so you’d think that would mean a zombie would be a great guy to date. He’s not. There’s no upward mobility in it. Once you’re a zombie, you’re a zombie. There aren’t upper management zombies. Or doctor zombies. And it’s not that you need a guy who is going to move on up, but dating a guy who has no chance of upward mobility is dating a man who is stalled in his life. No fun.

2. He’s always checking out other girls…and guys
Cheating is just a no-no, and it can come in a lot of forms. With a zombie boyfriend, he’s always going to be looking around at other people. Now it won’t be for sex…but he’s going to want someone else for their brains. Can you live with that? With not being the only brain for him?

3. His sense of humor is stilted
Imagine a lifetime of this one joke: “Knock knock.” “Who’s there?” “Brains.” That’s it. That’s the whole joke. He’s not going to learn another one.

4. Body parts coming off during sex
Sexual compatibility is a big part of a good relationship, and I’m sure there are some zombies that still remember all the right moves. And since their muscle fibers and tissues are breaking down, they can also probably move around in some really crazy ways. But if a leg comes off in the middle of the sexy,
it’s going to scar you for life. I don’t care how freaky you are!!

5. Also, he wants to kill you
This is biggest reason not to date a zombie. He’s going to moan and groan and make all the right hand gestures, but when he smells your hair, it’s not about how hot he thinks you are. It’s about that tasty brain you’re keeping in your skull cavity. That’s what he wants, girl! Your brain. And even though we’ve all spent
decades exclaiming how we want guys to love us for our brains, in this case, it’s really not going to work…unless you want to zombie up, too.

So make your decision about who you pursue after the apocalypse comes, but don’t let some hot piece of zombie ass make you forget the pitfalls. Aim for the head, protect your brain.

Jesse Petersen is the author of many novels, including the truly hilarious Married With Zombies, Flip This Zombie and Eat, Slay, Love. Until the zombie apocalypse, she lives in the Midwest with her husband and two cats. Find out more about her at jessepetersen.net or follow her on Twitter @jessepet.

]]> http://parktownbusiness.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/form-4-business-test/ Tue, 22 May 2012 10:44:04 +0000 parktownbusiness http://parktownbusiness.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/form-4-business-test/ Study the following for your test on Thursday

• Topic 2

Test can be broken down as follows

• 1 x essay for 40 marks
• Short questions for 15 marks
• Medium questions for 30 marks

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I do believe I was in the ninth grade–a freshman. At our school the class was called Civics. It was a required course taught to instill  an understanding of how the American form of government functions and also to do a little bit of flag–waving to convince us, as future tax-payers, how fabulous the setup truly is.

It’s called checks and balances. You know it well: the executive branch, headed by the President; the legislative, by Congress, and the judicial, mainly referring to the Supreme Court. I suppose I could talk about our history and say that this particular organization seems to function–but the lethargy, competition and frustration that is produced through the process holds back progress to such an extent that it is often nearly lethal to human causes.

It’s because we believe strongly in this country that we need a middle. We want a middle class, we extol the value of middle-of-the-road music, we love the happy medium (just another name for the compromised middle), and we’ve even established a world called “middle management,” where people who have not yet excelled to executive level can still feel a boost of confidence that they are no longer working on the floor with the serfs.

The problem with the middle is that it creates a jealousy for the top, and too often, a disrespect for what lies beneath. The checks and balances envisioned by our forefathers was constructed in a time when individual thinking was supreme, and being linked to a party or clump of beliefs was secondary. In other words, as long as every person actually thinks for himself and is not responding to the demands of an organization, then debate, challenge and conversation can occur on issues, resulting in some sort of agreement. But if your allegiance is primarily to your cause instead of reasonability, then your particular “flavor of the month” can dig in its heels and halt progress.

I will tell you what the problem is with the legislative branch of our government–you have nearly 535 or so men and women in one building, wishing they could be President–wanting to do the bidding of the President, or deciding to do everything they can to discredit that President. They are jealous of the executive branch and therefore can use their vote to pout.

Let’s move on to the judicial arm of the government. When I was a young man, the politics of a judge appointed to the Supreme Court was quite private, and whether the individual was conservative or liberal was a better-kept secret, with each person who received the honor promising to judge cases on merit instead of political swing. That is gone. The Supreme Court has lost its meaning because it’s just as political as Congress.

