Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best… and Learn from the Worst, Sutton, Robert I.
I’m becoming a fanboy of Bob Sutton, an engineering professor at Stanford who co-founded the d.school there. It started when i read The Knowing-Doing Gap : How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action, which he co-authored with organizational [...]
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, Shirky, Clay
Anyone who can use lolcats to make a relevant and provocative intellectual point is worth paying attention to. Clay Shirky pulls it off in his latest book. Here’s his point:
Let’s nominate the process of making a lolcat as the stupidest possible creative act…. The [...]
The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist, Brooks, Frederick P.
Currently a professor of computer science at the University of North Carolina, Fred Brooks led the development of IBM’s System/360 and its operating system. He’s the author of The Mythical Man-Month : Essays on Software Engineering, which remains one of the best books [...]
My 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 [...]
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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 [...]
Also taggedMy 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 [...]
Also tagged 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 [...]
Also taggedThought leadership risks becoming an empty marketing phrase just as it becomes essential to long term success. In an idea economy more and more firms understand the importance of getting credit for being on the leading edge, but getting credit is best preceded by actually being there. Organizations that depend on generating and exploiting ideas [...]
Also tagged Learning, reflectionThe 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 [...]
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