infoarch

If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn you've probably seen I changed jobs as of Jan. 1 of this year. After 6 great years at Entopic and Bildung I decided to join Teva Pharmaceuticals as senior director external digital channels. I've been at Teva now for about 10 weeks and must say I enjoy it. There's lots going on in the pharmaceutical industry and the intersection of digital and pharma is very interesting, I find. In short, there's lots and lots to do. So, why change? As mentioned I enjoyed working at Entopic and Bildung. Great working environment, great team, dito customers. But I also found I was looking for new challenges. In leadership development and in digital. If possible I wanted to get more experience with leadership in a large, international organization. And I was looking for new areas in digital to learn about. Teva contacted me and gave me this opportunity. After quite some talks and lots of thinking, I decided to go for it. And I'm happy to s...

I've been wanting to point to a series of booklets about the future of work . These booklets have been put together by Novay . One of Novay's projects is about Future Workspaces. They have been and are conducting practical and fundamental research in the are of the new way of working. The booklets contain many insights from there work. The booklets are great to give away to management.

Sitting in the train I had time to read 'What Matters Now' . I loved it. It's a very inspiring read. A great way to tap into the minds of great people. And all that for free! All contributors were asked to write a one-pager about a word. E.g. Power, Harmony, Compassion. Here's some of the parts I enjoyed most: Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. -- Michael Hyatt (This relates nicely to my post about Vision vs Scale .) The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth. This year, your job is to find them and attract them. -- Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC - all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolu...

Oof, I've been quiet for too long. Or have you been enjoying it? ;-) I don't know what happened, but I simply couldn't get myself to post regularly the last couple of weeks. I have been twittering though. Maybe this does imply conversation are shifting from blogs to Twitter?! My silence definitely doesn't say nothing is going on. I saved loads of interesting posts I would love to read, comments on and post about. Hope I find time for that. What have I been up to lately? 1. I'm still working on a future information architecture. This architecture should provide a sustainable, flexible way to support structured and unstructured information processes in our organization. Leading to more effective and efficient business processes. I find that an interesting and tricky job. In technical organizations the structured information processes are supported by heavy tools (PLM and ERP tooling). Lots of focus is on these processes (usually not an integrated focus, thoug...

Just was rethinking the way I organize my work while reading the 'Productive Magazine' . (Great magazine, by the way!) As a knowledge worker I do lots of work because I think it's good for me and/or the company I work for. After finishing a memo, report, etc I go off and distribute it. Of course I hope others will read it, use it and make good decisions based on it's content. I organize my work using the 'Getting things done' methodology . And it works great for me. In the Productivity magazine other methods tell us what GTD is lacking. I wasn't too convinced by their lists... But all of a sudden I did realize that I don't ask myself explicitly enough for every task: Who I am doing it for? Is someone really waiting for me to give them new insights and/or am I answering questions they have? This relates to what GTD calls 'desired result' of a task. I think I should focus on this more to hopefully become more productive than I already am (- at le...

BusinessWeek recently published an interesting issues dedicated to "Business@work" . All kinds of work-related topics are discussed. Like: work-life balance , dealing with toxic bosses , how to go from good-to-great in the workplace, tips from experienced office workers , measuring productivity, staying creative in the workplace , working with Generation X and Y employees, etc. I'd advise you to go and read all the articles. But to get you to do just that I'll give you some highlights from the articles: - Jim Collins says : don't only make a todo list, but also a stop-doing-list. And define "white spaces" in your agenda to think. Keep asking questions. - Managers (and employees) should openly write down "how I work" to help others collaborate with you. For instance, your colleagues should know how you react under pressure and why you do or don't give much feedback. - Really nice article on "combating bureaucracy" . I like ste...

Nice post on why you should read blogs at work . Actually I was quite surprised we need a post on this topic. I would say: of course you read blogs (and other information) at work! Apparently some people need to be convinced... And I hope they are after reading this post.

Sometimes you run into an article that just blows you away. (Thanks for the pointer Lilia !) That's what happened to me while reading Clive Thompson's NYT article "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy" . The article is very long, but super informative and gripping. It's about online social networks, especially Facebook and Twitter . I find everybody should read it! The article questions why and how people use these tools. It basically answers the question with: You have to experience it to know. It also questions how real-life social networks relate to digital ones. Why are real-life networks smaller than digital ones and what does this mean for intimacy. I love the terms 'ambient awareness', 'ambient intimacy' and 'ad hoc, self-organizing socializing' to depict these tools. Because it's true, that what I experience too when using Twitter , my blog and Facebook . And I knew real-life networks were limited by the magic number, 150. But ...

Interesting poll on Word Processing over at ReadWriteWeb. I must admit I still mostly use MS Word at work. But at home I just Google Docs and OpenOffice more and more. I do find, though, that even within companies, document collaboration will move to the web. And we will be working directly on document content using wiki concepts and stuff like Scribd more and more. Do you agree?

