infoarch

Bumped into this great quote in  an interview with Tom Friedman . Context of the quote is what the future of work is and if robots will take our jobs. Here's the quote: ... we used to work with our hands for many centuries; then we worked with our heads, and now we’re going to have to work with our hearts, because there’s one thing machines can not, do not, and never will have, and that’s a heart. I think we’re going from hands to heads to hearts, which is just another way of saying what you just said: “What are the most human capabilities we can tap into?” This doesn't mean when we worked with our hands and heads, we didn't work with our heart. We did. But now and/or in the future working with our hearts will be the differentiator, that's where humans will distinguish themselves from machines (and robots). And always have and always will. Curious what you think of this quote and if you agree.

I just finished uploading 100 documents to a platform and assigning them to someone for review. A very operational task. It had to be done. It's definitely not something I enjoyed doing. While I was doing this task, I was reminded of some self-help and productivity books I've read in the past. Many of them stress the important of 'doing what you are good at', 'following your passions', 'doing what you find important', etc. You should stop doing all things that don't fit into these categories. Of course this advice is important and useful. There are many people out there that have never really thought about these things and do their work because they happen to do that work. This can easily lead to stressful situations or even a burn-out. On the other hand, is this advice realistic? If I would follow this advice I wouldn't have done the upload work today. I would have just left it there for someone else to do. As if there is someone out th...

Recently I was (re)reading the article "The Knowledge-Creating Company" by Ikujiro Nonaka. It's an old HBR article from 1991, but still a very interesting read. (Later Nonaka expanded the article to a whole book with the same title as the article.) Two sentences from the article have been going around in my head since I read the article. Let me share them with you: The fundamental principle of organizational design at the Japanese companies I have studied is redundancy - the conscious overlapping of company information, business activities, and managerial responsibilities. And: Redundancy is important because it encourages frequent dialogue and communication. Nonaka stresses the importance of redundancy in organizations. On the one hand this is obvious. Life is full of redandancy. On the other hand what struck me most is how so much in life and especially work is about getting rid of redunancy. We talk about defining processes, automating work, cutting out inef...

How do you get things done? Do you have a method you follow? I’ve written about this before . A lot of times actually. The trigger to write about it again is my continuous surprise how little people have a method to work productively. Actually everybody has a method, at least implicitly, and sometimes it’s pretty OK. But often I see people struggle. Usually this is because they don’t have a productivity approach and/or there are all kinds of loose ends in their method. I follow the ‘Getting things done’ productivity approach by David Allen . I follow it fairly strictly and revisit the books quite regularly to see if I can do better. I read ‘Getting things done’ for the first time when I was about two years into work life. I was struggling. I had a method, but it wasn’t working. I wasn’t in control and often forgot to do tasks. ‘Getting things done’ was a revelation to me. After reading it I thought: This is it, everybody should read this. This should be a mandatory course at univ...

There are quite a few books about ‘collaboration’. Recently one was added to the list: ‘Collaborating in the social era’ . I had the pleasure to read Oscar Berg ’s new book twice. Once in ePub format and then in paper. And I must say I enjoyed reading the book and highly recommend you read it too. Reason to read the book The first reason I enjoyed it is because I’ve been following Oscar’s writing ( blogging ) for years now. It’s great to see his writing has been collected, structured and extended into this book. Intranatverk did a great job publishing it. The second reason is the fact that many books you read about collaboration are theoretical. They give us general and more strategic things to think about. And these kinds of books have their own right. I enjoy them as well. On the other hand, after finishing those books, I can feel lost. What steps can or should I take? Oscar’s book is not about that. For one, it’s clear that Oscar is not only a consultant, but has done ...

I'll liveblog large parts of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I'll try to publish my notes as soon as the talk is over. First talks at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit are by Jon Mell and Dan Pontefract about ' Heading from Engagement to Passion in Future Work Performance '. Flat army First, Dan Pontefract about 'Flat army'. Pontefract starts with some stories about his experience in corporate life. Why do organizations feel like jails? Research (Gallup a.o.) shows employee engagement is horrible in most large organizations? In the US research shows this leads to huge losses in productivity. Disengagement is a huge issue in organizations. How do we avoid disengagement in organizations? Most people want to find purpose at work. At Telus, the company Dan works for with 40.000 employees, they use several different models to encourage engagement in leadership, collaborative tools, etc. Telus had engagement issues. Half of the employees were not engagement. They d...

Oh how I love blogging, but what a horrible blogging year I’ve had… Just 24 posts in 2013 … What happened? Well, I’m happy to say I’ve been very busy. I think 2013 was my busiest year ever. My personal life has been busy. Little David was born in August and my two others boys are growing bigger of course. Furthermore we have plans to move to the middle of Holland, sold are house and are looking for a new one. A lot of time and energy went into my new role at the company I work for, Entopic . It was my first (complete) year as ‘manager Projects’, responsible for the people in Projects, ‘acquisition’ of new assignments and actually working on them. I really enjoyed the previous year, but found it left little time for reflection and slack . On the other hand I learned a lot for the work I did for clients. You should see the draft section of my blog: many one or two line draft posts about topics I’d like to share my perspective on. Topics like: intranet strategy, intranet des...

This is my final post about the SocialNow conference 2013 . In this post I’d like to share some highlights from four talks. Two were about gamification, one was about money and one about the future of work. Gamification The presentations about gamification by Andrzej Marczewski (of Cap Gemini) and Paulo de Carvalho (of Vodafone) were very interesting. I really enjoyed how these presentations were placed back-to-back. Andrzey gave a general but very good introduction to gamification . He talked about the what, why and how. I really enjoyed how he also talked about cheating and gamification. Paulo talked about his experiences with gamification inside Vodafone. He gave a detailled overview of how they applied gamification to certain business processes and how they deeply thought about the right metrics and incentives for the game to be useful. Costs Ana Neves gave a short presentation about the cost of social tools in the enterprise. Don't focus on the lic...

