Twitter pointed me to a great article on How to work with "stupid" people by Jason Crawford. He's answering the belief that "people are stupid" with a wise redirection: maybe we don't understand them.
John Hagel spoke this evening about his new book, The Power of Pull, at the Berkman Center. I took a boatload of notes and this is the result of that.
I have said this before: many organizations have far more good ideas than they have the resources to execute those ideas. I was listening to a recent Harvard Business IdeaCast and my ears perked up when they started talking about multitasking.
Ricky Cheong has posted a slideshare presentation of his research progress on Personal Knowledge Management.
"I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short" applies to email just as it applied to letters in the 17th Century.
Mark McDonald on the Gartner blog network says that The nature of change is changing with a new pattern being related to much flatter organizations and wider information flow. He says that change is becoming social-driven, rather than process-driven. Interesting.
I was sent a complimentary copy of The Imperfect Leader because I've been reading and reviewing a number of other business novels. As you might guess from the title, this one focuses on leadership.
I've been meaning to read Bill Dettmer's The Logical Thinking Processes for a while. It covers the "thinking processes" as defined by the Theory of Constraints community. And these are a larger structure of tools used to help describe and define Change programs. In the TOC community, change is defined by What to Change, What to Change To, and How to Cause the Change.
If the business world is moving toward a networked reality and we find ourselves working with people from all walks of life and all corners of the globe, then our ability to work together is going to be exercised more and more.
The HBR blog has a piece on knowledge workers and how executives look at their employees: Are All Employees Knowledge Workers? by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison.
A graduate student from McGill contacted me recently to ask about my blogging practice with a focus on how I use categories within my blog. If you are curious too, this is my answer, edited for the blog format.
Kevin Kelly at The Technium talks about The Shirky Principle, which is "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." This reminds me of the 5th Theory of Constraints Focusing Step: don't let inertia become your constraint.
A Robert Scoble video interview with Lisa Petrides of ISKME, where they talk about education and technology and a pending revolution. A number of discussion elements touch on knowledge management too.
Why don't people speak up and ask questions? Is it the standard list of concerns around why people lurk? Euan Semple suggests there is something else going on in the sociology of people: they are afraid to speak their mind.
Pointers to a couple case studies on process improvement from MIT and focusing on a division of Ford Motor Complany.
James Robertson's "Knowledge managers: stuck in the shadow of immortal figures" has inspired some interesting discussion, both on his blog and in at least one email discussion list.
As many of you know, I am always looking for better ways to do my own work - personal knowledge management or just plain old being smart about how I work. But why is that? Why do I think it is so important that my own work moves so smoothly?
My review of Chip and Dan Heath's new book, Switch. It has been making the rounds of my networks, and now it sits next to me with lots of dog-eared paged and underlinings. And special thanks to Tammy Green for adding another point of view to my thoughts here.
I've been enjoying Glen Alleman's rants about the proponents of "project management 2.0." This time he makes some interesting observations about the role of people talking to each other vs. doing status updates.
Even ten years ago, people were saying technology is only an enabler for knowledge management. Is it changing? Yes, and no. Let's see what Chris Collison has to say about the question.