Bob Sutton’s Work Matters Blog continues to be one of my best sources of managerial insight. One of the challenges of managing is choosing whether and when to intervene in your organization (presuming that micro-management is not your goal). In this recent excellent post, Sutton offers the distinction between two classic acronyms as an excellent diagnostic [...]
Tagged diagnostic, Knowledge work, managementExcellent reflections on his creative process, the value of "sleeping on it", and the battle between flow and interruption. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better way to spend 10 minutes of your day
Tagged creativityDeliverables should be a knowledge worker’s best friend but, like all good friendships, the relationship can get complicated. One of the most direct ways to improve the quality of knowledge work is to spend more time and effort to define appropriate deliverables. My faith in deliverables has grown out of decades of practical consulting experience, [...]
Tagged Knowledge work, observable workPatti Anklam and I have reconnected after first meeting several years ago. We navigate in the same circles and our networks overlap, but I hadn’t been carefully following her work. My mistake and I’ve fixed that now. Here’s a recent piece from her with a very good overview presentation on moving from a general understanding [...]
Tagged Knowledge work, Social mediaOne of the lovely things about the Internet is that the good stuff is there whenever you finally manage to stumble across it (so is the crap, but that’s another story). I’m in the process of cleaning up a bunch of stuff that has been lingering in my various queues and stopped long enough to [...]
Tagged BloggingLuis Suarez pointed me to this excellent clip by NPR’s Scott Simon on how to tell a story: I’m with Luis that storytelling skill is an essential in today’s knowledge intensive organization.
Tagged Knowledge Management, knowledge sharing, StoryI’ve been part of the private beta of Gist for the last several months and am still wrapping my head around it. They’ve just opened up the beta for wide consumption. Here’s the announcement from CEO T.A. McCann. Today, Gist brings you a better way to communicate and build stronger business relationships. After a year [...]
Tagged Gist, Gist.com, Knowledge workEspen reminded me of the following passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It is a wonderfully succinct description of the scientific method and its power to protect us from the risks of wishful thinking when problems call for discipline. We used to use this passage as a piece of our basic training [...]
The critical leverage point for an organization seeking more effective innovation is establishing new attitudes toward curiosity. Industrial organizations were optimized to extract value from tiny doses of curiosity and cannot tolerate larger doses. Today’s organizations require more frequent and intensive invention and innovation, which depends in turn on learning to foster and effectively channel [...]
Excellent insights from Cory Doctorow on the skills and techniques needed to ensure reasonably civil and effective discourse in online environments. You would also do well to take a look at Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s advice on moderation in online forums. Which troll-fighting techniques work Cory Doctorow: In my latest InfoWeek column, I look at what [...]
