What Steve Jobs can teach us

January 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

I found a best of Steve Jobs’quotations.



Some of them should be taught at school and studied by many companies’ boards.

• “Always have a beginner mind”. It’s true that I have the impression that I do things better when i try to envisage thme with new eyes rather than trying to apply my certainties and my past experiences every time. One more piece of the controversy : “do what has to be done vs do what you know and you’ve always done”.

• The difference between leaders and followers is innovation. Sure John Chambers would not disagree.

• The only way to be good at something is to love what you do. And you have to keep on searching until you find. Who said employees have to behave as machines and taking affect into account in business life was heresy ? Perhaps it’s also a message to companies who must learn how to be loved and take this into account in their HR strategy.

• “I would try all my technologies for an afternoon with Socrates”. I never thought about that but why not ? After all it’s true that I would prefere the one who’ll teach me how to find solutions rather than a one who’ll give me a ready to use solution. The first will always be useful, the second will only serve once.

• Stay Hungry, Stay foolish. True. Status quo is not a way to improve anything, to find anything better. Neither overcautiousness nor certainties will make us progress.

To end, I’ll propose you to watch this video from Steve Jobs at Stanford for the umpteenth time. I don’t know if there is a connection but I remember the firt time I’ve seen it. It was the time when I decided to give up with traditional ways of thinking to find something more accurate to our times. My friends really told me I was crazy, that no company would ever want to ear about bottomp-up things or web 2.0. No they ask me if we have open positions…

Whatever. Take good care of you Mr. Jobs. And come back soon.
Filed Under: Management & HR, Misc. Tagged With: , , , ,

Links for 01/31/2009

January 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

  • Transformer l’Entreprise pour améliorer sa performance

    La crise qui s’annonce durable, contraint les organismes publics et privés à réduire la voilure pour traverser sans trop d’encombres la tempête.
    Pour ce faire, celles-ci lancent des « programmes de transformation » de leurs fonctions métier et support en vue d’améliorer la performance (transformation de la fonction finance, transformation de la fonction It, RH, achats, supply chain,..).

    tags: crisis, downturn, change, transformation

    • 1. La première approche consiste à améliorer « l’existant ». Pour ce faire, on évalue l’organisation (finance, It, RH,…) en termes de coûts, délais,… La question est : combien coûte le processus de reporting par exemple, on compare ce coût aux meilleurs de la classe (benchmarking) afin d’identifier d’éventuels gains.
    • 2. La seconde approche ne tient pas compte de l’existant. La question est : que devra / devrait être ma fonction X (finance, IT, RH,..) dans 3, 4, 5 ans compte tenu par exemple des nouvelles technologies, des nouvelles contraintes réglementaires, de la nouvelle organisation de l’entreprise. Cette approche peut/ doit conduire à la création de nouveaux processus qui porteront de nouveaux objectifs et à la suppression de processus existant.

  • Four Generations In The Workplace by Sacha Chua @IBM – DogEar 犬の耳

    f you’ve ever heard, thought, or felt any of these things, your team may have multi-generational issues. Find out how to adapt to four generations in the workplace!

    tags: generationx, generationy, boomers, matures, generations, humanresources, management

  • Emergent outcomes

    With a social infrastructure in place, a company will manage its resources with best efforts to produce intended, or expected, outcomes. In addition, the transformation will produce emergent outcomes. Doing business differently will produce different results: product breakthroughs, process improvements, and broader interpersonal connections.

    tags: outcomes, emergentoutcomes, crowdsourcing, breakthrough, process, improvements, connections

  • How GE Drives Change – HBR Editors’ Blog – HarvardBusiness.org

    There seemed to be five reasons the program has been so effective:

    * Intact management teams went through the program. As a result, each team reached a group consensus on the barriers to change and how best to attack them.

    * Participants considered both the hard barriers to change (organizational structure, capabilities, and resources) and the soft (how the members of the team individually and collectively led–i.e., how they behave and spend their time).

    * Attention was paid to the eternal leadership challenge of managing the short term and the long term simultaneously.

    * The program created a new common vocabulary of change.

