Category: Agile
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The Power of Positive Attention
I liked this (via Tom Peters, taken from Nine Lies About Work): "Positive attention is THIRTY TIMES more powerful than negative attention in creating high performance on a team…So whilst we may occasionally have to help people get better at something that's holding them back, if paying attention to what people can't do is our…
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The Decline of Historical Perspective
I've been thinking a lot recently about whether we're seeing a deterioration in the value that we place in learning from the past. This New Yorker piece on the decline of historical thinking in particular struck me. The article features a study done by Northeastern University professor Benjamin M. Schmidt that showed that in spite…
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The Paradox of Automation
This post from Marc Rubinstein (which was shortlisted for this month's Post of the Month vote) on the lessons from the tragic crash of Air France Flight 447 ten years ago gathered together a number of interesting concepts. One of these was the so-called 'paradox of automation', which is the idea that: '…the more efficient…
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I’m Writing Another Book
It's been almost two years since my first book came out. Writing that book was something of a cathartic exercise for me, having worked for many years to help companies of all types become more native to the digital empowered world in the way that they think and operate. At the time there was plenty…
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Bullshit Jobs
'Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.'…
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Valuing Curiosity in Business
'Curiosity fundamentally conflicts with the scalable efficiency model that dominates virtually all of our institutions – we anticipate a big shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning driven by a changing economic environment' John Hagel Curiosity is one of those qualities in business that most of us recognise as having value yet few businesses actually…
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Bureaucracy
“Bureaucracy is a massive, role-playing game. If you’re an advanced player, you know how to deflect blame, defend turf, manage up, hoard resources, trade favors, negotiate targets and avoid scrutiny. Those who excel at the game, unsurprisingly, are unenthusiastic about changing it.” Source Via Nicole Yershon
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Getting Things Done in Large Organisations
When I work with leadership teams in big companies it's often apparent just how hard it is to get (new) things off the ground. It's almost as if the company is set up to thwart people who want to create something new and different. Which is why I loved this from Kumar Garg, who worked…
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Bike-shedding
Thanks to Richard Shotton for pointing me at Russell Davies' description of 'bike-shedding' as a way to describe the way that significant amounts of time get wasted in corporate meetings by focusing on trivial issues that attendees know more about. Worth quoting in full: 'I was once in a meeting about a software project. It…
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The Future of Marketing Operations
I'm a fan of marketing technologist Scott Brinker's work in bringing a healthy dose of insight, perspective and understanding to the increasingly complex world of martech. His annual surveys of martech vendors demonstrate brilliantly the sizeable impact of technology on the discipline of marketing (the number of solutions mapped in the survey has risen from…