I see a lot of projects within business support organizations that look like "implement this tool." And then the organization is surprised when the project takes much longer than expected and the tool doesn't get used to the extent expected.
I see a lot of projects within business support organizations that look like "implement this tool." And then the organization is surprised when the project takes much longer than expected and the tool doesn't get used to the extent expected.
It's a short book, meant to be a quick read and guide to start thinking about thinking. Or maybe, more accurately, to get people doing something differently about thinking. The tone is light, but insistent - change the way you think to create fantastic new solutions.
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953.
Clarke Ching's "Rolling Rocks Downhill" is a great business novel, primarily about TOC and Agile. I like how it combines a number of perspectives and shows how real value can be obtained in surprisingly short time horizons. That said, it helps when there is outside pressure.
A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. - Annie Dillard
"One-time events create change like dieting only on your birthday and expecting to lose weight."
Kevin Fox's book, Aligned & Engaged, talks about creating effective teamwork in an organization. He provides 29 practices that will help any leader create more and more alignment and engagement in order to improve the bottom line.
Gary Klein's decision-making research is centered around the idea of intuition - what he calls "recognition primed decisions." Intuition is a key element of decision-making. It's not that analysis is wrong, but analysis alone is often insufficient to make good decisions. And how to develop intuition? Develop expertise through experience and guided learning situation.
The (Australian) Financial Review has a list of 12 things that kill innovation in your organization. For people that pay attention to this space, the entries should sound familiar: A culture of fear, Lack of meaningful mission and vision, Too much hierarchy, Old-School HR practices, The blame game, Overly prescriptive job design, Filtering, Micromanagement, Lone wolf thinking, Silos, Low autonomy, Dissatisfaction
A quick article with opinions from six people on project killers: 6 Experts Share the #1 Thing That Derails a Project | Smartsheet. Of course, there are six different things listed as "the #1 thing." And there are a few more listed in the comments.
More on time management and multitasking. It's a topic near and dear to what I've been doing for many years.
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.