    * Teams emerged from the program with the first draft of an action plan for instituting change in their individual businesses and there were mechanisms put in place to make sure that they delivered on it.

    tags: GE, training, change, management

  • What Is The ROI On Connections? | Socialutions

    The ROI on “connections” depends on what we do, create or solve with our connections which in turn creates a relationship. Get it?

    tags: ROI, connections, relationship

  • Web 2.0 Represents A Fundamental Rethinking Of Business, And The Theory Of The Firm

    As an economist — and a micro-economist specifically — I look at Web 2.0 through the lens of Coase’s The Nature of the Firm and the eventual refinement and expansion of his theory over the last 80 years. So what do I see when I look at Web 2.0, social media, social software, and whatever else you want to call this thing? I see a fundamental rethinking of the definition and function of the firm; the single biggest change since the industrial revolution.

    tags: coase, enterprise2.0, web2.0, valuecreation

    • What Web 2.0 software has done is give firms the tools to blow the doors to value creation wide open and invite customers, partners, experts, and prospects into the process.
    • firms now have the ability to conduct perpetual focus groups with as many people as care to join.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Enterprise 2.0 and the myth of content generation

January 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Web 2.0 is fueled by user generated content (UGC) ans, logically, it should be the same within companies. It’s obvious : when connecting people to information and connectiing people through information is a driving principle, it’s easy to undersand that the existence of a published and shared information is the key to the new form of interactions companies want to make emerge.

Here’s for the “expert” side. Because, on the enterprise side things are not that simple. I’m not talking about creating and using contents, I’ talking about the concept of content itself.

It’s said that employees generate lots of contents. That’s true. That they will generate more and more contents. That’s true too. That they must be encouraged to generate and share even more contents. Why not. That companies have to imagine all this amount of information to understand how it’s important to switch to cloude computing. Certainly but..

Contents are like discussions : they are words companies may not understand and that may worry many managers.

It’s a misunderstanding that has to be vanished because the substance remains true. Two apects have to be taken into consideration : formulation and organization.

Let’s put ourselves one second in a manager’s shoes. Everyday he’s asked to do the impossible, he feels light fighting against a non-reactive machine and employees that are overwhelmed by work. Imagine what he may think when someone tells him about the “incredible chance that all the contents his staff will generate represents”. He will answer that his staff is not here to generate and spread contents but to work. If the example of internet is used to convince him, he will have the impression that his department will be turned into a leisure center. That’s one of the examples that show that web 2.0 logics have to be translated when it comes to import them into the enterprise.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Knowledge & Information management, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Social networks : are companies looking for the ROI or something else

January 29, 2009 By 2 Comments

Whatever people may say, it’s still the hot issue of enterprise social networks. Considering ools that that are not processing tools strictly speaking, benefits have to be found on the new way of doing things they make possible rather than in the tools themselves that are only enablers. As I wrote here, benefits are not on the cloud but in the operational reality.

This said, the answer is still hard to be found.

So we may follow Forrester :

costs-benefits-internal-communities-forrester

I found the list of direct and undirect benefits very exhaustive and clear. But is that enough ?  No. If we can explain, for example, how intangible assets contribute to value creation, we cannot explain in which measure. Let’s consider the CISCO case. Chambers can give a backed up by figures ROI in terms of capacity to drive projects and in financial terms, but I’m not sure that when the decision was made had any figure he was automatically sure he would reach.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Links for 01/29/2009

January 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

  • Teaming Up to Crack Innovation and Enterprise Integration – HBR.org

    In the continuing quest for business growth, many CEOs are turning to their CIOs and IT organizations because technology is essential to two compelling sources of growth: innovation and integration. Innovation, of course, is doing new things that customers ultimately appreciate and value—not only developing new generations of products, services, channels, and customer experience but also conceiving new business processes and models. Integration is making the multiple units, functions, and sites of large organizations work together to increase capacity, improve performance, lower cost structure, and discover opportunities for improvement that don’t appear until you look across functions.

    tags: innovation, integration, IT, CIO, growth, distributedinnovation, ideasmanagement, web2.0

    • Together, innovation and integration allow an enterprise to engage more customers and bring more goods and services to market. Successful innovation often depends on the ability to coordinate efforts across organizational boundaries because innovations reach sufficient scale and impact only when integrated into the larger operations of the corporation.
    • But the work involves sometimes daunting challenges because business innovation and integration have something else in common—both are still “unnatural acts” in most large corporations.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Is internet dangerous for kids or does parents misunderstand what happens

January 26, 2009 By 2 Comments

This blog post by Jon Husband and the  article from the Guardian it menstions takes me to wonder about the presumed impact of the net and its use on kids.