How do you feel when you’re under pressure? Can you get things done then? Can you think? I was wondering how you cope with pressure, because I’ve been very busy lately. So busy, I hardly have time to blog (and tweet)… Which is not good. In the past I’ve written about how important slack is for work in general and specifically for social stuff, like blogging. We need time to reflect and think things over. Time is needed to write things down and publish blogposts about what we do and think. What I find is that when slack leaves my time schedule, I have a hard time keeping up blogging. However important I find blogging, it’s one of the first things I stop doing. So, how important to me is it really, I wonder? Should it be part of my weekly time schedule? However, on the more positive side,  you may know, I use the ‘Getting Things Done’ methodology to stay efficient and effective. I’ve been under pressure many times, but I never let go of GTD. It really helps me plan my task...

Bribing the knowledge workers on whom these industries [of the Information Revolution] depend will therefore simply not work. The key knowledge workers in these businesses will surely continue to expect to share financially in the fruits of their labor. But the financial fruits are likely to take much longer to ripen, if they ripen at all. And then, probably within ten years or so, running a business with (short-term) "shareholder value" as its first—if not its only—goal and justification will have become counterproductive. Increasingly, performance in these new knowledge-based industries will come to depend on running the institution so as to attract, hold, and motivate knowledge workers. When this can no longer be done by satisfying knowledge workers' greed, as we are now trying to do, it will have to be done by satisfying their values, and by giving them social recognition and social power. It will have to be done by turning them from subordinates into fellow executiv...

Oscar Berg wrote a blogpost about a short discussion we had on Google+ recently. In his interesting post he shares  how he consumes and shares social media . Over on his blog I commented on his post by asking him some questions about his strategy. But I thought I'd share my strategy here as well. I've shared my strategy in the past , but it has changed over the years. Here's my current strategy in one picture: A couple of remarks about the picture: I use Flipboard to interact with my Twitter Lists (3 lists) and Google+. I also consume the HBR-, National Geographic-, Vimeo-, and Instagram-feed there. I read interesting tweets right away or email them to my inbox to read them later. I view my Twitter search every now-and-then on Twitter.com. But will move that to Flipboard as well after reading Oscar’s post. I read my feeds in Google Reader. If I want to read a post I star it and make sure I find time during the day/week to read the starred items. When I know I’ll...

Is email here to stay or will it die? Will it die because social media is here or will something else replace email? Recently Steve Dale wrote an interesting post about this topic. It's titled 'Email is dead: long live email!' . It was discussed on G+ and the blogpost itself has many interesting comments. I thought I'd share my comments here as well. Please read Steve's post first. I think it's an important post for social business people. Steve lists several reasons to use (and keep on using) email: Email arrives near instantaneously. It can be accessed from almost anywhere. It brings not just text, but pictures, documents, links, and more. Email is great for non-urgent communication. Things that don’t require an immediate response that others can deal with on their schedule. Email can provide a powerful documentation trail. Unlike text messages or phone calls, email provides an authenticated audit trail of past communication. It is hard to deny pas...

Oof, it's been a while since I blogged... Hope you missed me! ;-) A post by John Stepper triggered me to rejoin the blogosphere. Of course I've been paying attention to the blogposts, reading and commenting on them. But I simply didn't make the time to write a blogpost of my own. John wrote an interesting blogpost about an internal course he's giving. And the topic of the first course is defining your purpose . That's a very big topic. And it's hard for people to define what their purpose is. John bumped into this issue when running his course. I recognize this big time! This is what I was struggling with when I started working. I read lots of productivity books and they all said: "Define your goals and purpose. Do what you're passionate about." So, you start to wonder what it is. You see all these smart and successful people around you that seem to have a clear purpose. They can articulate it as if they always knew what there purpose is. I...

Eryc Branham recently posted an interesting article about 'The invisible company' over on ReadWriteWeb . I think his post also underlines that companies are inherently social. A company is a collection of humans. And (most) humans are social beings. I find most people don't look at companies this way. I hear lots of talk about social business as if business' are only social if they use social media internally and interact with the market via social media. Companies aren't social when they use social media. But, as Eryc says, social tools can be and should be used to make the social interactions between colleagues visible.

A long time ago I blogged about the IT Flower . I thought is was a very interesting diagram and I still use it regularly. I find it helps people understand the different types of work, how things get done and how they are(n't) support by tools in companies. Recently I read Harold Jarche 's post about "Informal Learning is a Business Imperative" . I find his work on social learning and personal knowledge management highly interesting. Most of his posts contain lots of food for thought and have interesting diagrams to chew on. This post did as well. The diagram in this post clearly shows the different types of work and how they relate to different types of learning. This fits perfectly on my two above-mentioned posts about the IT Flower. This diagram is an extra layer focused on types of work and learning. (Or the other way around, whatever you like!) I’m also happy to see that the diagram shows that even in very structured work there are still non-routine tas...

A while back Thomas Davenport wrote an interesting McKinsey report 'Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach' . It's a thought-provoking piece. It goes against the trend to say knowledge workers should be left alone, they're smart and know what to do. Davenport says we should provide more structure to knowledge work. Providing knowledge workers "well-defined context of tasks and deliverables". It's time for companies to develop a strategy for knowledge work - one that not only provides a clearer view of the types of information that workers need to do their jobs but also recognizes that the application of technology across the organization must vary considerably, according to the task different knowledge workers perform. Davenport clearly also looks at the down-side of the free-access model for knowledge work. Are all knowledge workers really up to their task? Davenport clearly says 'no'. There are different levels of knowledge work tha...