The Boston Globe, David Allen and Farhad Manjoo all have me thinking about personal productivity, and how to go about creating the necessary focus.
I read Bob Sproull's _Epiphanized_ in just a few days and found it told a gripping story of TOC transformation, even if the writing style was sometimes off-putting.
Working with clients on project management, as I do, I see a familiar theme come up over and over again. People have a difficult time separating the creation of an idea from starting to work on that idea.
"Problem Solving Knowledge Transfer: An Expert's Perspective" by DeAnna Myers is a Capstone research report from Northwestern's Master in Learning and Organizational Change (where I was on faculty for a few years).
I've been taking Howard Rheingold's course Toward a Literacy of Cooperation, and this past week's readings and conversation were on the topic of social dilemmas, best described by The Prisoners' Dilemma and similar multi-party games. We had an exercise to try some online versions of the game and reflect on our experience.
Creativity and productivity are both enhanced by acknowledging and working with full understanding of the operating constraints. An HBR article from Matthew E May reminds me of the idea once again, "How Intelligent Constraints Drive Creativity."
PEX Network has some useful thoughts on best practices and benchmarking. Best practices are only indicators of what you really want - results. Don't confuse the two.
Project management and knowledge management are about getting things done. I attended and spoke at the Center for Business Information (CBI) 6th Annual Forum on Knowledge Management this week in Philadelphia. Rather than talk about knowledge management directly, I opted to speak about managing projects - whether they are KM or other types.
Thanks to Mark Graban's recent Leanblog podcast with Steve Bell, I found a long list of "information wastes" that serve as an appendix to Bell and Orzen's _Lean IT: Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation_ (2010).
Thomas Corbett's _Throughput Accounting_ is a quick read and very familiar for someone who has been in the Theory of Constraints world. I wonder if anyone comes to TOC via this route, rather than through The Goal and some of the other business novels.
We need to do a better job of helping our colleagues - and helping ourselves - see the whole picture when a change is at hand. What are people really trying to DO?
This book is a collection of 122 management f/laws described by Ackoff and compiled and updated by Herbert Addison. Good fun.
I came across a pair of articles that compare Lean, Theory of Constraints and several other process improvement approaches. Both decide that Lean is the best, but the authors appear to emphasize Lean in their work as well. TOC doesn't get a very good hearing.
Thomas Friedman has noticed some differences in the way people think about collaboration and pulls on the dictionary for some assistance.
Some interesting quotes today: Metadata is the stuff you know. Data is the stuff you are looking for. -WeinbergerInformation is the answer to the question asked. -Goldratt
"The High-Velocity Edge" was given to the attendees at the Lean Software & Systems Conference this year, as Steven J. Spear was one of the keynote speakers. I enjoyed the book and have dog-eared pages and underlined throughout.
I just finished reading David Byrne's somewhat autobiographical research, How Music Works. I found Talking Heads and some of his other projects playing on the stereo much more frequently than usual.
Mobile phones are the best thing since sliced bread. They are the worst invention since television commercials. Yin. Yang. Are your mobile devices distracting you from getting things done? Or are they part of your web of tools that you use to accomplish things today?
I've written about the common focus on efficiency several times here. This time it's inspired by an HBR blogs article by Casey Haksins and Peter Sims, "The Most Efficient Die Early.'
Collaboration is all around us. But so too is active disengagement of people we might expect would want to collaborate. Tom Graves provides some thoughts about this through the metaphor of a kids' train set.