Marjolein continues to do great work with her new ActiveWords blog, AWesome. She’s started a webring for those of us who are fans of that productivity tool.
Two-fold Boost. The WebRing and my self-esteem got a boost today. Three experienced ActiveWords users were added to the WebRing. Please take the time to join too. Soliciting and organizing all this does take quite a bit of my time (my cute… [AWesome]
Added to my TIVO to do list for Monday night. A great opportunity to see a first-rate thinker at work.
Way back when I was getting my MBA, Porter’s strategy course was the second year elective of choice. This was when Competitive Strategy was being written. Those of us fortunate enough to get into the class got to read it a chapter at a time. I was also fortunate enough to do a field study with a team of fellow second years under his supervision.
I learned a ton during those two courses. My fundamental reservation about Porter’s approach to strategy is that it is too focused on static equilibrium and doesn’t pay enough attention to technology innovation. Mix in Clay Christensen’s work on innovation however, and you have a powerful set of lenses to apply.
Michael Porter on Charlie Rose. Michael Porter on Charlie Rose — Missed it Friday night, but Harvard Professor and strategic management thinker and author Michael Porter was apparently a full-hour guest on Charlie Rose on PBS. By Porter:
Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Amalyzing Industries and Competitors
Competitive Advantage : Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
Michael Porter on CompetitionFortunately, in New York, the show is repeated the next day (Monday May 3 in this case) at 1:30 PM. I’m setting my DVR for it. You might want to check your “local listings.” [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
“Crazy old men are essential to society. Otherwise young men have no suitable models.”
– James Broughton quoted by Chris Corrigan, via Andy Borrows
[Seb’s Open Research]
Differentiating between urgent and important is the trick though isn’t it? After the fact, it may be easy but in the moment it can be devilishly hard, especially in a world that treasures action over reflection.
Perhaps one heuristic would be to simply ignore any decision (excepting immediate threat to life and limb) that claimed a need to be made immediately.
If It’s Urgent, Ignore It. If It’s Urgent, Ignore It — From Seth Godin at Fast Comany…
“Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.
“A key corollary to this principle is the idea that if you don’t have the time to do it right, there’s no way in the world you’ll find the time to do it over. Too often, we use the urgent as an excuse for shoddy work or sloppy decision making. […] Urgent is not an excuse. In fact, urgent is often an indictment–a sure sign that you’ve been putting off the important stuff until it mushrooms out of control.”
Obvious, but worth repeating from time to time. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]
An article ran yesterday in the Times about Asperger’s syndrome, what some describe as a form of high-functioning autism. Wired magazine ran a similar piece a few years back under the title, The Geek Syndrome. It makes a case that the social “blindness” that characterizes many of us in technical professions may have a neurological basis.
I could pick out a number of incidents in my past to make my own case for suffering from Asperger’s. One that comes to mind is an early programming job, where I turned into the team debugging specialist. Other team members would leave me candy and core dumps to debug. I finally tracked down one especially tough bug and grabbed the phone to call Glenn, my boss, and tell him the good news. Glen was very kind. He listened to my excited description of my detective process before he gently explained that he and his wife generally thought that 2 o’clock in the morning was a more appropriate time for sleeping than listening to status updates from young programmers.
There is an interesting side dimension to this condition that nicely illustrates one of the key differences between tacit and explicit knowledge. If you do tend to be blind to social cues that most people pick up naturally, one compensating strategy is to develop a series of explicit rules for operating in social situations. You train yourself to pay attention consciously to the clues that most people have forgotten that they use. On the plus side, you develop observational skills you can take advantage of. On the down side, you have to work through the rules to decide how to behave. Your performance is slower and never as expert or fluid as those whose knowledge is tacit.
Answer, but No Cure, for a Social Disorder That Isolates Many. Thousands of adults who have never fit in socially are only now stumbling across a neurological explanation for their struggles. By Amy Harmon. [New York Times: Science][free registration required]
Steve Denning did some excellent work using stories to drive change when he was at the World Bank. Here’s a pointer to an interview with Denning summarizing his key arguments about the role and value of story in driving organizational change. If this catches your fancy, you may want to look at Denning’s book, The Springboard : How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations.
Steve Neiderhauser points to an interview with Steven Denning. Excerpts:
People can’t absorb data because they don’t think in data. They think in stories. If you give people a story, then they can absorb the meaning of large amounts of data very rapidly….
The good news is however that we are all storytellers. We’ve simply been browbeaten into thinking that this is some kind of arcane skill that only a few people have. As Jerome Bruner has documented, we all do it spontaneously from the age of two onwards, and go on doing it throughout our lives. When we get into a formal setting, we succumb to what our teachers have told us and start to spout abstractions. But once we realize that our listeners actually want to hear stories, then we can relax and do what we all do in a social setting and tell stories.
One of the things I have done in some recent presentations is not to use a presentation aid. I have just stood up and talked, trying to weave a tale around the points I want to make. I have found this much more effective personally – I tend to speak with more passion, and the audience is listening to me, rather than looking to the presentation. While this may not work in all settings, this approach is something which definitely needs more thought.
Quotes about design. Here is a list of quotes about design collected from designfeast.com.
[owrede_log : interfacedesign.org]
I’m always on the lookout for useful new tools to add to my mix. This looks to have several tools I wasn’t aware of
The 46 Best Free Utility Programs.
TechSupportAlert.com provides a great list of the 46 best free utility programs.
Let’s face it, nobody likes to pay for software when no-cost alternatives are available. I can second the recommendations for several of these programs and have added a good number of programs from this list to my “must try” list.
Another good find from Maish Nichani at elearningpost by way of George Siemens.
Tremendous resource – Storytelling: “We’ve assembled a resource guide for business leaders, consultants, educators, marketers, storytellers, artists, activists, students, and anyone else eager to apply story in the world of work.” (elearningpost)
I’ve been watching Tinderbox for a while now, even though it’s a Mac program. I once used StorySpace from EastGate and Tinderbox looks like an interesting tool for my work. I’m looking forward to the Windows version.
Tinderbox 2.2 is out. You can download a free demo. The upgrade is free if you bought Tinderbox in the last year. If not, you can get another year of free upgrades for just $70.
This is primarily an infrastructure release, paving the way for Tinderbox for Windows. But there’s plenty of great new stuff here for everyone:
- Quick lists (like this)
- Much faster interactive spell checking
- Lots of new, advanced HTML export features
- Support for richer syndication formats — both RSS and Atom