infoarch

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...

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...

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...

Work should be a mix of car and train, I wrote recently . But how do you make sure your work has the ‘car’ element, when you don’t travel by car? I recently read this interesting article in which the big boss of LinkedIn, Jeff Weiner, explains how he makes time to listen and think. He basically underschedules. He deliberately has fixed time slots in which he has no meetings. These time slots are for walking around, talking to people and listening to them, sitting back and thinking everything through. This is interesting. I’ve written about the concept of ‘slack’ before and how important it is for work in general and collaboration and networking (platforms) specifically. It’s important to me personally as well. I find I really need time throughout the week to restructure things in my head, generate some creative ideas for my clients, write things down for a blogpost or just to document things. But I also know that in the society we live in ‘time is money’. ‘Billable hour...

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...