Corporate Innovation and the Hierarchy of Information Needs
Master the hierarchy of information requirements to unleash corporate innovation, with insights into problem-solving and the importance of knowledge management.
IoT Field Notes: Seed Fund, Year 2
Projects that are funded through your internal seed fund resemble lifecycle stages of startup companies - an interesting parallel.
Empathy Skills for the Transformational Leader
A real-life journey of self-discovery that gave me insight to the impact of transformational change to the organization. Get out of your comfort zone once in a while, to have meaningful empathy with the team you are trying to change.
Change Your Definition of Success for Breakthrough Results
Focus on a better definition of Success - one that delivers results. Quantifiable change, improved operations, smarter people, profitable top line growth - there is a big difference between deliverables and meaningful results.
Tracking in the Enterprise – Correlation versus Causation
We've got the activity captured, and now we have "effectiveness" ratings for the people in the group - how will we put them together and see a relationship? Mechanically, this is a simple XY scatter graph - a standard chart type in both Excel and Google Docs. Let's take a look at a sample data set that illustrates the idea: This is the picture I expected to see: the more you use the system (the X axis), the more results…
Marketing and IT Get Together: The Elephants in the Room
Marketing and IT may have strong opinions about each other - but there is value in understanding each other's point of view. Here are a number of hard truths that Marketing and IT have to realize and come together on.
Five Lessons on Social Media from an Unexpected Source
A true-life story of collaboration in action; social media done right, with plenty of lessons learned. Because coffee!
Marketing a Startup Business (2 of 3)
author's note: 2nd of 3 parts of an essay first published in 2000. Check out part 1 here ... jpm Starting in the Middle To get moving on step 1 – capturing the “vision” – we’ll start in the middle with the executive summary. This presentation will help gather the relevant “what”, “why”, and “how”, without going into too much detail or oversimplifying. A little structure now will allow you to quickly summarize the salient points into your elevator speech.…
The Key to Success for your Next Job Interview
I'm been clipping some interesting posts over the past few weeks, regarding interviewing techniques and hiring technical people. Rothman's aptly named blog is always good for an insightful article at least once a week - some of the recent postings of note include: A good technical person should always be intellectually curious about how things work. This translates into wanting (demanding!) to understand "the stack", as I call it - the technology pieces from the top (ex. PHP in my…
Answering questions with questions is a quick path towards irrelevance
Why do some folks insist on answering questions with questions? Or, answering questions with roadblocks? It's not surprising when you hear IT complain about their inability to connect with the business, of not being included, etc. - and then demonstrate a style of investigation / requirements gathering / support / feedback that is a bit antagonistic. Business: How long would it take you to do X? IT: Why X? Why not Y? ... or IT: Why X? What are the…