Overview: Digital Transformation

Excellent intro to "Contextual intelligence: the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge and to adapt that knowledge to an environment different from the one in which it was developed. ... The most difficult work is often the “soft” work of adjusting mental models, learning to differentiate between universal principles and their specifi…

"Blockstream is working on technology ... to secure other kinds of assets, such as contracts or ownership of stock.... building on top of it using what are known as “sidechains.”... Blockstream has developed a way to safely move bitcoins back and forth between the blockchain and sidechains in order to add new functionality to Bitcoin transactions…

"research into network science has begun to shed light on how synchronization happens and how we can make our enterprises function more effectively.... Great overview. Of particular interest to I-Labs: - "research helps explain why it is so hard for enterprises to adapt to new challenges... leaders need to treat new initiatives not as mere organi…

"With 95% confidence we conclude that an increase in ranking “the intranet search helps me find the information I need” results in a higher valuation of the respondents intranet as a whole. The impact for the same question related to menus was statistically insignificant." Not quite the deathknell for information architects and resellers of stic…

GE's FastWorks is "a framework for entrepreneurs, building on “The Lean Startup” ... an approach to developing new products that came out of “Agile” software development... It’s now being tried in manufacturing since GE and others believe that rapid learning cycles with customers will reduce the risk that you build something you can’t sell." Star…

"Frugal innovation is more than a strategy. It denotes a new frame of mind: one that sees resource constraints not as a liability but as an opportunity — and one that favors agility over efficiency. Frugal organizations ... create good-quality solutions that deliver the greatest value to customers at the lowest cost... we have gleaned five valuab…

"a smart contract is a contract that enforces itself. ... a computer program that can be run on hardware which automatically executes those conditions." Good intro to what can - and can't - happen once you have bitcoins. - DAOs Are Not Scary, Part 1: Self-Enforcing Contracts And Factum Law – Bitcoin Magazine

An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.

Does what it says on the box.

"The core innovation of Bitcoin is not going away, and it is deeper than currency. What has been introduced to the world is a method to create decentralised peer-validated time-stamped ledgers. That is a fancy way of saying it is a method for bypassing the use of centralised officials in recording stuff. Such officials are pervasive in society..…

"even if we still need human beings to perform certain specialized tasks, can we remove the management from the equation instead?... ... encode the mission statement into code... an inviolable contract that generates revenue, pays people to perform some function, and finds hardware for itself to run on, all without any need for top-down human di…

"We made the transition from dark web to daylight, venture capitalists started their stampede into digital currency businesses, governments worldwide gave the industry’s start-ups tacit approval, A+ executives joined the fray to build more of Bitcoin’s core infrastructure, we collectively answered some of the critics’ most pressing questions ... a…

Great article on improving intranet UX, and useful inspiration for any website manager: "During the online cardsorting sessions I covered over 1000 content items and got nearly 36,000 individual responses. The first batch ... designed to elicit our main navigation labels. Subsequent tests then checked that the chosen names would suit all the intr…

"we’ve applied econometric principles to the results of over 200 intranet surveys and… statistically pinpointed which intranet attributes most impact a user’s perception of their intranet. This first post... showing what employees prefer to look and find when they view their company’s intranet." Some surprising results, For example, although I'…

" What was simply needed was to tweak the ‘rules of the game’ and to incentivize the right people so as to drive the right behaviors. In other words, by turning a predictable work process that had always led to the corresponding predictable sub-optimal outcomes into something fresh that talked to people’s EQ, we managed to make ‘work as natural as…

A fun interactive setting out the 'ideal team & process' required for building interactives. Rarely seen in real life, sadly. - One Approach Leading Interactive Expeditions: Eric Cade Schoenborn | Creative Director | Knight Foundation

"Ethereum is a platform and a programming language that makes it possible for any developer to build and publish next-generation distributed applications.... Ethereum can be used to codify, decentralize, secure and trade just about anything: voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowdfunding, company governance, contracts and agreements of …

"companies that subscribe to the Plus plan will be able to request every message that employees have sent on the service from that point forward, including direct messages to coworkers and a history of any changes you made to your messages." - Slack alters privacy policy to let bosses read your messages | The Verge

"The diagram below is an early concept illustration of the Independent Digital Music Market which now forms the basis of the Bittunes platform & Android application currently in Open Beta in the Bittunes Google+ community. This project, which had been put on ice in late 2006, was restarted in April 2013 when Bitcoin began to ‘cross the chasm’,"

"From Bitcoin Blockchain technologies to advances in mesh networks connecting devices together to create new people powered communication systems... to new understandings of 'emergent semantics' processes at work in folksonomies and massive user generated data sets powering new forms of search and discovery systems... 'Edge Pri…

"businesses ... can, without realizing it, generate an environment hostile to innovation... frontline business units... are optimized to relatively short-term goals that are anchored in what they are currently doing or selling rather than in what they could be doing differently. As a result, line managers instinctively reject innovations that won…

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

" 2015 is likely to see a democratization of data throughout the organization, meaning that more departments will become adept at using the insight that it can bring. Rather than working towards a central strategy that is created by senior management, day-to-day activities will be based on data and the insights created from it." - Big Data Top T…

"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…

"Charted automatically visualizes data. Give it the link to a data file and Charted returns a beautiful, shareable visualization of that data... open-sourced and available for anyone to use at charted.co... it adjusts to any screen, automatically updates itself" - Introducing Charted - Data Lab - Medium

Interesting description of the benefits of being a 'fast follower' by The Economist's Paul Rossi: "instilling a culture across the business where staff are keeping an eye on what's going on ...the editorial side [is] ... actively talking to people about new technologies. How to deliver content, how to deliver video... on the commercial team everbo…

"the basics of human resources management goals and practices have remained little changed, philosophically and practically.... The main metaphor today’s HR professionals live in is still a machine with its designed-and-fitted parts and cogs, as opposed to the ‘living’ system of social networks in which people participate and interact... Let’s …

My most important two questions were 'what are you going to do when you get selected?' and then I always followed up with 'and what will you do if you aren't selected?'.

"Instead of trying to make them happy, ask them to do something hard... @the opportunity to use skills and abilities” has displaced “job security” as the top driver of satisfaction, and it consistently ranks among the top two... Employees don’t just want their skills used; they want them stretched.... Respondents ... started to feel stale after o…

"So, does engagement actually cause higher performance, or are high-performing employees just more engaged?... In one of the few robust studies to examine this issue, Ben Schneider and colleagues mined archival engagement and performance data for several Fortune 100 companies. " - To Motivate Employees, Help Them Do Their Jobs Better