A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught …
One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some [...]

Defining Business Benefits: Hard and Soft

All projects should have a clear objective, a practical plan,
and an understanding of the costs and benefits to get the thing done.
Easy to say, but a lot of project teams struggle to crisply and clearly define specific business benefits. One way to move the process forward would be to have a clear [...]

The Sandpit

(via GNC, thanks for this one!)
A bit of artistic inspiration; a visually stunning film, combining time-lapse and tilt-shift photography.
For the intellectually and technically curious – more information here.
For the artist and the observationally curious – tai chi under the freeway? Nice.

A “New” Critical Requirement for Business Projects (Part 1 of 4)

As we continue the deep dive into questions like “how do I get information required to run my business?”, we inevitably get to training – more specifically, training on …

… the business / functional domain, and [your company's] self-image and self-awareness in that domain (who we are, and how we talk)
… process [...]

A Hierarchy of Information Requirements

It’s a common problem statement – ‘I don’t have enough information to (run my business unit, manage this process, identify opportunities, etc.)’. The solution designer, when faced with a question like this, starts with a little detective work; the problem is too broadly stated.

eMail is Dead, Long Live Social Networking: Don’t Get Left Behind

via Fred Wilson – a stunning slide from Morgan Stanley’s recent Internet Trends report:
The primary topic of the report is the growth and future prospects of the mobile internet – reason enough read through all 87 slides. However, I am slightly amazed by the fact that eMail runs second to the relatively new phenomenon of [...]

Business Proposals and The Lesson of Jabberwocky

When someone asks my opinion on their writing, I’ll get fairly detailed; I’ve noted in the past that there is a lot of power and influence in the written word, and it’s fairly important to get it done well, or your project proposals just never seem to get off the ground.
This [...]

Managing Change: Knowing, Understanding, Empathizing

Do you know your job, or do you really understand your job? One difficult part of change is getting people to see the difference.
Of course, this is seriously delicate stuff – you can’t just walk in and ask people if they understand what they are doing. You know you’d be insulted if someone asked you [...]

Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered – embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical [...]

Why Corporate IT Fails when Competing with Consumer Tech … and How to Change the Game

I’ve been working with internal developers over the past few weeks, experimenting with a treemap / heatmap-style visualization that is quite interesting / insightful when loaded up with data, but very tough to configure and manipulate. We are also struggling with a presentation layer (surrounding this data control) that doesn’t adapt to the size of [...]