People worry about the time teenagers spend online. So what ? I think that all generations, theirs,mine and our parent’s had their favorite leisures. For some it was TV, for others miniature trains, Barbie dolls had their fans too who were taking care of it like if it was in real life while their brothers were trying to become the new Magic Johnson on the nearest playgroung and, later, on their game console. The list is long and we can all try to remember what was catching our attention when we were younger. Things are not that different now. Is this dangerous ? Not more than everything that catches all our attention and makes us forget about the rest. Not less either. In brief, nothing new since my grandmother’s time.

A danger kids have to be protected from is isolaton caused by too all-consuming leisures. Here again, I don’t find there’s anything new. Solitary leisures cut people from the rest of the world, collective leisures cut kids from their parents. Nothing new.

So why so much fear in front a phenomenon that’s been known for years ?

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Filed Under: Management & HR, Society, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Links for 01/25/2009

January 25, 2009 By Leave a Comment

  • Leveraging Thought-leaders As Stakeholders On Your Projects And In Your Programs

    Thought-leaders, even if they are completely detached from the project, outside of the organization, and maybe even deceased, actually provide a tremendous ally to us if we know how to leverage them.

    tags: projectmanagement, thoughtleaders, problemsolving

  • Reiser 2.0 : Weblog

    This is pretty cool and probably the dream of any online marketeers. Community created content is TRUSTED by the community !

    But how can you build trusted “bottom up” content?

    Its all about how you facilitate the communities !

    tags: communities, trust, facilitation, content

    • 1. We need to build a content trust model
    • 2. We need to build a reputation model
    • 3. Facilitated community facilitation

  • Library clips :: Community membership reinterpreted online :: January :: 2009

    There can be a real difference between online/offline communities when it comes to membership. You may have 10 members in a community and you want to enhance it by turning it into an online community. Over a couple of months, a lax Facilitator adds 100 people as a Members.
    Are these people really “members”, do they contribute in any way, do they do anything to make the community what it is.
    In the offline world you wouldn’t get a 100 people turning up unless they really wanted to contribute, as it takes effort and passion to get off your seat, or attend a synchronous meeting where you can be seen, and perhaps asked something.

    tags: communities, onlinecommunities, membership

    • Membership is something that is felt, rather than handed out.
    • “There’s really only one rule for community as far as I’m concerned, and it’s this – in order to call some gathering of people a “community”, it is a requirement that if you’re a member of the community, and one day you stop showing up, people will come looking for you to see where you went.”

  • Top 10 PM Trends for 2009

    ESI International just released a list of Top 10 Management Trends for 2009. Their most experienced consultants and Senior Management say these trends point to organizational need for expertise while coping with tighter budgets, fewer financial and human resources, and change. Do you believe that this is where your should focus in 2009 to drive project and organizational success?

    tags: management, project, communities, virtualteams, projects, bureaucracy, governance

    • Today’s economy will force organizations to confront the important roles middle managers play in the success of change efforts. Middle managers’ roles will shift from simple messenger of directives ‘from above’ to creating a positive environment to enable change
    • Powerful communication, key management strategies and new rules of engagement will be required to manage virtual teams
    • This year will see an increase in the understanding of the cardinal differences between projects and programs and the utilization of strategies to boost program managers’ effectiveness and increase program success. 
    • These informal communities will be highly prized for the lack of bureaucracy that increase the sharing and use of best practices, enabling increased dialogue to overcome challenges and growing future leaders.
    • People Will Come Before Technology
    • In 2009, many organizations will say goodbye to the ‘one number’ method for project outcomes and embrace a quantifiable range of potential results on which to base decisions

