Year: 2005

Corante launches Future Tense – on the future of work

I’ve signed up to contribute to a new blog at Corante that launched officially today. Hylton Jolliffe lays out the premise below. My involvement grew out of a lunch Hylton and I had last month in Cambridge (at Charlie’s Kitchen, a Harvard Square landmark). We’ll be exploring a topic that’s long been near and dear to my heart and it feels like it’s going to be a great group to work with. For all you fans of RSS, the blog’s feed is here.

Check it out.

New blog on the future of work. Today we launch a new blog – Future Tense – that will examine and explore how the modern work “place” is evolving and adapting to new trends, technologies, and economic factors. Future Tense, authored by a handful of closely read thinkers and practitioners in the broad, industry-spanning “space,” will discuss the trends and pressures that are forcing employers to rejigger the way they think about the workplace, manage projects and staffs, encourage collaboration and innovation, support a decentralized workforce, motivate and reward employees, build morale and foster teamwork, design physical spaces to accommodate a mobile and transient workforce, etc. Future Tense’s co-authors: Elizabeth Albrycht, a 15-year veteran of high technology public relations practice and a co-founder and co-producer of the New Communications Forum; Jim Ware, cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program; Regina Miller, formerly of Vodafone and founder of the consultancy The Seventh Suite;… [Corante Blog]

BBC Gives Away Beethoven

What a wonderful gift from the BBC. I listened to the 3rd and 4th symphonies this afternoon on my flight to San Francisco. Looking forward to downloading the remaining symphonies when they are available.

BBC Gives Away Beethoven. The BBC rocks. Here they are giving away MP3s of all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies here for the week after they are broadcast. All the symphonies are performed by BBC Philharmonic, conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Amazing stuff. Talk about public… [loose wire]

Thanks Dave!

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I’ll get this moved over to the margin shortly, but I wanted to make sure it got up here quickly. I’ve been depending on Dave’s innovations since the first version of ThinkTank shipped in the early 1980s. From outlining to blogs to RSS, the central concepts and tools in my day-to-day knowledge work all flow from the software innovations he has made happen.

I haven’t made a scientiifc study of the problem, but I’m pretty sure that few, if any, of the tools I use on a daily basis were developed and fielded by his critics.

Thanks Dave, thanks Richard.

Thanks Dave! and also thanks Richard:

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From Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey: Thanks Dave!.:

QUOTE

You’ll find a new addition to my site today – this simple, little badge:

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The badge is a link to Scripting News, the weblog home of Dave Winer. If you hover over the image on the site, you should see the following text:

My thanks to Dave Winer for his visionary role in the development of weblogs, RSS, podcasting, SOAP, XML-RPC, OPML, and outliners.

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao’s Weblog]

One of those weeks

I have been feeling as though I’ve been slacking off in posting here lately. Right at the end of last month and the beginning of this, I felt I was just getting back into a decent rhythm. That should have been a clear warning sign.

It started with what seemed like a simple request to add some memory to my laptop machine. I’m working on a fairly complex cost modeling project at the moment and the smart guy doing all the hard work decided it was time for me to have a more detailed look at his work. This is his way of making me feel as if I were adding some value to the effort, but I’m not fooled. It turns out that the memory on my old laptop was maxed out. My simple request for a memory upgrade turns into an upgrade to a new machine. Our IT guys were great, but they also know that I tweak my machines to a fair-thee-well. They did the basic upgrade, but then I ended up spending the next several days rebuilding and reorganizing my working environment. Very educational and a much needed opportunity to clean up a lot of accumulated cruft, but several days where blogging was impossible and when I did get my blogging tools restored, there were 1500 unread posts waiting for me in my aggregator.

By now it’s the weekend. Now I could start blogging or I could take these two fellows to watch the Cubs beat the Red Sox 7–6 on Saturday. It wasn’t a difficult choice:

DandZakatWrigleyCubsRedSox2005

The one with the new Mohawk is mine. The Monday after the Cubs game, I put him on the plane to skateboarding camp.

