Overview: Digital Transformation

"...there are computational techniques that will reveal all kinds of information about you that you're not aware that you're sharing... "Project Gaydar... were able to infer people's sexual orientation by completely ignoring anything that the person had actually said and instead looked at the person's friends ... even if you're a person who want…

"incumbent players [must] expand the horizons of their leadership team beyond the next quarter or next year ... challenge key assumptions... resist the temptation to deny that [disruption] exists." - Edge Perspectives with John Hagel: The Disruption Debate - What's Missing?

Wow, that's timely: "Q1. What is disruption? Disruption happens when the strong are defeated by the weak....

Fascinating account of a leading scientist's decades-long investigation into creative genius and mental illness. creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way... creative people have shown stronger activations in their association cortices ... This pattern h…

A whole bunch of reasons why the wrong consultants are hired for the wrong reasons: "When we don’t know much about somebody, we ... think about people in over-optimistic ways...what normal individual can stand up against an outsider or expert made up of pixie dust and rainbows? ... when we go looking for a better expert ... we tend to find them…

@digitaltonto weighs in on the LePore v Shristensen debate on Forbes: "Yet Lepore veers off course by essentially affirming the consequent.... In her fervent desire to critique, she conflates. Disruption, innovation and disruptive innovation are, in fact, three distinct entities.... there is more than one way to innovate, what’s really important …

"In the end, meetings turn out to be a waste of time — just people sitting around, chatting, wasting hours of precious time (even preparing for it). Approximately 15 percent of your time working in any company is spent in meetings. That number is more than doubled for middle managers, while executives spend 50% of their time stuck in meetings."

Clayton Christensen reacts to Lepore's article on his theory of disruption. Nice to see academics can be as carefree with facts as politicians and think tank gurus ... "in order to discredit me, Jill had to break all of the rules of scholarship that she accused me of breaking... if she was truly a scholar as she pretends, she would have read [tho…

"Case studies are terrible at proving theory, but they serve as a great way to think through a problem." - winterspeak.com: Silicon Valley, the New Yorker, and Disruption

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

5 principles for any organisation seeking to innovate digitally. Most cover the role of management and organisational structure (flat vs hierarchical structures, cross-silo interdisciplinarity, etc.), but the one that resonated most for me was cultural: "...one of the main cultural challenges [to innovation]... focus on optimising current proce…

Great read on intrapreneurs and innovation. Thinking the @bloggingportal reboot probably qualifies ... "When you treat something like it's stupid, you have fun with it, you don't put too much structure around it. You can enjoy different types of success... no one is watching you and there are no expectations... The best thing a startup can d…

If you're involved in developing strategy, you need to read 'Why Smart People Struggle with Strategy'. Personally I recognise a lot of this, including in myself, although I don't consider myself particularly smart. The key recommendation? "strategy should not be a monoculture ... of high-IQ analytical wizards. Great strategy is aided by diver…

Good advice for me here. "once you've established that heroism is required to hit deadlines ... work will expand to fill the available space ... more and more weekends and late nights are required to meet the expectations you've set yourself on what you and your team can achieve... by doing lots of out-of-hours work you're over-estimating …

Excellent intro to @buffer team's toolkit. Many I'll definitely check out, particularly Sqwiggle "... a video chat tool that helps you stay in touch with your team when you're working remotely. Every few seconds, Sqwiggle takes a screenshot of you so your colleagues can see that you're around, and just by clicking on another person you can join a …

Thoughtful post from @steveology. Reminding me of Rule #2 of "10 things the EU should probably know about social media", but adds to it. "in house staff, or primarily outsource to an agency? ... neither model works very well, but a hybrid works extremely well... The advantage of a comms agency is that their staff work for "a dozen or two comp…

At first glance, Overtask uses Chrome’s new tab page into a project or task management tool, depending on how granular you want to go. But in reality its approach makes it an excellent productivity enhancement:each task is managed via a tab, which stores all sites and pages associated  with that taskopening a task opens all the related sites for t…

"Employees don't want to be "satisfied" as much as they want to be engaged. What they want most is a great boss who cares about their development, and a company that focuses on and develops their strengths." - Employee Satisfaction Doesn't Matter | LinkedIn

"Internal communications are responsible for engagement, which can enable employees to actively play a part in shaping the values and the type of experience customers have. Engaged employees who have been inspired and experience the vision, values and mission will then be strong advocates as they work and become involved in the brand themselves…

"if you co-create with your consumers, you are more likely to develop something that they want to buy; consumers are far more likely to be advocates and ambassadors for something that they have had a say in developing; the very act of engaging in a process of co-creation will increase consumer loyalty to your brand. Swap the word "employees" fo…

Good insights on combining editorial, programming and visual experts from NPR: "The multimedia crew wanted to make pictures and video that were truly web-native, which required web makers. And our news apps lacked empathy — something we’re so great at on the radio. It’s hard to make people care with a chart. Pictures were the obvious missing piec…

New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…

Latest post on my shiny new LinkedIn blog. Read it, and resolve to stand out of the herd ;)

"technology is the easy part ... cultural and political—those are your two big barriers. And they’re sort of tied together.... ... a lot of people go off the rails ... dictate solutions without any understanding of the on-the-ground realities of the agencies doing the work. " - Learning from New York City’s open-data effort | McKinsey & Company

Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…

New post on LinkedIn

The mind boggles ... "perhaps the creepiest outgrowth of cryptocurrency 2.0: distributed autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Based on charters taking the form of code on a peer-to-peer network, these are entities that could automate many of the tasks of a conventional organization with varying levels of human input. For instance, a DAO could act d…

A long, excellent read, with practical tips and tools. More people should read this! "A badly managed meeting can suck away time, energy and money without being productive for anyone. But it is avoidable: Here's what you should and shouldn't do when meeting in a group at work, whether you are leading the meeting or not." - How to Have a Meeting …

"...is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; extending it with web services; and linking it to databases like Freebase."

"Marketers now have a very real option to bring the majority of their media agency work in-house. If agencies want to maintain relevance ... [they need to] break down the silos they’ve spent the last two-plus decades creating.... The silos will come down one way or another. Smart agencies will dismantle them by design; the rest will crumble under…