infoarch

Working together is great - most of the time. I really enjoy working with other people on tasks, instead of alone. Usually it's more fun, we get to results faster, the results are better, etc. But how often do we give 'working together' some thought? What I see is lots of time is spent on who should we work with and for ("who are our stakeholders?"), when the work should be done and what the objective of the tasks is. But how often do we think about the 'how' of working and what this means for the 'what' and 'when'? Deliberately thinking about how we are working to get better results. I think we should do this more and recently a great report was published to help us all do this more. Martin White recently wrote an interesting research paper about 'working together' . First I thought it was 'only' about meetings, live and virtual. And if the report was just about meetings, it would have been valuable enough. My expe...

Markets are conversations , remember? In 1999 this was the central thesis of the great book The Cluetrain Manifesto . The book is just great. It's a must-read. I'm surprised how many people in the digital marketing and communication market know and have read it. Not to mention that I think we still have a lot to learn from the book - so don't just read it once! Markets are  conversations. We know and feel that deep down. But are we as humans and are companies actually doing accordingly? There is so much in marketing, communications, advertising, selling, etc. that has nothing to do with a conversation... Maybe there's something more fundamental that we are not getting here. I'm about 90% through Sherry Turkle's book Reclaiming Conversation . And what a great book it is. I love books that really make you think. And this is one of those books. When your a 'digital' fan and junkie like me, you almost want to put it away. The book is a mirror and what...

Ran into this on Marc Andreessen's blog : I used to play with Crayons ... So, there's practically the same for adults too. (I bet the Crayola version is based on this stuff.) It's the MIT Whiteboard : Post to Del.icio.us / Furl It

Wow this is really exciting. I was reading an article on bnet about "How to run an effective meeting" . (Got there again by a tip from Joost 's blog.) The last lines of that article are: The easy way to preserve whiteboard ideas Say you and your colleagues had an intense whiteboard session and came up with a complex diagram that will solve all your problems. But copying it onto a notepad will take hours, and another group is standing outside waiting to use the conference room. What do you do? Take a picture of the board with a camera phone and e-mail the photo file to wb@scanR.com. They'll clean up the image, improve the contrast and legibility, turn it into a PDF, and e-mail it back to you can forward it everyone on your team (all the while securing the confidentiality of your file). This looks wonderful! They give some examples on the website. When I've tried this, I'll let you know. By the way, on the scanR blog they make an interesting statement about ...