Blind Spot: A Leader’s Guide To IT-Enabled Business Transformation, Feld, Charlie In the 1980s a handful of organizations established that the right combination of strategic and technology insights and execution could lead to results worth the attention of CEOs and Boards of Directors. One of those successes was a major transformation in the sales and [...]
Tagged IT Org, Organization, StrategyThe Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Gawande, Atul The idea of a simple checklist to raise the quality of a routine practice seems innocuous enough. It also seems to rankle those with lots of education and experience as an unnecessary intrusion on their autonomy. The canonical example is the story of the effort [...]
Tagged checklist, health care, Knowledge workDrive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink, Daniel H. Pink takes a look at much the same evidence base as Lawrence and Nohria do in Driven with a slightly different purpose. His take is that organizations rely too heavily on extrinsic motivators (carrots and sticks) at the expense of tapping into much more [...]
Tagged Knowledge work, ThinkingThe War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Pressfield, Steven I recently finished Seth Godin‘s excellent new book Linchpin (see Choosing to Draw Your Own Maps for my review). In it, he devotes a central chapter to the notion of resistance and how we get in our own [...]
Tagged creativity, ThinkingLinchpin: Are You Indispensable?, Godin, Seth Seth Godin continues his quest to become the next Tom Peters. Linchpin is the latest installment of Godin’s advice to today’s knowledge workers and aspiring entrepreneurs. Here he shifts his focus from broader issues of marketing to the individual. Godin is the latest in a long line of thinkers [...]
Tagged Godin, Knowledge workDriven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, Lawrence, Paul R. and Nitin Nohria What happens when you combine what we are learning about evolutionary biology with what we have learned about how organizations work? One of the wellsprings of thinking about organization and organization design has been the Organizational Behavior group at the Harvard Business [...]
Tagged evolution, OrganizationOn the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the First Edition, Darwin, Charles Earlier this year, I came across the Darwin 150 Project, an effort to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. They’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and all the rest of today’s modern social [...]
Tagged Darwin, evidence, evolutionIgnore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, MacLeod, Hugh Maybe all business authors should be encouraged to start their writing careers doodling on the back of business cards. Wouldn’t we all be better off if more of us invested in distilling our messages as crisply as Hugh MacLeod does here. MacLeod started drawing on [...]
Tagged Knowledge workConfessions of a Public Speaker, Berkun, Scott Scott Berkun is an ex-software development manager from Microsoft who is in the midst of a transition from manager/geek to author/public speaker. So far, I’ve interacted with Scott in his writer persona and have yet to hear him deliver wearing his speaker hat. Based on Confessions of a [...]
Tagged speakingMakers, Doctorow, Cory Cory Doctorow is turning into one of my most useful ‘cheats’ in making sense of the ongoing collision between technology and human drives that is today’s world of electronic commerce, social media, enterprise 2.0, and the teeming mix of catchphrases, acronyms, and neologisms cluttering my inbox and browser windows. Doctorow does [...]
Tagged Doctorow
