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.

Managing Change: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution

Often, when trying to figure out how to “make things happen”, your focus switches between multiple targets. What am I doing? Why am I doing this? And How can I get the others to understand what I am doing? Real change happens along a continuum that stretches from The Big Idea to [...]

Managing Change: Pick Something, and Do It Well

This is the first in an series of posts on Managing Change … look for more over the course of the next few weeks …
A common way of expressing the holistic nature of a project is to talk about “People, Process, and Technology”. I’m not sure who came up with this little gem, or [...]

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 [...]

If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?

As the new year approaches, debates over the “value” of IT and business projects intensify; it’s not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I’m hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will “make the cut”. We will definitely iterate on [...]

A Company is like a Sphere

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit – I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring.
A company is like a sphere.
As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the larger a company gets, more people get embedded and hidden from [...]

Facilitating Innovation: Establishing an Environment of Possibilities

I’m exchanging email with someone interested in establishing a skunk works, and they are asking some very interesting questions about the nature of innovation and the ingredients for an “environment of possibilities” …
… things are … [as they are] because someone already tried unsuccessful alternatives … [This] begs the question: when it is required, [...]

BigDog: Impressive Robotics

I don’t often post YouTube videos, but this one elicited a “wow” …

I’ve only dabbled in AI-type programming, but I can appreciate the amount of computation that’s going on in real time here. The Big Dog recovers nicely from a hard shove at about 0:40, but that’s nothing compared to scrabbling on the ice at [...]

Innovation That Matters – Substance Over Style

This the time of year when organizations (companies, departments, and teams) review their performance from the previous year. Breathless presentations are made to upper management and/or the Board of Directors, in late December or early January. Typically, the IT department will go through their projects and talk about how many significant chunks of work got [...]