All in business
BCG Perspectives have an interesting approach to publishing thought-pieces. The one I stumbled on is their discussion of "Strategy Traps", where they pair up a number of "traps" that trap organizations - and use a historical figure to highlight the idea.
April K. Mills' "Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials" is a distillation of several change management approaches into clear and enjoyable approach to change.
If you look for something, you will likely find it. If people know you are monitoring or looking for something, they will make an effort to supply that thing. And on the other side, if you don't ask for that thing / report / result, you won't get it.
The latest DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast has a great discussion from Julie Zhou, VP of Product Design at Facebook, about creating great solutions to problems. You need to define the problem well!
How many projects in businesses today are focused on building / implementing a solution without understanding why? Your problem isn't the lack of a solution.
Sunday's Boston Globe Magazine section had a feature on "best places to work" and many smaller articles on the modern workplace. I thought a few of these had bearing on knowledge workers.
Everyone wants to kill email. I'm no fan of it either, but it does serve a purpose - a purpose that no other tool serves quite as well. Or more specifically, better than any SINGLE tool serves.
Advertising is not a topic I normally worry about, but somehow the topic of "Seducing Strangers: How to Get People to Buy What You're Selling" by Josh Weltman goes beyond just about advertising. I like to think that this topic can be thought of beyond purely advertising into other areas where one might need to get people to "buy."
Break away from Groundhog Day of solving the same problem over and over. Dissolve the problem instead of merely resolving it.
What are the real ways to revitalize manufacturing? Will changing governmental policies and regulations do the trick? I suspect not.
I've seen many examples of end-of-the-month syndrome, but this example from Airbus is a great example of the same effect happening at the end of the year.
I see a lot of projects within business support organizations that look like "implement this tool." And then the organization is surprised when the project takes much longer than expected and the tool doesn't get used to the extent expected.
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953.
"One-time events create change like dieting only on your birthday and expecting to lose weight."
More on time management and multitasking. It's a topic near and dear to what I've been doing for many years.
An interesting talk from AI researcher Kenneth Stanley on his counter-intuitive discovery/realization that formal goals/objectives can block creativity.
Stephen Bungay's "The Art of Action" brings together ideas around how people and organizations should be led, based on the study of Carl von Clausewitz and other military thinkers around how they deal with the fact of life: we can't know everything before we must act.
Is the goal of a for-profit company to "make more money, now and in the future"? I suppose it depends on how you define the terms.
Freek Vermeulen's "Business Exposed" is a great read that debunk a lot of common practice and common beliefs within business. He brings in a variety of business research to back up his sometimes surprising observations.
Jason Jennings' book Less is More: The main idea: focus. Focus on one thing - one thing for the long term, not one thing this quarter. And that one thing is the big idea of the organization - why is the organization on the planet? That big idea sets the direction and the yardstick by which everything is measured.