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In the business book category there are two types of books. On the one hand you have books that serve a relatively easy solution to a problem everybody knows is way more complex than the book tells us. Usually the author doesn’t have actual experience with the topic he/she is writing about. The book is largely based on interviews and other books. The author pulls these together and provides the reader with an overarching model or list of learnings the reader can apply. I’m not saying this approach is wrong. I regularly read these kind of books and enjoy doing so. But when I’m done I’m usually left with the feeling that the inspiring story is far away from the real complexity I have to deal with. On the other hand there are books which are clearly written by authors who have been or still are there. They clearly know what they are writing about, don’t provide easy answers or simple 1-2-3 steps to success approaches. These books try to help in your real situation and provide loads...

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...

Last week I blogged about 'Reaching out' . I tried to explain why I think it's so important, especially in organizations. This led to another thought. It's something that I came to see during my previous life as a consultant, but actually already knew while working in a large company. It's about 'shipping'. To me shipping is about delivery results. The weird thing is that I find most people think about results as being a huge results. So many don't deliver results at all. They think and talk endlessly about what the result will be. But never really produce results or versions of the result. And this thinking and talking usually happens in small groups. To others it seems that nothing is happening. As a consultant I was hired to deliver results. I remember the great clients I've worked for that were absolutely thrilled results would be delivered, every 1 to 2 weeks. Progress! Some of them were capable of doing so by themselves but didn't ha...

I’m on my way back from my visit to Stockholm. I was honored to speak at one of Kristian Norling’s Intranatverk conferences . I’ll share my insights from the conference in another post and start with sharing my slides and the story around the slides with you. Please find my slides here: The importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces #intranatverk from Samuel Driessen Surprise My talk was about the importance of Why for intranets and digital workplaces. The reason to talk about this topic is my surprise about how often organizations don’t answer the why question and just focus on the what, when and where of intranets. (Research on Swedish and Finnish intranets underlined this. I’ll share more about this in a following post.) I think this is problematic and leads to intranets and digital workplaces that don’t have (enough) value. Endless debates When we talk about ‘why’ we could easily get into endless philosophical, demographical or cultural discussions. About ...

I find Mary Meeker's reports on internet trends very interesting. They're packed with interesting data and insights. I've been following her work closely. She recently published an updated overview of 2012 and I thought I'd share my highlights with you at the end of this year. sheet 9: stunning slide showing shipment of iPads, iPhones and iPods over 10 years compared. This slides is old(er), but it just underlines the interesting times we live in sheet 10: You thought the ramp up of Apple products is huge, well Android ramp up is 6 times that of iPhone sheet 12: 30% of US adults own a tablet, less than 3 years ago that was 3% sheet 17: mobile advertising is growing rapidly; $0.7 billion in 2008, $19 billion in 2012 sheet 18: 24% of online shopping was done via tablets on Black Saturday, versus 6% 2 years ago sheet 20: we are in the midst of a huge change powered by new devices + connectivity + UI + beauty . Meeker highlights the effects for the pc, photography, ...

ThiemeMeulenhoff organiseert maandelijks een iLunch. Een iLunch is een inspirerende bijeenkomst voor TM medewerkers. Meestal wordt een externe spreker uitgenodigd om de iLunch in te vullen. In december was ik uitgenodigd om te spreken over het succesvol inzetten van Twitter, privé en zakelijk. Mijn slides heb ik gedeeld op Slideshare en bij deze ook hier. Feedback, vragen en commentaar zijn welkom. Scoren met Twitter iLunch ThiemeMeulenhoff View more presentations from Samuel Driessen

I really like the way Socialcast is sharing their vision on the workplace of the future. Every Tuesday they share an interesting infographic about an interesting topic related to their vision (and product). They call it #e2sday . The last one was about the intranet . I thought I'd share it with you because I recently wrote a post about why intranet is so hard and... why it can be easy as well. I was curious which sources they used to set up this infographic. It struck me the sources were pretty old! Which is not the same as outdated, to be sure. The problem with the intranet is an old(er) problem for sure. I agree with the statements made in this nice visual. What I tried to do in my posts is ask: But why does this happen? Why is information not up-to-date on traditional intranets? Why is it unclear what the strategy and intention of intranet is? Etc. Hope you enjoy and learn from this nice infographic!