Eric Mack webinar on using MindManager as a Knowledge Management Tool

I won’t be able to attend this since I wll be on Spring Break with the family, but I intend to watch it after the fact. Eric’s weblog is also well worth your time if you’re interested in knowledge work and personal productivity.

Sign up for my “How I use MindManager” webinar

MindJet has asked me to present a webinar on how I use MindManager to get things done. I agreed, and on Wednesday, March 28, 2007 at 10:00 AM (PST) I will present a free webinar, entitled MindManager as a Knowledge Management Tool: How I use MindManager and Lotus Notes to get things done. That’s the fancy title. My working title is “Mind Mapping in the Digital Sandbox.” (See description below)   

I’ve provided a link to sign up for the webinar at the end of this post.

MindManager as a Knowledge Management Tool:
How I use MindManager and Lotus Notes to get things done.

Date:
Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Time:
10:00 am Pacific Daylight Time

Description: Consultant and eProductivity Specialist, Eric Mack, will give us a tour of his world and how he works and how he uses Mind Manager as a visual thinking and planning tool. He will discuss how he uses Mind Manager as a visual dashboard and planning tool for project and action management. He will also share how he uses Mind Manager on a daily basis as a support tool for getting things done with the GTD methodology and how he uses Mind Manager as a research support tool for Knowledge Management. Finally, he will show us how he uses MindManager to brainstorm and track projects and actions stored in Lotus Notes databases. In addition to using Mind Maps at work, Eric uses them when home-schooling his children and when coaching robotics teams. We’ve asked him to share a little bit about how he teaches the kids to use Mind Maps to organize their thinking and strategy when planning for a paper or a competition. At the conclusion of the webinar, Eric will be available to answer your questions.

Click to Enroll

Originally posted on Eric Mack Online

John Sviokla blogging on technology and strategy

Dan Bricklin nicely summarizes most of the nice things I would have said in calling your attention to John Sviokla s new blog (Sviokla s Context). I think I can rightly take some credit for persuading John to add his voice and thinking to the mix. John and I first met twenty plus years ago at the Harvard Business School. John was just finishing his DBA (Doctor of Business Administration, not Data Base Administrator – this was HBS s original version of a Ph.D. in business that explicitly emphasized interdisciplinary thinking) as I was starting work on mine. He joined the faculty there and I worked as his research assistant for a while.

When HBS foolishly chose not to offer him tenure ten years later, I persuaded him to join me at Diamond, where he ended up becoming my boss again. Calling John quite bright is along the lines of describing Tom Brady as a pretty good quarterback. If you are at all interested in how technology and strategy fit together, John is someone you would best pay attention to.

John Sviokla s blog. As part of my work as a DiamondCluster Fellow I ve spent a lot of time talking with their vice-chairman and Global Managing Director of Innovation and Research John Sviokla and listening to his presentations. We ve also produced a few episodes of a podcast together. Prior to DiamondCluster (a consulting firm that merges technology and strategy consulting) John was a professor at Harvard Business School (not when I was there as I recall). He s quite bright and helps me understand big businesses and organizations.

John has recently started blogging at a somewhat regular pace (a new long post every day or so). Given the disclaimer that I have a financial interest in DiamondCluster, that I do consulting for them, that I talked with John about his blog a few weeks ago as this was starting, and that he pointed to me today when writing about Motorola wikis, etc., etc., I have to tell you this because I think I d be doing my readers a disservice if I didn t: John Sviokla s new blog is really worth reading. He covers technology and business in a way that will help people in both worlds. He brings interesting perspectives that remind you of those moments in business school when after 60 minutes of discussing a case in class it all starts making sense there s a way of looking at things I hadn t considered.

His blog is Sviokla s Context and it has an RSS feed.

John is trying to add his voice to the blogosphere. I think it s a welcome addition. A nice sign of the times as a blog may be pushing aside the white paper at a major consulting firm. [Dan Bricklin on John Sviokla]

Deliverables – the fundamental secret to improving knowledge work

I’ve been exploring the role of deliverables in understanding and improving knowledge work for a while. In January, I took another shot at articulating the link in a column in the Enterprise Systems Journal putting deliverables at the center of the challenge of improving knowledge work.

Knowledge work does not produce standardized, well-defined outputs. Instead, the value of its outputs depends on how well they match the unique needs of their users. No one is interested in a spreadsheet full of someone else’s data; no teacher is likely to value a copy of a paper you’ve submitted to another class. Understanding what aspects and features of a knowledge work product are most valuable to its intended user is key to focusing efforts on producing the desired deliverable. [The Fundamental Secret to Improving Knowledge Work – ESJ].

Our experience in industrial settings encourages us to look at the output as something that is already well-defined and well-understood. We focus on process changes that will produce the output more quickly or more cost-effectively. When we are doing knowledge work, we do better to focus on the deliverable longer and more mindfully. At a minimum we need to understand the user’s definition of quality, the balance between uniqueness and uniformity that will meet this level of quality, and the conditions that must be met to declare the work done.

Stay away from the net today

Truly excellent advice, which I intend to follow as soon as I finish this post. See you on Monday.

Stay away from the net today

Bitflux has a a good post today. I simply quote what they said on this April 1st:

Just go outside, enjoy the sun or do something else useful 🙂
The net is a waste of time today, and the day didn’t even really start in the US …

We already have Google Romance, Jeremy going to Google, and other fun stuff. Going out now. I’ll just clear my RSS reader on monday. 🙂 [Oliver Thylman – Thoughts]

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