So as both political parties try to extol the beauty of honoring and respecting the middle class as the true by-product of America’s governing style, the middle class instead becomes the muddle class–lacking the integrity of being satisfied, but also lacking mercy towards those who have not yet achieved solvency. This is why middle management, in a company, is filled with some of the most nasty, cantankerous pencil=pushers you will ever find. They are discontented that they are not upper management, and also disgusted with those who work beneath them because they once held those jobs and feel that they are menial and meaningless.

If you will allow me to advance a theory, here’s the problem. Right now, in this country, we are trying to develop a philosophy based on the facts provided. Therefore, we are always changing our philosophy just due to circumstances, which can frankly often be temporary. America has developed a “moveable philosophy,” and because of that, all we have to do to become befuddled, frustrated, angry and unwilling to cooperate is to be confronted with a new set of hassles that contradict and challenge our previous conclusions.

Consider this: we just finish with the issue of civil rights for our black citizens, battling, arguing and even shedding blood over the issue, and then, before we can even take a deep breath, here comes the issue of gay rights. Rather than taking what we learned through the civil rights movement during the 1960′s, we act like we’re reinventing the wheel when it comes to civil liberties. We fail to honor a basic philosophy. Bluntly, we do NOT hold it to be self-evident that all men are created equal, as Jefferson insisted. We are continually looking at similar issues and acting like they’re brand new problems.

Let’s bring it into the normal household. If my oldest son has a curfew of eleven o’clock and I discover, that eleven o’clock is too late for him to be out because of the temptations available and I decide to change his curfew to ten-fifteen, it is ridiculous for me to start all over again with an eleven o’clock curfew with my next son. Have I learned anything through the experience with my first-born? Have I developed any concepts, attitudes and notions that are transferable to the next situation?

Therefore it is not an issue of checks and balances nor whether we have a middle class. The problem with our vision is that whenever anything new comes up, we never consider our history while honoring our philosophy, and applying both yardsticks to measure out wisdom to our new situation. So there you have it. History, our philosophy, action–the correct order and it is the way to get things done using the gravitas of our journey.  Instead, we try to develop a new philosophy for everything based upon the facts provided rather than adjusting the facts provided to our well-established, trusted and tested philosophy.

I have very little conflict in my life. It is not because conflict is not available. I deal with hundreds and hundreds of people every week–a built-in formula for stress (or even a coronary). But I don’t look at every person I meet as a new problem or even a new situation. I take these people into my life based upon an established philosophy and allow them to fit into that existing Magna Carta of tried-and-tested behavior. I took a combination of Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” and the suggestion of Jesus–“do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” and I came up with MY core of conduct: “NoOne is better than anyone else.”

So if I were in Washington, D.C., the checks and balances would work for me. I would not feel I was better than the people who elected me, and I wouldn’t be jealous of someone who had achieved a higher office. In my soul, I have accepted the fact that no one is better than anyone else. But absent that fireball of intense understanding inside my soul, I begin to try to adjust everything I do to the information that is right in front of me. In that case, I not only become confused over the statistics and data, but bewildered and angry that nothing seems to be working.

I don’t care if you’re a Republican and I don’t care if you’re a Democrat. But I will tell you this–if the soul of your philosophy is not the precious idealism of “NoOne is better than anyone else,” you will eventually clump and muddle things up by protecting your cause instead of creating a cause to protect those in need. I do not extol any system unless it honors a central truth and holds that truth to be not only self-evident, but well-practiced.

So you can debate about Mitt Romney or Barack Obama all you want to. Our government will be at a stand-still as long as we are trying to find a middle ground that just becomes a muddled mess of confused, conflicting opinions. Sooner or later, both parties–all Americans–and everyone who lives within our borders need to agree on the lessons of our history and hold dear a common philosophy about how to move forward. We can debate how “NoOne is better than anyone else.” We can argue about the best method to treasure that particular gold nugget. But to proceed forward with half of our country believing one thing about humanity and the other half of our country believing another thing about humanity is to produce a muddle class that has no idea which direction to go. Going up seems impossible; going down sounds like hell.

