Is email useful or not? This topic has gotten some energy lately from Luis Suarez and Andrew McAfee (and others). It's clear to me that email is simply not th eright tool for collaboration.
I thought Folksonomy folktales from Tom Reamy in the October 2009 KMWorld provided an interesting perspective on the discussion of folksonomies as the solution to all troubles that aflict taxonomies.
Shocking news everyone: Multitasking doesn't work. Stanford research shows that it doesn't, at least when walking and chewing gum at the same time.
I'm a little behind the curve on this one, but I picked up and devoured Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, The Story of Success. Now, the question is, what do I do with this information?
Brad Hinton has a recent post On clarity, where he suggests that a key element of knowledge management has been ignored: the goal of being able to do something with all this stuff of knowledge management. I was reminded of context.
Lucas McDonnell had a nice post on 6 signs your knowledge management strategy is in trouble. One could imagine some other signs too.
The April 2009 McKinsey Quarterly has an article that got my blood boiling by just reading the title, "The irrational side of change management." Fortunately, the article by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller isn't quite so inflammatory once you actually read it.
Dennis Stevens has a nice description of how Theory of Constraints and Big Agile relate to each other. I've known that the do, but I hadn't given much thought to the connections.
Patrick Lencioni was the keynote speaker today at the Project Flow conference. He did a great job of speaking on the topic of "Building a Culture of Teamwork and Engagement" with a focus on telling hilarious stories about business and himself. I suspect you could pick up a lot of the below from reading his books, but here is a summary of the 90 minutes he spent with us today.
The fundamentals of CCPM workshop was interesting in that I saw some new simulations (games) and he put the vicious cycle of standard operations in a drawing that made a lot of sense to me.
Luis Suarez pointed to an entertaining YouTube video produced by one of his IBM colleagues, which has me pondering the tendency we (in business) have of jumping from bad effects to a "solution" without understanding the underlying cause.
This week, I get to spend several days in San Francisco at Realization's Project Flow 2009 conference. Hopefully, I get to meet some additional friends.
A week ago, the Sunday Boston Globe carried a piece on Eugene Litvak's work on helping hospitals improve. Flow is the key.
Glen Alleman of Herding Cats has a nice piece that talks about planning, What Does a Good Schedule Look Like? I offer up my list of elements of a good schedule.
Tesco is using weather forecasts to predict demand. Instead, it might be a better idea to design the supply chain to be flexible and fast to respond to actual changes in consumer demand.
CommonCraft have published another informative video, but this time the interesting part (to me) isn't the subject of the video.
In case you don't realize it, I drink a lot of coffee. Several people on Twitter pointed to a LiveScience article on "10 Things You Need to Know About Coffee."
The organization is a system. If a piece of that system is taken away, then that system changes.
Information overload can be considered an individual problem to be solved by many of the rules I've written about in my own journey around personal effectiveness. Or it can be thought of as part of a larger system of people interacting that needs to be addressed with a systematic approach.
A colleague forwarded a copy of "Manage a Living system, Not a Ledger" by H. Thomas Johnson. It is a great discussion of why traditional financial measures, while required for accounting reporting, are terrible for internal decision making.