Like everyone else who’s awake, my long-time friend and colleague Keri Pearlson and I have been trying to make sense out of the uptake of new "social" technologies into organizations. We are noodling on the hypothesis that the CIO represents the best choice if an organization wants to develop a social technology strategy that is [...]

I’m turning into a bit of a Hans Rosling groupie, having blogged about several of his previous performances at TED conferences (Hans Rosling talk on world economic development myths and realities and More insights from Hans Rosling at TED 2007). Most recently, he presented at TED India. He’s a wonderful story teller and watching his [...]

Patti Anklam and I have reconnected after first meeting several years ago. We navigate in the same circles and our networks overlap, but I hadn’t been carefully following her work. My mistake and I’ve fixed that now. Here’s a recent piece from her with a very good overview presentation on moving from a general understanding [...]

What this graphic and the underlying data analysis show more than anything else is how little evidence and rational analysis have to do with most decisions by most people.  We can lament that all we want. If you’re running a lottery, you make money off this predictable irrationality. On the other hand, if you’re committed [...]

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, Lawrence, Paul R. and Nitin Nohria What happens when you combine what we are learning about evolutionary biology with what we have learned about how organizations work? One of the wellsprings of thinking about organization and organization design has been the Organizational Behavior group at the Harvard Business [...]

One of the lovely things about the Internet is that the good stuff is there whenever you finally manage to stumble across it (so is the crap, but that’s another story). I’m in the process of cleaning up a bunch of stuff that has been lingering in my various queues and stopped long enough to [...]

Keri Pearlson, a long time friend and colleague, and I have proposed a session for the Enterprise 2.0 conference scheduled for this June in Boston. Your votes could help determine whether our session makes the cut. We’d both greatly appreciate it if you’d go take a look at our pitch and give it a thumbs [...]

Jordan Frank is VP of Sales and Business Development for Traction Software. Last Fall, Paula Thornton ( @rotkapchen) interviewed Jordan during Traction’s annual user group meeting. Jordan has been working with a variety of knowledge intensive organizations over the much of the last decade. Here he shares some of his insights on the interplay between [...]

Here’s a typically thought provoking session from TED. Conductor Itay Talgam uses videos of conductors leading performances as a launching point for reflecting on leadership.   For organizations that depend on the active and creative engagement of their knowledge workers (who doesn’t), Talgam’s perspective is especially relevant.

The earliest blog posts were essentially pointers to ‘good stuff’ out there.  Here’s such a pointer from last fall from my former partners and still good friends Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui. They’ve found two very worthwhile reads that I otherwise would have missed. Following up on yesterday’s post about John Cassidy’s New Yorker article, [...]

We’re opening presents now but with the magic of Wordpress this will post while we’re otherwise engaged. We hope you are also otherwise engaged with family and friends.

Who doesn’t love Handel at Christmas? Here’s a clip of the Hallelujah chorus as performed by monks who’ve taken a vow of silence yet found a way to celebrate the season. The video quality is a bit rough, but it captures the essence:

On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the First Edition, Darwin, Charles Earlier this year, I came across the Darwin 150 Project, an effort to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. They’ve got a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and all the rest of today’s modern social [...]

Luis Suarez pointed me to this excellent clip by NPR’s Scott Simon on how to tell a story:     I’m with Luis that storytelling skill is an essential in today’s knowledge intensive organization.

Jessica Lipnack provides an excellent set of tips and best practices for making conference calls more productive. For all the time I spend on calls, I frequently find them immensely frustrating. I plan on incorporating these practices in whatever calls I can influence.  I’ve excerpted a few highlights here: Could you please repeat the question? As promised, [...]

One of the best parts of participating in KM World 2009 last month was the opportunity to catch up with some long-time friends, turn some long-time e-friends into face-to-face friends and to make some new friends.  One of those new friends was Allan Crawford, who directs an online master’s program in knowledge management at California [...]

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity, MacLeod, Hugh Maybe all business authors should be encouraged to start their writing careers doodling on the back of business cards. Wouldn’t we all be better off if more of us invested in distilling our messages as crisply as Hugh MacLeod does here. MacLeod started drawing on [...]

XKCD strikes again. Food for thought wrapped in a laugh. Something for you to ponder on a Monday morning. Spinal Tap Amps Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:00:00 GMT

Confessions of a Public Speaker, Berkun, Scott Scott Berkun is an ex-software development manager from Microsoft who is in the midst of a transition from manager/geek to author/public speaker. So far, I’ve interacted with Scott in his writer persona and have yet to hear him deliver wearing his speaker hat. Based on Confessions of a [...]

Just before Thanksgiving I was at the KM World 2009 conference in San Jose listening to a keynote presentation by Charlene Li. Like many others, I was tweeting during her presentation and posted the following: At just about the same time, on the right coast, danah boyd of Microsoft was delivering a keynote at the [...]