Here is my suggestion–tell me your core philosophy and I can tell you if we’re going to be able to work shoulder-to-shoulder towards the common good. For me, if someone contends that “some people are just better than other people,” I can love that person but I cannot work with him. Because for every reason you can come up with that some individuals are better than others, I can tell you that holding that position is always the first fruits of bigotry.

So how do we get OUT of the muddle class? Somewhere along the line, as Uncle Tom Jefferson told us, we must hold some truths to be self-evident. Otherwise we debate the statistics and twist them in our own direction, instead of using our philosophy to determine how we will address the present possibility. 

The producers of jonathots would humbly request a yearly subscription donation of $10 for this wonderful, inspirational opportunity

Facebook stock priced at $38 per share was to begin trading under the symbol “FB” on the Nasdaq, giving the world’s leading social network a dizzying value of $104bn at its initial public offering (IPO) of stock.

Investors were keen to own pieces Facebook, which grew from a Harvard dormitory project in 2004 to an online community with more than 900 million denizens.

Facebook reportedly planned to go public hacker style with an all-night software bending bash to culminate with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg remotely ringing the Nasdaq opening bell.

Employees were to join in a “hackathon” to start late Thursday at Facebook’s offices in the Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park and continued until the IPO at which 421 million shares of common stock will be sold.

Facebook itself is selling 180 million and holders of previous shares are selling 241 million.

Facebook was on course to raise $16bn with the IPO, behind only that of financial giant Visa in 2008, according to Renaissance Capital. The addition of a possible stock “over-allotment” could boost the total to some $18.4bn.

At a market worth of $104bn, Facebook would be among the most valuable US firms, ahead of sector giants like Amazon ($98bn) and Cisco ($89bn), and more than twice the value of Ford Motor ($38bn). But it remains behind Google ($203bn) and Apple ($495bn).

Under the share plan, co-founder Mark Zuckerberg will hold 55.8% of the voting power, and some 18.4% of the value of Facebook. The 28-year-old controls the firm through a dual class stock structure.

Wall Street and investors around the globe have been girding for a Facebook IPO frenzy.

In the past few days, Facebook boosted the estimated price for the shares, and added to the number of shares being offered from insiders.

London bookmakers anticipated a stampede. At the betting firm Spreadex, clients have been speculating that shares could rise above $56 after their first day.

Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter believed that despite the large number of shares being offered, Facebook stock price will climb quickly in trading.

“I would guess it trades a lot higher, and settles in the mid-40s (dollars),” Pachter told AFP.

Spreadex noted that among other tech IPOs, LinkedIn rose 109% the first day while Groupon surged 31%. Social game maker Zynga lost ground on its first day.

But Spreadex spokesman Andy MacKenzie said that “we have had some customers holding back based on their belief that Facebook shares may well fall in value after the furor over the initial launch has died down.”

Lou Kerner, founder of The Social Internet Fund, said he expects a strong response.

“US institutional demand has been good, the retail and global demand has been overwhelming,” he said.

London-based Hargreaves Lansdown Stockbrokers said Facebook may have a hard time living up to lofty expectations but pointed out that it is “a relatively developed company which can display ‘real’ income and profit.”

“There are extremely high expectations for the company’s prospects and perhaps on that basis it deserves the punchy valuation it has been given, the brokerage said in a note to clients.

But the brokers said Facebook faces challenges including how to make money from the growing base of mobile users.

The IPO’s net proceeds to the company were estimated at $6.4 billion. The rest of the cash goes to Facebook insiders and others who made early investments in the social network, and to cover the IPO costs.

The Wall Street Journal said 57% of shares will be from insiders, which is an unusually high percentage. Under Wall Street rules, investors have to wait six months to sell any shares not offered at the IPO.

Some analysts predicted Facebook’s stock price will jump quickly to $44 a share but the long-term outlook is less clear.

At the heart of the debate about the wisdom of owning a piece of Facebook is how much revenue it takes in.

Revenue vaulted to $1.06bn in the quarter which ended March 31 – an improvement year-over-year, but down about six percent from the previous quarter.

According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook.com received nine percent of all US internet visits in April 2012. It had 1.6 billion visits a week and averaged more than 229 million US visits a day for the year-to-date.

