Work is Personal. The Work Matters. I'm in an EMBA program right now, but I view this journey as something that started long before that program, and which will continue long after -- continuous learning, continuous improvement, a "Perpetual MBA".
Could this be the next wave after Information Technology? If so, remember you heard it here first...
Or so I thought. Turns out there are several companies named Action Technology, Action Technology, and Action Technologies, Inc ("Powering Knowledge-Worker Productivity"); the last of which seems to embody more of what Sig was thinking with thingamy...
More on this soon, I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. And more about the technical side of thingamy over at /tech.
Tags: action technology, thingamy, IT, erp, not erp
I've mocked video-blogging in the past, but this is very cool. Video blogging from the beach in Hawaii.
In this episode, Rox talks about having a positive perspective on events, but more importantly (I think) on how competition can help make any process more exciting and interesting and can lead you to better results in the end.
If it was written in a standard blog, that wouldn't have been worth linking to. But you have to listen to the waves in this video, and the way she's playing with her dog as she walks... I laughed out loud when she pointed out a tree branch to the cameraman (who was obviously walking backwards) -- his response, and the way they worked static web pages into the dialogue was pretty cool.
In their book, Idealized Design: How to Solve Tomorrow's Crisis...Today (Wharton School Publishing), authors Russell L. Ackoff, Jason Magidson and Herbert J. Addison build upon a simple notion. They argue that, "the way to get to the best outcome is to imagine what the ideal solution would be and then work backward to where you are today." This excerpt, based on Ackoff's experience, shows how the process worked at Bell Labs in the 1950s.
I had the pleasure of hearing this story first-hand from Russ Ackoff during the kickoff of our MBA program. I'm not sure that reading the story or even listening to the audio would have quite the same effect, but the story is still compelling -- basically it is the origin of many of the telecommunications technologies that we take for granted. But when there was no concept of a dial-pad, or even a calculator keypad, these ideas were radically creative. (Article and audio available here - Knowledge@Wharton).
But this isn't just about telecom or high-tech -- Ackoff was persistent that we must apply Systems Thinking to all aspects of business and life.
If you want to lead a team, a company, an army, or a country, the primary problem you face is getting everyone moving in the same direction, which is really just a polite way of saying “getting people to do what you want.”
In the spirit of getting people to do what you want, Joel Spolsky presents the pros and cons of three common management methods:
-- I haven't read the Identity method yet, so please don't give away the ending...
Joel writes insightful and funny stuff about software development and management at Joel on Software.
