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{ Category Archives } Knowledge work

Better thinking about performance improvement

  Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande, Atul
I’ve always been troubled by the phrase “best practices” thrown around loosely in business settings. In certain engineering and professional settings, the term can have an important legal meaning. Even then, “best practice” is always a moving target. Better, Atul Gawande’s most recent collection of essays [...]

Literate thinking as a barrier to Enterprise 2.0 adoption

Most of the technologies lumped under the Enterprise 2.0 label presuppose some facility with the written word. I wonder to what extent that presents a barrier to adoption in many organizations? Moreover, I wonder how visible that organizational barrier is to those who are already facile?
I’ve written before on oral vs. literate cultures in organizations [...]

Alan Kay on learning and technology

Alan Kay is talking once again about what went wrong with the personal computer and personal computing. Here’s a pointer to a recent interview he did with CIO Insight magazine that is well worth your attention.

A CIO Insight

Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine’s Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan [...]

Strategic sensemaking and Enterprise 2.0 technologies

The increased importance of sensemaking will prove to be one of the central drivers for Enterprise 2.0 technologies adoption. Organizational theorist Karl Weick positions sensemaking as one of the central tasks in organizations. Dan Russell at Creating Passionate Users provides a nice definition of sensemaking that will serve as a useful starting point:

Sensemaking is in [...]

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Ross Mayfield points to an interesting post by Bob Sutton at Stanford. Ross nicely captures the essence of Bob’s post.
More important, for my selfish purposes, is learning that Sutton is blogging. Sutton is a Professor at Stanford’s Engineering School, the author of several recent, excellent, books on management and innovation and one of the vocal [...]

Balancing diligence and laziness

Some time back I came across the following quote in The 80/20 Principle : The Secret of Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch, which I’ve been pondering ever since for its implications for knowledge work and knowledge workers:

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they [...]

Radio Archives

I started this blog in October of 2001 using Radio as my blogging tool. The blog has been hosted with its own domain from the beginning so the archives are already here. I am gradually porting them over to WordPress. In the meantime here are links to archived posts that have yet to be converted.
2002/12

Enjoy [...]

About this blog

I started McGee’s Musings in October of 2001 when I was on the faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management as a way to share thoughts with my students. While they sometimes struggled with the notion that I often had more questions than answers, that seemed to cause less concern to those who came [...]

Going hands on to get your arms around Enterprise 2.0

I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got [...]

Bruce Mau on Change (from 2004)

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 posted on December [...]