Another book in my long backlog was Ray Immelman's "Great Boss Dead Boss." I finally picked up a copy and thoroughly enjoyed it. As with many good books, the ideas have me looking at the world in a slightly different way.
All in business
Another book in my long backlog was Ray Immelman's "Great Boss Dead Boss." I finally picked up a copy and thoroughly enjoyed it. As with many good books, the ideas have me looking at the world in a slightly different way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Matt Homann posted a list of Ten Rules of Law Firm Retreats, but I think these are equally applicable to just about any time you take people off to discuss how things are going in the business or how to improve the business.
Mark Gould has a discussion of "best practice" that reminds me just how important it is to have a regular policy of looking for other examples of how something has been done before doing it myself.
In case you think I am a dyed-in-the-wool Theory of Constraints promoter, I point to this article by Dan Trietsch from a 2005 issue of Project Management Journal.
Phillip G. Armour discusses is the nature of people in groups. There are people (often leaders of some sort) whose behavior sets the tone for the whole group.
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.
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.
Are you subject to lots of clichés? Are you a frequent user of clichés? Be careful. Phillip G Armour writes about this.
Mary Abraham, always interesting, has a good one that relates to something I heard recently from one of my clients.
Another interesting discussion from Sig at Thingamy: mindless stuff and leadership vs. management. He starts with an example of "managing" teenagers and gets to the key that they can only be led.
Just to be clear that Director Magazine is completely negative on blogging, here is an article in the May 2007 issue, Strategic business blogging by Matthew Stibbe.