Learn from the best. Here’s the first of a four-part series on storytelling from Ira Glass of This American Life. Here he begins with the two fundamental building blocks of good story.
A skill worth developing as far as you are capable, although few of us will reach his level of mastery.
Part 2, Part 3, Part [...]
Tagged StoryThe discussion about organizational culture in knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0 efforts is evolving in useful and pragmatic ways. The earliest discussions ignored culture entirely and implicitly assumed that technology would magically shape the organization as needed. The next round of discussion identified sharing as a desirable global cultural characteristic. If you were in a [...]
Tagged observable work, process, visibilityMy post on the visibility of knowledge work last week generated some some excellent comments and excellent blog posts around the web. For my own benefit I wanted to gather up what I’ve come across so far and put it in one place.
Recap
Greg Lloyd, CEO at Traction Software, kicked things off. pulled together some key [...]
Image via Wikipedia
The essence of good knowledge work is uniqueness not uniformity. The ideal knowledge work product is exactly what your client asked for and could only have been created by you. The challenge is that we have been conditioned by the industrial economy to value uniformity and see uniqueness as undesirable variation instead of [...]
Tagged Knowledge workMy long-time friend (old is such an ugly word) Vaughn Merlyn at IT Organization Circa 2017 points to the following fascinating animation to a speech by Dan Pink on his most recent book Drive, which I reviewed here earlier this year. It’s well worth 10 minutes of your time to watch.
We are in the [...]
Tagged Knowledge work, motivationDebates over whether the Internet is making us smart or stupid are entertaining in the bar and can serve as a pleasant background noise for ruminating during a keynote address in a dimly lit hotel ballroom. When I get back to work on Monday (or more likely on Sunday night) I return to the reality [...]
Tagged Knowledge workI’m just back from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. Fortunately, there were a number of bloggers more proficient than I at tweeting and reporting on the action as it happened. Bill Ives, Mary Abraham, and Patti Anklam all provided excellent blog posts, while the tweet stream at #e2conf was rich.
What follows are some [...]
The 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 [...]
I came across the following YouTube video the other day while checking out Boing Boing (one of my favorite sources of interesting and provocative stuff).
Fascinating in its own right, but I keep coming back to it and thinking what it also has to say about the world we work in. Some thoughts:
Don’t let the [...]
Tagged Knowledge workImage by The Value Web Photo Gallery via Flickr
I’m struggling with the issue of incentives in organizations trying to promote improved knowledge management and more effective use of new collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, and the like. Invariably, after an early spurt of activity and experimentation with the new systems, usage plateaus and talk [...]
Tagged behavioral economics, Incentives, Knowledge work
