infoarch

First up, Lee Bryant about leading 21st century firms. This talks is part of an expert panel about Defining the leadership model and design of the 21st century organization . Here are my notes. So, what comes first social tech or new organizational structures, Lee asks. Step 1 is deal with your org chart, your organizational structure. The culture of work is changing. We are talking about human resources instead of resourceful humans. Productivity has gone quantum. 12 people is the new army. Hierarchy is one dimension of the organization. It exists and will continue to exist, but it is very expensive to get things done. We will move to small, coordinate agile teams. The general manager that has no specific skills is not something of the future and are generic best-practices. Communities and networks are the new structure (or actually the old structure of the org). Podular working ( Dave Gray ) needs an underpinning service platform. There are companies doing this, like Kyocer...

Learning is an interesting topic. It's one of the main reasons I blog . Failing is also an interesting topic. I've blogged about it before. And I wondered: Is failure also one of the reasons I blog. I think so. Blogging helps me fail. I write things down, get things wrong, get corrected by comments, etc. I'm learning! Not too long ago Harvard Business Review published an interesting article about failure. It was written by Amy Edmondson and is titled ' Strategies For Learning From Failure' (April 2011). I'm not going to summarize the article for you (this time). But it's pack with great insights and learning points. For instance it explains how we are programmed to think that all failure is bad, what different types of failure there are (good and bad ones), how organizations can embrace failure and how leaders can build a safe environment for failure. I found the last point most interesting. I think embracing failure is a personal decision. In this c...

I'm at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt! I'll be live tweeting through this summit. I'll also try to summarize the talks as they pass by. The first talk is about "Manager 2.0" by prof. Richard Collin (Grenoble Ecole de Management) and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz (CEO Sony). Collin wonders if 2.0 is a good extension in Enterprise 2.0. 'It's just a version number'. It doesn't stress enough the future enterprise will be totally different. A new space is emerging. Not in the economy of good anymore, but in the economy of information. (Before the economy of good there was the economy of territory.) The north point is not north, Dow Jones, but 'you'. Information is the new steam. The industrial age is passe. And it's moving fast. He tells about how long it took the book and the pc to move into our world. And relates that to the speed in which the Internet moved into our world. This has implications for leadership! How should be defin...

Just for fun and for the weekend. :-) Have you already watch the movie Inception ? I did and loved it. I was wondering: What if inception was really possible? And you could do it. What would you do? How would you change you colleague's or manager's mind? Maybe this is something to start influencing...

Zappos is a bit far away from a Dutchman. We don't have it here, yet. But of course you hear a lot about them. Zappos is praised for its culture, very engaged workforce, use of social media in business, great profit, etc. Recently I wrote a post about 'Organizing on Passion'. Frederik Vieten , a student doing research at Océ, pointed me to Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness . I hadn't heard of it yet, so that was a great pointer. I'm going to order and read it. But I also browsed the site and found a recent talk by Hsieh at Google . Man, I watched it this talk this evening. And it's absolutely great. If you have an hour, just sit down, watch it and be inspired. What a great company and what a great leader Tony is. Here's the video: I really liked the way the importance of company culture is stressed and how it can be crafted. I also love the way they select new employees based on questions linked to their core values . One of the most ...

Some time ago I read an interesting article in my Dutch newspaper ( NRC , May 1, 2010, 'Nederland bestaat voor 5 procent uit eeuwige zeuren. Negeert die frustraten') about the Law of the Travel Guide. This is how it goes: Every travel group has some notoriously dissatisfied travelers. Mostly is not more than 5% of the group. In whatever way the travel guide tries he will never satisfy them. The question is how to cope with this group. It is a potential danger for the travel guide. The biggest mistake he can make it to try to make this group feel OK. He will never succeed, because they are notoriously dissatisfied. All the more he does his best to satisfy them, the bigger his defeat will be. And that energy cannot be spent on the other 95%, dissatisfying them as well (with good reason). Every travel guide knows there is part of the group that is not dissatisfied, but can become that very easily. Spending too much time on the 5% group, can easily lead to a 25% group... A ...

Love this quote by the CEO of Kodak, Antonio Perez (the highlighting is mine): In my experience, there are three key elements in the path to disrupt a mature, well-established market--meaningful technology breakthrough, significant supply chain management improvement and valuable business model innovation. The more elements you bring to the table the bigger the disruption and the easier it will be to make money from it. However, before any of the above will have any meaning whatsoever you need to find out the most important part of the recipe--that is the existence of "opportunity," or what I call Notorious Decadence .

Recently I went to a three-day course about 'Realistic Influencing'. I've been wanting to go to a course about influencing for some time. My role, as an information architect, is about influencing. And I'd like to know how courses about influencing try to help people be better influencers. I enjoyed the course and would like to share some learning points with you. Here's part one. 1. In the 1st place I like the diagram (inserted as a picture in this post). I like it's simplicity. And we went through all the parts of it and experimented with it. 'Facts' are things a person sees as real. His or her experienced truth. This don't not have to be the same as a fact, as we usually talk about facts. Like 2+2=4. As we know (and maybe even have experienced) some would dare say the equation is not true, not a fact either... The idea behind this model is to take the persons 'fact' as a fact. 'Criteria' are personal norms and values a person ...

I've been looking around at how companies use blogs. I see several types of blogs: A company blog, sometimes a blog per country (written in the local language) A page with an overview of official company bloggers. Usually these blogs are focused on product or market areas. Some of these companies have several more bloggers, but they are not listed on the official blog page. These bloggers often clearly state they work for a certain company, but 'the musings on my blog are strictly personal'. For some reason I find this strange. Why aren't these blog posts (with disclaimers) also listed on the page with official blogs? I think this has something to do with the old style of 'managing' communication. The official company blogs are basically controlled posts, somewhat different from official press releases (they have comments...!), but still pretty much the same. In this model it would also mean that all our talk about our work and the company we wo...

A nice quote taken from Andrew McAfee's article "Shattering the Myths About Enterprise 2.0" (HBR Nov. 2009): A leader ... is like a shepherd. He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind.

Have you seen the movie 'Pay it forward'? You probably all have and I'm the last one to catch up! ;-) But if you haven't seen the movie, go and rent or buy it. It's worth your time and money. Pay it Forward is an intriguing movie with a powerful message. It's about leadership, small decisions make a big difference, change can happen, social networks, etc. Here's a very interesting part to get you to watch the whole thing. Enjoy! Tags van Technorati: social networking , change , sharing

I recently learned an important new word: candor. "Candor" is honesty, openness, sincerity. HBR ran an interesting article about this term and what it means for business some time ago: "What's needed next: A Culture of Candor" (June 2009) by James O'Toole and Warren Bennis. When talking about 'enterprise 2.0' and openness and transparency, words like 'trust' and 'authenticity' are often also discussed. Another important aspect is 'candor'. The authors stress its importance due to the context we live and work in: Now the forces of globalization and technology have conspired to complicate the competitive arena, creating a need for leaders who can manage rapid innovation. Expectations about the corporation's role in social issues such as environmental degradation, domestic job creation, and even poverty in the developing world have risen sharply as well. According to the authors this context asks for a specific ty...