So finally, it’s off to my client and our financial model. I figure I’ll get to some blogging done in the hotel room after work. Instead I spend 5 hours in the emergency room at Mt. Auburn hospital learning about the joys of kidney stones (I had great sympathy for Dave Pollard’s experience a while back, now I empathize). The combination of drugs they put me on pretty much knocked me out for the next several days. I think we are finally back to some semblance of normal.

Organizational lessons from Hunterdon High

Fascinating case study of better meshing high school with real world demands. I suspect that, if this experiment is allowed to continue (by no means a certain thing), these are students who will be prepared to cope with the world they will have to face. Here’s the money quote for me:

“You have to make available all the technology you can get your hands on,” Farley explains. “And then you have to do one more thing – you have to trust them.” At Hunterdon, kids already prepare their own lesson plans. What’s more, Farley expects to see extensive at-home schooling within two years. “You have to decentralize learning,” he says. “It doesn’t all take place in the classroom. Our technology makes that possible. Then you have to think through what that means for the school buildings. Even more important, you have to think through what that means for the school community.” [Fast Times at Hunterdon High]

If you think this is only applicable or relevant in schools, you haven’t been paying attention. I really don’t fully understand why, but the leadership strength it takes to let the “inmates run the asylum” remains all too rare; despite the accumulation of evidence that it pretty much invariably works, be it in schools, business organizations, or elsewhere. Most likely because few of our leaders had the benefit of this kind of educational environment.

First Impression: Life Speed. “Kids today live in a nanosecond world.”

–Ray Farley , Superintendent, Hunterdon Central Regional High School

[Fast Company]

Interviewing Excellence

A typically succinct and insight filled summary of how to think about, prepare for, and conduct fact-finding interviews from Tom Peters. Reading it won’t take long; learning to do it will take a good chunk of the rest of your career.

Years ago, when I was designing the basic consulting curriculum for DiamondCluster, we gave serious thought to building the whole thing around interviewing skills. We weren’t quite brave enough to do it, but we probably should have.

Interviewing Excellence

As promised, I spent several hours in London this past Saturday working on the “InterviewingExcellence31.” You’ll find it here.(ppt file) (FYI: I was in Copenhagen yesterday for HP … and will scoot off today to one of my favorite places … South Africa.)

REPEAT: No B.School teaches PresEx (Presentation Excellence (ppt file)) and IntEx (Interviewing Excellence).(ppt file) What a pity. (Or: How stupid!) [Tom Peters weblog]

On Experience

This made me grin at least.

At the same time, if you get better and faster at recognizing your mistakes, that alone can help improve performance. I remember talking to my instructor a few years back as I switched from skiing to snowboarding. Her observation about both sports was that you could think of them as a series of controlled recoveries.

It’s only within the mythology of Soviet style planning (whether encountered during the Cold War or in a corporate environment ), that mistakes can’t be tolerated. If you’re quick and agile enough, you can recover from those small mistakes that you make every day. Step one in recovering from mistakes is recognizing them as quickly as possible (Step 0 is given yourself permission to make the mistakes you’re going to make regardless).

On Experience. On Experience —

“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”
— Franklin P. Jones

(via The Quotations Page) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

What is GTD?

At the odd intersection of a powerful and popular idea, the blogosphere, and today’s intellectual property environment, David Allen is now offering a “official” definition of his Getting Things Done approach. I understand what drives him to follow this approach, regret it as a symptom of an IP-environment losing connection with reality, and still endorse Allen’s GTD-approach as among the best approaches to dealing with the complexities of acting in today’s world of knowledge work.

I also think David is himself one of the better examples of why truly good thinking and thinkers will survive in this environment. For all the power of David’s thinking and his books (Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything), you will still learn more if you can get yourself to one of his seminars and workshops.

What, indeed, is “GTD”. Because of seemingly ever-expanding number of GTD-related discussions, ads and blogs, I wrote up an “official” definition of “GTD.” I am asking that if any of you are using “GTD” in any way in your materials you include a link… [David Allen]