The company I work for, Océ , is looking for new colleagues. For this reason they launched a couple of video interviews with some colleagues of mine giving you insight in what we are about. And what it's like to work for Océ. Pretty nice!   More info can be found on our jobs site .

As you may know I try to apply the "Getting Things Done" methodology to my work and private life. I have one issue, though, that I keep running in to. "Getting Things Done" says: Write down your task immediately and keep all your tasks together in one list . When at work and at home I do this and it has really helped me become more focussed and productive. However, when I'm not at work, for instance walking in the forest somewhere, these ideas and tasks pop up. I usually don't have pen and paper with me, or my PDA, when I'm walking. Because I can't write them down and get them out of my head, these ideas/tasks will bug me during my walk, because I don't want to forget them. How do you remember those ideas/tasks? I've heard of people that carry pen and paper around with them everywhere for this reason. Some call themselves on their mobile and send themselves a voicemail. But as I said: when I'm walking in the forest I don't want to ta...

Idea Sandbox is an interesting site/blog on creativity and fresh thinking. They also have a newsletter I subscribed to. Not to long ago I received one titled: "Five tips to beat Procrastination". One of them struck me: Keep Yourself Fresh: 48/12 Rule - For each hour, work for 48 minutes followed by a 12 minute break. This really works. The 12-minutes gives you a nice break. The 48-minute push helps you crank through your work. Even if you're on a roll, still take a refresher break. (Especially if your work requires using a computer screen... the 12-minutes is a nice break for your eyes... and in the end reduces overall fatigue). This is basically the 80-20 rule! My experience is that most people find breaks signs of laziness, working all day long without breaks is cool and shows your tough. But how many people actually apply this rule? For instance, if you have a two-hour meeting, you might stop for a short coffee break, but nobody I k...

Awesome TEDTalk by Sir Ken Robinson on how kids 'work' ('they'll take a chance'), get educated and how the capacity to 'be wrong' and 'make mistakes' is lost as we get older. 'If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original.' Enjoy!

Luis Suarez of IBM has been treating us with some very interesting post on using less (corporate) email and more social tools. I've pointed to several of those posts before and commented on several of his post. Basically he wants to stop using corporate email (except for confidential matters) and move all communication to social tools. This is a neat experiment. However I was one of the questioners that wondered how the time he spends/spent on email is compared to social tools. I understand his experiment is not about that, but I'm not asking it to be skeptic. I think it's a relevant question. Of course shifting communication from email to social tools is cool, better and more productive/efficient (in the long run). But it does have to be in balance (or doesn't it?). For instance, I can send back an email in a couple of seconds to someone with whom I share a certain context. I can leave out all the details when I reply to him/her. But when I want to answer him/her via...

Well, now that I'm back at work I dare write about this. Some time ago I said to myself I want to walk the Nijmegen 'Walk of the World' (Dutch: 'Vierdaagse' - Nijmegen is my hometown.). This is the largest walking event in the world. It's four days of walking and you can choose between 30, 40 or 50 kilometers (per day). I walked the 50 (you don't get a medal for less in my age category). And... I finished! It was pretty heavy stuff. But here's the proof that I finished . Now back to work and blogging.

Insightful and nice overview of the history of personal productivity in theory and practice in Strategy+Business . It was written by Tom EhrenFeld. It addresses questions like: What is at the core of the visions of productivity prophets? What makes a good productivity 'system' anyway? And what productivity advice is timeless? (For Dutch speaking/reading people: this article was also translated and published in Holland Management Review , nummer 117 - 2007. There's no online version, by the way...)

Started using GetFingerTips today and am excited about it. I'll let you know what my experience are soon. But for now, being able jot down tasks without going to Outlook is already a big improvement.

Back from vacation (that's why blogging has been slow, although I've been using automatic posting - works wonderfully!) and still the first to comment on this interesting post about a.o. Luis' venture to stop using email ... After another week of about 30 mails Luis remarks that lots of these emails are related to scheduling. He writes: Yes, indeed, I am talking about e-mails that are related to scheduling, setting up and participating in conference events, customer meetings / workshops, specially when it is to show my own experiences on this new reality itself. I am thinking that if I would be able to find a way to reduce those I would be getting my number of incoming e-mails down to 15 to 20 a week. If not less! Yes! As massive as that!!! This triggered me. This implies (logically) that his list of email per week should also include information about the time he has to spend on an email. If you get 30 mails you can delete after just accepting the meeting request for insta...

Will life slow down in the future or will it continue to speed up? Interesting post on the ever-increasing speed of life by Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb . It titled: "Faster - Why Constant Stress is Part of Our Future" .

Some time ago I pointed to an interesting ReadWriteWeb article about trends in reading . Now there's an even more intriguing piece on reading behavior. We're reading less and skimming more ! Again, I'm really curious what its implications are for reading/skimming in the enterprise.