On last week's WB40, Chris and I spent some time dissecting the arguments put forward in a fascinating article Survival of the Mediocre Mediocre in which Venkatesh Rao proposes that the thing that humans are really good at is being not quite great at a lot of things, and this is the quality that will hold … Continue reading Mediocrity, consciousness, and competence
Category: Management
At the end of 2018 I presented at the London Strategic IT Partner forum. Here's what I had to say... https://youtu.be/VXmFQRk4wv8?t=45 Big thanks to Jon Baxter for permission to repost the video.
A couple of weeks ago I was running an event for the technology leadership team of a pharmaceutical company. The team is geographically dispersed across the planet, and one of the things that become clear from our conversations was that they were missing informal contact and conversation. As is often the way when teams are … Continue reading The #globalcanteen
Sometimes my better ideas come from my mildly sarcastic one-liners... A couple of weeks ago I was in a workshop with a group of people when someone said that they were working on a project to promote "Paperless Meetings" within their organisation. "You should be striving for meetingless papers" I quipped. It's been a recurring … Continue reading Meetingless papers
Anyone who regularly delivers workshops or presentations will know the massive impact that the layout of a room will have on the session. An audience laid out in the lines of a theatre auditorium will be in receive mode. Put them around tables in "Cabaret" style and they'll talk to one another more readily. Put … Continue reading Virtual rooms
Semiotics isn't something I've heard much about in the two and a half decades in which I've been working in the technology industry. It's a bit woolly for the tech world. But I'm a big believer in how you can understand much about the culture of an organisation through the artefacts that it creates as … Continue reading The cultural assumptions in collaboration software
Back in those strange days when I worked at Microsoft there was a concept of giving and receiving kudos. This wasn't a soft skills thing that encouraged people to face the fear and start giving rich and rewarding feedback to one another. Kudos was a system that allowed for the automation and measurement of the … Continue reading Kudos where kudos is due
Last week I had the pleasure of working with a group of senior HR professionals at The People Space's London event to create the HR edition of the CxO Priorities. If you're not familiar with the CxO Priorities project, they are sets of playing cards that encapsulate things that might be on the mind of senior … Continue reading Working Out Loud: #CHRO Priorities
Our world is dominated by ideas of problems and solutions. Of questions and answers. And I'm beginning to wonder if there are cognitive biases at play that prevent us from being able to contend with the complexity that often arises from the answers that are required to solve seemingly simple questions. The trigger for this … Continue reading The Simple Question Fallacy
Every so often I get asked "What should our digital strategy be?" Now there is a big debate about whether an organisation actually needs a "digital strategy" or not, or if it should be just entwined within general strategy within an organisation. But the latter requires a level of maturity and experience in thinking about … Continue reading OMG! We need a Digital Strategy!