  • Carnet intranet: L’intranet essentiel, responsable intranet partenaire des dirigeants

    • L’intranet est comme un DAB (distributeur de billets): il vous permet de faire ce que vous voulez faire, quand et où vous voulez le faire.
    • Si vous souhaitez rendre votre intranet essentiel, il faut identifier un process que tout les collaborateurs doivent faire et le mettre sur l’intranet.
    • Measurer, measurer, measurer. (L’approche mesure doit correspondre à la culture de l’entreprise; toutes les entreprises ne peuvent forcément mesurer de la même façon qu’ont fait BA et le Environment Agency.)
    • Faites un suivi systématique de tous vos objectifs opérationnels.
    • Etudiez de près les besoins et comportements de vos utilisateurs.
    • Essayez d’y répondre à leurs besoins tout en vous assurant que vos actions soient bien alignées à la stratégie de l’entreprise en même temps.

    tags: intranet, ROI, usages, measurement, process

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Innovative management : finally it’s simple

January 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

All these social networks and value co-creation things are really starting to bore you ?

If trusting your employees, rely on your human and social capital seems to be impossible, you can still try this new management approach.

I would like to apologize for wandering from my traditional editorial line but I really wanted to share this video with you.

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Links for 01/24/2009

January 24, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks

Is multitasking dangerous or a myth ?

January 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Multitasking is a big issue for both people and organization. It’s the (presumed and made essential) ability for someone to do many things at the same time. The social media phenomenon and the increasing number of information flows people are exposed to are making this concern more and more central.

I’m afraid that, behing th multitasking question, hides a fundamental and dangerous erreur that may make us lose sight of what matters.

Human beings are not fully multitask. We can fully do ony one thing at the same time and it will last for years even if I can admit that in a few centurys our skills will surely imprve. Even Digital Natives are not more multitask than others.

Being multitask and being able to switch from one thing to another are often mistaken. New generations (but many other too) can quickly shuttle between two tasks, what is sometimes seen as being multitask. These people are able to transfer attention and energer between two things, what does not mean they adress them jointly.

But we also have to assume that, when attention is continuously transfered from one point to another, it loses intensity and the more multitask people are the more errors can be found in the tasks they achieve. If you need to be convinced, please read this note .

Some may find it disappointing since  because they used to see in multitasking the response to many concerns about productivity. But it’s not that bad : the impacts of multitasking would not all be positive. I already mentioned the risk of an higher failure rate. But there’s also another point : the impossibility to respect due dates. Imagine three tasks, A, B and C, whose duration is 10 (minutes, hour, days… ).

If they are carried out in a raw, the first will be achieved at H+10, the second at H+20, the third at H+30. Now imagine they are carried out in a fragmentary way, on a 5 minutes slot base. The result will look like that :

image-28

I didn’t even take into account the time needed to re-focus on each task. Maybe it can make it possible to finish a task earlier but, on a global scale, it doesn’t help people to save any time.

People are overwhelmed by signals and information that force them to try to multitask. At the end, it only lowers their productivity although communication tools are supposed to help them improve it. That is not becaue a message is received that it’s treated, and everyone has his own prioriies. But, obviously, those who send messages and those who conceive the tools that carry them, seem not to be paying any attention to that.

Being exposed to a lot of flows that condition their work, employees need to take leadership upon tools and to maser channels instead of being under a waterfall. By the way I like the analogy that consists of saying that a multi jet shower is something pleasant while being under a waterfall hurts.

The response to this issue has two sides

• The first is behavioral : employees have to learn how to turn flows off and achieve a task without being interrupted.

• The second is rather technical: tools employees are provided with must allow them to master flows and not to be their victims anymore. They must be able to priorize some, put some on hold, reroute some others and make things in order to ” if information is relevant it will find me…if not it will wait”. In brief, tools will have to make it possible for people to build their own information supply chain, whose timing, rate and content will be under their control, starting from a information marketplace, a kind of marshalling yard. A major issue for the software industry where social software will have to play its part.

Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,
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