Overview: Digital Transformation

"Performance reviews that are tied to compensation create a blame-oriented culture. It’s well known that they reinforce hierarchy, undermine collegiality, work against cooperative problem solving, discourage straight talk, and too easily become politicized. They’re self-defeating and demoralizing for all concerned. Even high performers suffer, bec…

"I still catch myself thinking I know better than the wealth of data at my fingertips. That’s not to say your intuition and savvy as a marketer aren’t valuable. You need both. ... take a holistic look back at what worked well, what didn’t, and what you can double down on in the year to come." - Year End Analysis: How to Plan Your Content Based o…

Great advice for web data analysis everywhere: "We don’t live in a perfect world. Vague requests are going to get floated. ... that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recognize and strive to minimize how often that happens. Here’s how: - Condition yourself to go to full alert whenever the word “interesting” is used ... - probe for clarification as much …

"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…

"I had an ethics class where the explicit message was, “Crime doesn’t pay.” But the implicit message was, “It isn’t a crime if it is merely immoral and not strictly against the law.” " - Why business schools charge so much and pay their teachers so little – Quartz

"Blamestorming is a neologisms describing a meeting, which means to be formally a brainstorming. But the real purpose is to find a scapegoat" - from the EC's inestimably good Think Tank wiki

Remind me to buy this guy's books: "There is no way by which events can be directly recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, different in every individual, differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever recollected. . . . Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each…

by RAND: "What will be the key societal challenges that the EU will need to address within the next two decades? ... a review of literature, data and insights from over 200 international experts ... explores evidence and uncertainties underpinning global societal trends and the challenges they provide for policymakers. ... put in place a lastin…

Great FT.com piece: "... to work through the psychology of their clients, businesses commonly rely on market research... But they do not typically step back and properly think about human nature from a 2,000-year cultural perspective, and their analyses of their customers suffer as a result... There is (fortunately) no enduring conflict between …

"everyone is keen to board the Big Data bandwagon, yet a comparative few really understand why. " I don't know a huge amount about big data, but I can spot a bandwagon from a light year away, and this one is coming in at very high speed, judging by some of the stuff I'm starting to see. Expecting more entertainment in the years ahead ;)

"At Menlo Innovations, structure and multiple keyboards allows you to split the difference between chaos and bureaucracy". - How One Company Replaced Meetings and Bureaucracy With Pairs, Ceremonies, and Storytelling, from Fast Company

Came out just after my post on applying network theory and the EU online public sphere: "For those of us who are interested in understanding and participating in the EU digital public sphere(s), social network analysis offers a useful way to identify key influencers and map different communities. I can see plenty of practical applications (for e…

"Because ideas are like germs: they don't diffuse through populations of people at random; they make their way through networks"

"Just understanding “what is Big Data” is a challenge for a significant number of people" - ReadWrite, quoting Gartner. "Different industries have different priorities ... Industries that are driving the customer experience priority are retail, insurance, media and communications, and banking, while process efficiency is a top priority for manufa…

"I think companies such as Asana (which I love) will be the future of business consultancy. They will substitute the big consultancies leveraging big data, just like Coursera will displace traditional course providers by leveraging information on how people use training and using this information to design more effective training. Business consult…

Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …

" Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don't appear in the report, it's clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the o…

"They went out and interviewed a bunch of companies that do remote work... useful tips for making the case for remote work ... - In today’s economy, the quest for talent is so great that organizations can no longer afford to merely look at individuals co-located in their physical presence ... - It is easier than ever to coordinate the work of ind…

"‘social desking’, where personal workspaces are geared to co-work as well as solitary work. This involves rethinking the office as a shared space, that should be organized around something other than optimizing square meters per employees. Ultimately, it has to be judged by productivity and worker engagement. And the tricky part is not space, but…

"Innovation is the process of idea management - so, yes, you need great ideas to innovate, but that is only part of it. You also need to be able to select ideas. Once you've done that, you need the ability to execute them. While all this is going on, you have to keep people inside your organization enthusiastic about the ideas. And at the end …

File this under “Next time someone says they do it better in America”... “Everything about the way the government builds large technical projects contrasts unfavorably”... a management not a technology failure. Obama’s error was not to empower technologists to tell him the truth

Great article on Medium. Best part comes at the end: "This week we launched an initiative that aims to ease the conflict between these opposing forces. Each of our team members gets to study a subject of their choice over the period of a year. It's a long term study initiative that resembles a PhD. Think of it more like a thesis than project wo…

"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."

the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!

"Idiots come in 3 types. The first type is what I call the politician, the second type is the spectator and then last but not least there is the the whiner. Every business I’ve worked with has them either in or around them."

"the process we use here at Fractl to come up with ideas that we feel confident will find viral success. "

"Since ancient times people have held the notion that there's something mysterious, unpredictable, and even divine about where good ideas come from. But according to David Burkus, assistant professor of management at Oral Roberts University, today researchers are studying the heck out of creativity and much of what we think we know about the topic…

I used to refer to great-websites-for-the-wrong-audience as Meatball Sundaes, but this visual metaphor is much better... using Sharepoint to deliver social intranets for organisations that don’t want social intranets, due to the passionate conviction that they need a social intranet.

"This is the first course in Google's newly launched Analytics Academy -- which will feature a variety of self-paced video lessons. The course includes 22 video lessons, each 3-10 minutes long, and provides learning activities. Google estimates this course will take a total of 4-6 hours to complete. The first three units of this course cover indu…