Visible buffers give management a way to manage the system. And they also give the project participants a way to guage
I don't quite know how I got on this kick of reading, but in the last year or two, I have read a number of books that are centered around the 18th and 19th Centuries and many of the discoveries and social upheavals that happened around that time. It's fascinating to learn about how these things are all inter-related. The Invention of Air by Stephen Johnson is another of those books.
In the middle of the behind the scenes video on how they built the Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video, Adam Sadowsky repeats the words in the title of this piece.
A brief review of Digital Barbarism: Mark Helprin is one angry man. And he wants copyright to stay.
Here is a suggestion: Instead of sending email, step back for ten seconds and reflect on: Does this need to be sent? Can I contact the person directly instead?
Chris Grams writes "Three tips for escaping the creativity peloton without giving up on collaboration" and Robert Scoble gives us "Coming soon: the disruptive molecular age of information." Both contain interesting metaphors.
There are many modes of participation in a community. Talk of lurking and the opposite seems rather one-sided.
How often do knowledge management efforts get bogged down in the technology? Here's a current media example of the inevitable result. Toyota Europe knew about and fixed a problem a year before a US recall for the same problem.
Stan Garfield posted an interesting Communities Manifesto that describes 10 principles of communities and goes some way toward differentiating between teams and communities.
Chris Brogan has an article that steps away from the minutia of social media and looks forward to when we us it to DO STUFF.
Expertise is about experience and knowledge, and experience and knowledge are rather difficult to stuff into a database.
"Super Size Productivity Now: 3% Automation, 97% Leadership" by Kathleen Brush talks about how organizations can create more real productivity - and it's nearly all down to leadership.
What is "culture?" Patrick Dunn asks that question in "Culture eats strategy for breakfast - yes! But let's be clear what culture is." Any big change needs to be aligned with the organizational culture.
My review of Simplifying Innovation by Michael A Dalton, a business novel that shows how Constraints Management principles can be applied to new product development and other areas that require a lot of innovation.
Pete Warden - of Facebook mapping fame - also has Mailana that lets you map networks. The main application looks at Twitter, though he seems to have some other analysis capabilities as well.
I hold that the best way to deal with this is to encourage fewer people to send you email. Of course, before that happens you still need some solutions for triaging when there is too much.
Death By Meeting by Patrick Lencioni is an entertaining and rather direct leadership fable on the importance of creating a good meeting culture. It's helpful for all sorts of reasons, but the key is that bad meetings lead to bad decisions.
When you are looking for experts, you want to find out who the experts are and their areas of expertise. But you also want to learn how they know it and how they are at working with other people. How do they operate?