The other day, I finally got around to cleaning out my "filing cabinet" (others might refer to it as a cardboard box, but I prefer to think of it as a filing cabinet) and came across an essay assignment I wrote in my final undergraduate year at university.
The lecturer was fantastic and the material interesting - Organisational Change & Design with Ian Colville. In retrospect, it was in fact, one of just three courses that were of any lasting value from my final undergraduate year, but that is something for another post.
The essay task was to write an imaginary obituary for the Economist on Tom Peters (management guru and co-author of In Search Of Excellence - and a good deal more since). The trick was that we had to be innovative. My innovation was to write the obituary as a first draft by the writer that had subsequently been edited (lots of redpen) by a feature editor with a quite different opinion of Peters.
This rediscovery resulted in two things; firstly I was reminded why I didn't go into journalism (so apologies for this blog once again!) and secondly I got interested in Tom Peters again.
If I am quite honest, I don't think he ever really matched In Search of Excellence with any of his consequent books (and if you are really interested in some of the underlying thinking, you are in fact better of going for the more substantial writings of Weick - see also my books list at Amazon), but he remains a fantastic speaker and has - unsurprisingly - become a prolific blogger.
His own blog, http://www.tompeters.com/, is average, but he has a whole range of interesting links to further resources and other bloggers, and it is this resource that I would recommend; he knows everyone it seems and I spent ages browsing blogs that he links to.
His presentations are almost certainly the nastiest, most unclear powerpoints I have ever seen, but if you can get beyond the colours and to a certain extent the hubris, there are some interesting points on the need to constantly challenge oneself and the organisation.
One of his most recent posting caught my eye - Peters participated in a podium discussion with Seth Godin (I have a posting on him planned already) sponsored by American Express. It can still be viewed online here. He has some good things to say about the world at large (politics, entrepreneurship, the internet), but I was particularly taken by the pair's discussion of blogs, according to Peters the single most important and transformational tool he has used in his own professional life in the last 15 years. That said, I must confess that I am not 100% convinced just yet. Indeed, Seth Godin's view of the blog seemed more plausible to me - it doesn't matter if people are not reading the blog, it is the act of putting your thoughts down in writing that provides the value.
I hope he is right, looking at my reader statistics ;-).
Monday 27 October 2008
Monday 20 October 2008
Manager-Tools podcast - part 2
What perfect timing! Having posted an entry about manager-tools yesterday, I downloaded the latest episode this morning and found that the entire podcast was based around the "Effective Executive" (which I covered a few weeks ago - see here) and in particular, the fundamentals of effective decision making. Basically, they central premise of the podcast is a statement made by Drucker:
"No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then there are only good intentions."
They then map this statement to the effective meeting protocol and especially to the need to action decisions directly in meetings if you really want them to happen; utterly trivial, known by everybody and ignored 95% of the time.
Brilliant.
"No decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then there are only good intentions."
They then map this statement to the effective meeting protocol and especially to the need to action decisions directly in meetings if you really want them to happen; utterly trivial, known by everybody and ignored 95% of the time.
Brilliant.
Sunday 19 October 2008
Manager-Tools podcast
Following on from last week's post on @Google videocasts at YouTube as a source of training materials (with a bit of inspiration thrown in for free), here is another installment on free online progessional learning resources; www.manager-tools.com.
Manager tools is a weekly podcast, accompanied with handouts and additional resources to practice.
Now, in the same way that I don't like the title "The effective executive" (see post), I don't like the name "manager-tools". Many of the podcasts provided at this site (and there are several hundred!) are of value to anybody working in a professional environment and the name detracts from this and puts many people off.
What I like about manager-tools is that it is conversational in tone (the two co-presenters are always very well prepared, but do the podcasts in a 1-2-1 informal kind of manner) and this makes it easy to take in.
And what I really like about manager-tools is that they focus on providing actionable behaviour-driven advice. They try to answer the how as well as the what (and to a lesser extent the why) of being effective.
Over the last year or so the number of really interesting podcasts from manager-tools has significantly decreased, but this does not detract from the core casts that they produced. In particular I would recommend the following sets (easily found at www.manager-tools.com):
Manager tools is a weekly podcast, accompanied with handouts and additional resources to practice.
Now, in the same way that I don't like the title "The effective executive" (see post), I don't like the name "manager-tools". Many of the podcasts provided at this site (and there are several hundred!) are of value to anybody working in a professional environment and the name detracts from this and puts many people off.
