There’s no doubt that anyone who devotes a minute’s thought to it will conclude that email is a nearly useless tool for project management. Why then does email continue to be the default tool for most project management activity? My first thought is that few people, in fact, devote any thought to the systemic role [...]
Scott Berkun offers an alternative characterization of innovation than the diligence/laziness issue that I dicussed last month. Life is complicated enough; we don’t need more folks adding complexity just of the sake of complexity (or job security). There are two kinds of people: complexifiers and simplifers There are several thousand ways to complete the sentence [...]
A reminder from Tom Peters to reread (I think, although I apparently didn’t blog it the first time round) Bruce Mau’s Incomplete Manifesto for Change. Worth reading again. Probably worth printing out and stapling to your forehead. Beyond Thinking Different to Doing Different. 30 Dec 2005 from Brand Autopsy | Read the full story» Originally [...]
Why does Scoble choose to deliberately misunderstand Tim Bray’s thought experiment about Microsoft using ODF as the underlying core document format for Office? Robert isn’t dumb, so I have to assume his response is a deliberate misreading of what Bray is suggesting. It’s reflective of all too many technical arguments. As a user of technology, [...]
(cross-posted at Future Tense) Over the summer I wrote a column for the Enterprise Systems Journal that I neglected to point to at the time. The broad point I was trying to work out was that for all the recent attention to issues of innovation and design, the focus has been on addressing the needs [...]
A nice little reminder from Espen on the value of keep design simple and local. As much as many of us like shiny toys, it can be too easy to lose sight of the real objective of an information system. What is an information system?. Some years ago (December 1998, according to my email archive) [...]
Marc has always done superb work and this is no exception. Full of ideas you can adapt to all kinds of design problems. It is also an excellent example of what you can do with presentation materials if you are willing and able to take the time (and are as talented as Marc). Designing for [...]
Some interesting point-counterpoint on the relative merits of organizational scale, but I can’t help but smile at the notion the 80+ employees constitutes “big.” To me the more interesting question here is how low we’ve been able to drive the scale of micro-businesses such as 37Signals who are able to have impact and presence far [...]
Well Ted Nelson probably continues to be apoplectic over all this messiness, but Shirky is right. Thanks to Bruce Sterling for pointing me to something I had also missed at the time. Also, yet another example of why evolution works without need for an intelligent designer. Screwed-up, evolvable protocols that out-learn well-designed solutions. http://www.shirky.com/writings/evolve.html Clay [...]
More insight from Weinberger. A while back one of my former Diamond colleagues, Lynne Whitehorn-Umphres made the observation that over the last twenty years, the rato of metadata to data has gone from 1 in 100 to 100 to 1. I didn’t really appreciate where she was going with that point, but Weinberger helps me [...]
