Overview: Digital Transformation

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…

The bandwagon effect about the plague of social media experts seems to be coming to a close, at least in corporate USA

Some good tools to check out "Some of the exciting new tools for productivity that you can use today include: Quip, Evernote, Box and Box Notes, Dropbox, Slack, Hackpad, Asana, Pixxa Perspective, Haiku Deck, and more below. This list is by no means exhaustive, and new tools are showing up all the time. Some tools take familiar paradigms and piv…

Why does this brilliant video remind me of the preponderance of arts graduates in the #bxlsbbl?It’s really worth a look. And then another one. The acting here is actually superb. Watch the Expert’s expression run the gamut from shock to resignation in just a few minutes! (that one took me 20 years…)- via LaughingSquid: The Expert, A Hilarious Sket…

"oCam is 100% free Screen Recorder for home and office."

Brian Solis on LinkedIn: "a pattern of best practices ... these pillars represent the cultural capstones that the most innovative companies in the world invest in to stay ahead of the curve." - How to Build a Culture of Innovation Pt. 2: The 12 Pillars of Innovation | LinkedIn

Nothing in here about information flow management, but a lot of interesting theory about how evolutionary psychology reinforces the need to support pyramidal organisational structures. "power and winning create a self-reinforcing dynamic. Talented people associate themselves with success and attract other talented people to their side, making con…

Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Native Ads for Fi…

"some of the BBC’s most experienced investigative reporters explain how they find and tell their stories." Access to the BBC Academy's College of Journalism website is free to everyone in the UK and commercially available overseas

Interesting perspective on the rash of new tech-content hybrids emerging in the media space. Back in the day, companies could be either tech or content, but not both: "What were you going to be really good at? Engineering or “content”? You couldn’t do both, because that would mean that one would be subordinate to the other. And if you were going…

"The way we evolved ... is really not the way we have to operate today ... this attempt at hyperproductivity is making us much less productive.'" A podcast worth every minute. I have a few of these techniques down pat, most days, as long as I can work from home, but the whole mindfulness thing is still over my horizon. - 4 Ways to Make Your …

5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…