What I like about manager-tools is that it is conversational in tone (the two co-presenters are always very well prepared, but do the podcasts in a 1-2-1 informal kind of manner) and this makes it easy to take in.
And what I really like about manager-tools is that they focus on providing actionable behaviour-driven advice. They try to answer the how as well as the what (and to a lesser extent the why) of being effective.
Over the last year or so the number of really interesting podcasts from manager-tools has significantly decreased, but this does not detract from the core casts that they produced. In particular I would recommend the following sets (easily found at www.manager-tools.com):
- The original series on "The effective meeting protocol (EMP)" - nothing you haven't heard before, but nicely packaged and let's face it, practically every meeting we attend is ineffective in some way (and I say that in the knowledge that I am as poor as the next person on this front).
- The introductory set on "The management trinity" - their basic framework (1-2-1s, feedback, coaching and delegation), this resonates with me and fits in very well with my own organisation's approach to performance management.
- The DISC series - five podcasts focusing on the use of behavioural stereotyping to improve personal communications.
Monday 13 October 2008
Google learning on YouTube
I promised a couple of weeks ago that I would write a little bit about alternative sources of interesting online professional training (as opposed to academic training - see previous post here). This entry is a first step in that direction; Google on YouTube is an incredible source of interesting material from the (almost) undisputed masters.
Despite some misgivings about Google as an organisation and their constant march to world domination, there is no avoiding the fact that they are obviously doing quite a lot of things right. The host of presentational material.. or should I say propaganda.. that they provide at YouTube gives a real insight into some of these things:
Despite some misgivings about Google as an organisation and their constant march to world domination, there is no avoiding the fact that they are obviously doing quite a lot of things right. The host of presentational material.. or should I say propaganda.. that they provide at YouTube gives a real insight into some of these things:
- Google Code Talks: OK, I can't really judge the details of many of these talks, technophobe that I am, but they have some good stuff on OpenSocial, the mobile platform Android and integrating google applications into your own sites.
- Google techtalks: This is another developer-centric forum, but also has a bunch of presentations and workshops from within google's development organisation; how do they use agile processes? how do they get the user involved in development? what is their take on the python object model? These are sessions by google employees for google employees and are on the whole thoroughly informative.
- Life@Google: For those interested in google as an organisation (and I personally am!), this channel provides a range of perspectives on how the company ticks - much of it is banal, much of it is vlog-madness, but sift through it and you see an organisation that has much to be proud of!
- Talks@Google: It doesn't matter who they are, they all want to talk at Google; Barack Obama (Candidates@Google), Salmen Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, Jeffrey Sachs (Authors@Google) or Wynton Marsalis (Musicians@Google)
Tuesday 7 October 2008
The need for information architecture
Coming from a "nuts and bolts" kind of systems analysis background, I have to work hard at taking a more user experience driven view at development projects. Though I have worked on this front for several years now I am consequently constantly looking for structured approaches to user experience design and the varied facets (or "planes" as Garret refers to them in his seminal primer on user experience disciplines).
I found an interesting set of presentations recently on slideshare from the euroia2008 (the European Information Architecture summit). Predictably enough, these presentations focus on information architecture and do not provide anything like an overarching user experience framework, but they do give a few ideas about where things are going in this space and some nice concrete examples of approaches to try out.
Much to my surprise, it turns out it isn't just about a having a sitemap and a navigation structure ;-). Definitely worth a browse! The slides are here
I found an interesting set of presentations recently on slideshare from the euroia2008 (the European Information Architecture summit). Predictably enough, these presentations focus on information architecture and do not provide anything like an overarching user experience framework, but they do give a few ideas about where things are going in this space and some nice concrete examples of approaches to try out.
Much to my surprise, it turns out it isn't just about a having a sitemap and a navigation structure ;-). Definitely worth a browse! The slides are here
Saturday 4 October 2008
Latest postings from Telco 2.0
"2.0". Just reading the phrase already puts me on edge. There is so much 2.0 rubbish out there. That said, the guys from Telco 2.0 really do seem to have a good grip on what could happen in the telecommunications industry. They just posted another article on their "two-sided" business model thinking - basically the telco-provider as intermediary offering network services.
Although much of it feels a little like wishful thinking, the story they tell is definitely well structured and understandable. Here is the summary version:
Although much of it feels a little like wishful thinking, the story they tell is definitely well structured and understandable. Here is the summary version:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)