The world’s largest-social networking website is increasing by 25 percent an offering that was initially set at 337.4 million shares, the people said, asking not to be identified because the change hasn’t been publicly disclosed.

Facebook, gearing up for the largest-ever IPO of a technology company, had already increased the offering’s price range to $34 to $38 apiece, from $28 to $35 previously. Investors are betting that Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg can overcome slowing sales growth by expanding into areas such as mobile advertising and e-commerce, said Samuel Schwerin, managing partner at New York-based Millennium Technology Value Partners.

“An increasing number of institutional investors are looking beyond the value of the business today and looking at the future growth,” Schwerin, whose firm oversees $1 billion, including Facebook stock, said yesterday. “Those drivers are extraordinary in size, including international and mobile and commerce.”

At $16 billion, Facebook’s debut would surpass that of General Motors Co. to be the second-largest in U.S. history, excluding so-called over-allotments, which let underwriters buy more shares at a later date, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

GM, Visa Sales

GM raised $15.8 billion in November 2010, before expanding the sale to $18.1 billion when underwriters exercised the over- allotment option. Visa Inc. raised $17.9 billion in its 2008 IPO, the biggest in the U.S., and later expanded the sale to $19.7 billion.

Facebook’s underwriters will have the option to buy an additional 50.6 million shares from the company and its holders after the IPO, the company said in a filing yesterday, before people said the company will enlarge the offering.

Zuckerberg celebrated his 28th birthday this week, during the final leg of a marketing tour aimed at building demand for the IPO and convincing investors that Facebook can make money from mobile users.

Some institutional investors had balked at buying into Facebook early in the road show over concern about the site’s growth prospects, people with knowledge of the matter said last week. In a Bloomberg Global Poll of more than 1,250 investors, analysts and traders taken before the price range increase, 79 percent said Facebook didn’t deserve such a high valuation.

Facebook’s shares are set to price tomorrow and begin trading under the symbol FB on the Nasdaq Stock Market the following day. The Menlo Park, California-based company is expected to announce the increased IPO size in a filing today, CNBCreported yesterday.

Mike Buckley, a spokesman for Facebook, declined to comment yesterday.

“Our latest survey of 7,280 leaders, which our organization evaluated in 2011, confirms some seemingly eternal truths about men and women leaders in the workplace but also holds some surprises,” says the report, noting that “our data-set was generated from leaders in some of the most successful and progressive organizations in the world both public and private, government and commercial, domestic and international.”

It might be expected that female leaders excel mostly at “nurturing” competencies including developing others and building relationships, which was true: women did score higher than men in these categories.

But the fact is that at every level, more women were rated by their peers, their bosses, their direct reports and their other associates as better overall leaders than their male counterparts—“and the higher the level, the wider that gap grows,” says the research conducted by leadership development firm Zenger Folkman.

Asked about the overall effectiveness by gender across several management categories, percentile scores broke down as follows, with females excelling in every leadership category:

Moreover, at all levels, women are rated higher in 12 of the 16 competencies that go into outstanding leadership, and two of the traits where women outscored men to the highest degree—taking initiative and driving for results—have long been thought of as particularly male strengths, says the Harvard Business Review.

What was being tracked were the judgments of a leader’s peers, bosses and direct reports. Individuals were asked to rate each leader’s effectiveness overall and also to judge how strong he or she is on over a dozen competencies judged as important to overall leadership effectiveness.

“As it happened, men outscored women significantly on only one management competence in this survey—the ability to develop a strategic perspective,” the research reveals.

When researchers shared their findings with a group of women outside this particular survey and asked them to suggest why they thought their colleagues had been rated so highly on taking initiative and self-development, their answers pointed to the “still-tenuous” position they feel themselves to be in the workplace. Women were afraid to rest on their laurels, and feeling the need to take initiative, they were more highly motivated to take feedback to heart. Other responses include:

1. “We need to work harder than men to prove ourselves.”
2. “We feel the constant pressure to never make a mistake and to continually prove our value to the organization.”

When asked about the survey, recruiter Janice Detta Colli, managing director with Boyden Toronto, told eFinancialCareers that women in finance tend to stand out when they do good work, given that there are so few of them on the scene.

Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group / Work+Life Fit, attended the event and wrote up an incredibly useful post on the conclusions reached for Fast Company. In her experience, she writes, simple top-down strong arming of middle managers doesn’t get results. Instead, she suggests simple but effective techniques to help them work through their objections to flexible work and win their wholehearted buy-in:

Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like. Interview middle managers–the supporters of flexibility as well as the naysayers. Ask them why they think it is or is not important to be more flexible in the way work is done. Encourage them to tell you how it will solve their business challenges. Gather groups of managers and employees together to expand this shared vision they’ve created. At the end of the process, people feel invested in this approach to flexible work that they developed themselves.

Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility. I love naysayers. When I am consulting to a group of managers about work flexibility and one of them has the courage to say, “Yeah, but I’m going to be left doing more work,” I want to hug them. They are articulating one of the very real fears many of the middle managers have about changing the way work is done. When you give middle managers a chance to share those concerns freely, they are able to move beyond them. They start to see the long list of benefits from having a more flexible approach to work. But if they can’t, they get stuck behind the fears.

Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. For example, a manager finds that having two people in the group teleworking from home on the same day causes difficulty with customer coverage. That manager would call the group together and ask them to help her come up with a way to solve the problem. She wouldn’t be expected to take it upon herself to make it work.

Rather than suggest that middle managers need “bootcamp” and to be browbeaten into accepting that the future of work at their firms is more flexible, Williams Yost takes a more respectful route that treats managers like concerned and frightened humans not thick-headed impediments. And who isn’t more persuaded by respectful dialogue than insulting hectoring? William Yost’s approach seems not only more humane but also more likely to be effective. Want more details? Her post is interesting throughout and well worth a read in full.

What’s your approach to winning over remote work skeptics?  

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

San Francisco – Apple’s iPad outmuscled its Android-powered tablet computer rivals in early 2012, in a global market suffering from post-holiday hangover, a survey showed on Thursday.

Global shipments of tablet devices and e-readers slumped 38.4% in the first three months of 2012 to 17.4 million, compared with a fourth quarter pumped up by the holiday gift-giving season, according to research firm IDC.

But year-over-year, tablet sales were up a whopping 120%, in a market shifting away from desktop and laptop computers.

“Apple reasserted its dominance in the market this quarter, driving huge shipment totals at a time when all but a few Android vendors saw their numbers drop precipitously after posting big gains during the holiday buying season,” said Tom Mainelli of IDC.

“Apple’s move to position the iPad as an all-purpose tablet, instead of just a content consumption device, is resonating with consumers as well as educational and commercial buyers. And its decision to keep a lower-priced iPad 2 in the market after it launched the new iPad in March seems to be paying off as well.”

Apple shipped 11.8 million iPads during the quarter, down from 15.4 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, as its worldwide share rose to 68% from 54.7%.

Amazon saw a precipitous drop to four percent of the market, compared with 16.8% in the fourth quarter, and slipped to third place overall.

Samsung jumped ahead of Amazon to second place overall while Lenovo vaulted into the number four spot, followed by Barnes & Noble’s Nook at number five.

Lower price points

Although total Android shipments were down sharply in the quarter, IDC said it sees a rebound with companies such as Samsung and Lenovo beginning to gain traction with new products.

“It seems some of the mainstream Android vendors are finally beginning to grasp a fact that Amazon, B&N, and Pandigital figured out early on: Namely, to compete in the media tablet market with Apple, they must offer their products at notably lower price points,” Mainelli said.

“We expect a new, larger-screened device from Amazon at a typically aggressive price point, and Google will enter the market with an inexpensive, co-branded ASUS tablet designed to compete directly on price with Amazon’s Kindle Fire.”

The impact of Microsoft Windows 8- and Windows RT-based tablets, which are widely expected to ship into the market by the fourth quarter, is not yet clear, IDC said.

“The worldwide tablet market is entering a new phase in the second half of 2012 that will undoubtedly reshape the competitive landscape,” said IDC’s Bob O’Donnell.

“While Apple will continue to sit comfortably on the top for now, the battle for the next several positions is going to be fierce. Throw in Ultrabooks, the launch of Windows 8, and a few surprise product launches, and you have all the makings of an incredible 2012 holiday shopping season.”