A quick anecdote from Realization's newsletter on "There is no such thing as good multitasking" and some thoughts around the idea.
An interesting talk from AI researcher Kenneth Stanley on his counter-intuitive discovery/realization that formal goals/objectives can block creativity.
The recommendation? Give it a whirl - try something more focused on the task at hand. And if it doesn't work, email will always be there, like an old habit that you can't break.
Mike Gilronan, a Boston local knowledge management friend, has a nice piece on collaboration in the Boston Business Journal, "Five ways to improve collaboration among remote teams."
In 7 Wastes That Impact Business Growth Jon Terry, one of the founders of LeanKit, presents a nice way of thinking through the Lean / Toyota Production System idea of waste and how one my think about it in the context of business growth in any type of organization.
Stephen Bungay's "The Art of Action" brings together ideas around how people and organizations should be led, based on the study of Carl von Clausewitz and other military thinkers around how they deal with the fact of life: we can't know everything before we must act.
In my work the idea of "flow" is all about ensuring the right work gets started - work that will create value for the organization. And, once it has started, that it doesn't get stuck or stopped or held up until the value is created. Ideally: customer buys the results; savings are truly achieved.
The latest HBR Ideacast interview with Erin Reid talks about Why We Pretend to be Workaholics (based on a related HBR article). I enjoyed the discussion, but what really got to me is this idea of "pretending to be busy."
First impressions depend on our assessment of the person's warmth and their likelihood to do us harm. Science of Us provides a nice way to think about this in The Simpsons First-Impression Matrix.
Besides finding some extra lint in there, why do people get into navel gazing? When does it help? When not? Some interesting thoughts on the topic from Megan and Euan in Shift episode 35.
Interesting video description of a simplified Current Reality Tree that Bill Dettmer calls an Executive Summary Tree.
The interesting comment that just because you know something, it doesn't mean you understand it.
So, is multitasking bad or good. This author talks about both sides and then decides he wants to continue multitasking anyway.
Dealing with uncertainty / variability in operations is an important aspect of the TOC way of thinking and in the TOC applications.
Eli Schragenheim, author of a number of Theory of Constraints books and an active participant in ongoing TOC thinking has started writing his own blog.
There are plenty of job descriptions that make you scratch your head, wondering what they are really looking to hire. The classic is the job requirements for "good at multitasking" when that can be exactly the wrong trait. I came across one that throws Theory of Constraints and cost reductions into the same set of requirements.
I came across the video from the University of Texas 2014 Commencement address by Admiral William H McRaven in which he describes his training and draws ten life lessons. The story is engaging, and while the lessons out of context sound odd, they make sense in the way he puts it together.
"The CIO's Guide to Breakthrough Project Portfolio Performance: Applying the Best of Critical Chain, Agile, and Lean" by Michael Hannan, Wolfram Muller, and Hilbert Robinson is a good, short description of how to take ideas from several disciplines and apply them to an overall portfolio management approach.
Arthur Shelley posted his 12 Principles of Knowledge Leadership to a KM mailing list - turns out he wrote this a year and a half ago. Good reference material! He even channels Gandhi.
Henry Camp has created a nice two-page summary of Theory of Constraints and made it available for all to use. I have grabbed a copy (with permission) and it is available from my website too.