Snippets

“Golf is an engineer’s game. It’s a problem-solving game. You have a problem, the hole, and in...

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:48:09 +0800

“Golf is an engineer’s game. It’s a problem-solving game. You have a problem, the hole, and in theory, getting your ball into the hole is entirely calculable: if you can measure the windspeed, the atmospherics, the inclines and friction of the surface, and if you can control the weight, angle and velocity of the swing, you’ll solve your problem. It’s not by chance that three-quarters of the Cabinet also play golf. Like golf, engineering is above all a problem-solving game. It only works if your innovation environment is one of specifiable problems that you can pin down, locate, and work hard at in a consistent, methodical fashion.

Tennis, by contrast, is a responsive, adaptive, dynamic game. Here, it doesn’t matter particularly where the ball goes so long as it stays within the court. The point here is not so much the precision with which the ball is directed, but the addition you make to the direction, angle, spin of the ball as it comes at you. Each player must both respond to the novelties added by the other player, and add something special to the ball when they send it back across the net. The fun of the game is in the ability to respond, adapt, and add something new. It’s a much more playful game than golf.

Tennis is a far better analogy than golf for our current innovation environment, because it’s all about responding to uncertainty. When the problems won’t stay still, and when we can’t see or define them precisely, the golfing approach won’t work.”

- Patrick Lambe

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most..."

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 13:14:35 +0800

“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”

- Charles Darwin

"…trust is an emergent property of the process of engagement not a precondition."

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 11:12:01 +0800

“…trust is an emergent property of the process of engagement not a precondition.”

- Dave Snowden

"“…at the end of the game, if you only focus on points you’d think that some players are..."

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:17:40 +0800

“

“…at the end of the game, if you only focus on points you’d think that some players are useless because their specality is to help others score. Fortunately, statistics take “assists” (ie passes that help another player to score) into account for players and teams evaluations and they’re as important as points to measure player’s performance. It’s logical : the player who gives the ball makes his partners succeed and without him no point would have been score. More, a pass becomes an assist when and only when points are scored so it force people to make the right choices and not only pass the ball hoping others will do some positive things with.

So basket ball knows how to evaluate the people who make other’s succeed. If this wasn’t measured I’m sure many players would focus on their own points without paying any attention the the team’s points. When such behaviors happen, you often have a team with two main players (according to the points they score) but that lost all of its games.

How are people evaluated at work ? The answer will surely help you to understand why effective collaboration seldom happen.”

”

- While basket ball is counting assists, companies favor individualism | Bertrand Duperrin’s Notepad

"Knowledge sharing strategies are usually attractive to forward-looking chief executives who are..."

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:56:27 +0800

“

Knowledge sharing strategies are usually attractive to forward-looking chief executives who are anticipating efficiency gains, quality improvements and innovation.

It is equally appealing to front-line employees who see the value in carrying out their work.

When a knowledge sharing culture takes roots, employees seek solutions among their peers across traditional organizational boundaries. They stop looking solely up to their managers to solve their problems.

Middle-managers are often less enthused […] Middle managers have often built their lives and careers on mastering the hierarchical pathways of organizations. They can feel threatened by the emergence of new non-hierarchical work flows which no longer require command-and-control management behaviors.

”

- Steve Denning

"Self-organization does not mean that workers instead of managers engineer an organization design. It..."

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:29:49 +0800

“Self-organization does not mean that workers instead of managers engineer an organization design. It does not mean letting people do whatever they want to do. It means that management commits to guiding the evolution of behaviors that emerge from the interaction of independent agents instead of specifying in advance what effective behavior is.”

- - Philip Anderson

InformIT: Succeeding with Agile: Leading a Self-Organizing Team > Influencing Self-Organization

"Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success..."

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:31:07 +0800

““Having a chance to change or personalize a process to fit themselves seems to be a critical success factor for a team to adopt a process. It’s the act of creation that seems to bind teams to ‘their own’ process.””

- - Alistair Cockburn

There Is No End State When Transitioning to Agile | Mike Cohn’s Blog - Succeeding With Agile®

"The myth of a destination that experts can guide you to is an illusion. Instead let’s understand..."

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:07:06 +0800

“The myth of a destination that experts can guide you to is an illusion. Instead let’s understand that there is your Enterprise 2.0. Every organization is on a path – somewhere. And “2.0″ implies improvement and evolution. The Enterprise 2.0 vision implies that organizations are benefiting from new tools and behaviors inspired by new ways we create and share information using social-channels and emergent platforms.”

- Gil Yehuda

What does this (enterprise 2.0) mean for middle managers?

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:18:00 +0800

If you’re a middle manager who essentially views your job as one of gate keeping or refereeing information flows, you should be pretty frightened by these technologies, because they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to do that. They’re going to reduce your ability to filter what goes up in the organization and what comes down in the organization. And they’re going to greatly reduce your ability to curtail who your people can interact with, talk with, and receive information from. So if you’re inherently a gatekeeper, this is a real problem for you.

If you’re someone who sees your job as managing people and fundamentally getting the human elements right that will lead your part of the organization to succeed, these technologies are not at all harmful to you. One of the things that we’ve learned is that there’s no technology—even these great new social technologies—that’s a substitute for face time, a substitute for understanding the human situation in your organization and trying to mold that situation to the best advantage. So if you’re fundamentally a human-centric manager, these tools are not going to put you out of a job, are not going to reduce your influence at all.

If you have another view of yourself, which is that you’re someone who’s responsible for output, you’re someone who’s responsible for making good things happen in your team, then these tools should be your best friend. Because all the evidence we have suggests that Enterprise 2.0 helps you turn out more and better products and actually is not a vehicle for time wasting or for chipping away at what you’re supposed to be doing throughout the day.

- Andrew McAfee

Mckinsey Quarterly How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work: An interview with MIT’s Andrew McAfee

"From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren’t really..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:27:07 +0800

““From a social viewpoint, the architecture of business seems all wrong. People aren’t really designed to do one thing, like a cog in a watch. They have various relationships with other people, and through these relationships they have influence on the work going on all around them.””

- Stowe Boyd

"It’s becoming clear that to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 15:25:49 +0800

“It’s becoming clear that to constrict a person’s capabilities into rigid, set roles that limit creativity and innovation just doesn’t make sense. Diving talent into silos is an outdated paradigm. Rather, we should be encouraging the facilitation of diverse groups of people working together on common problems.”

- Venessa Miemis

"We live in a world where people are more likely to engage with affinity-based networks and groups..."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 09:08:52 +0800

“

We live in a world where people are more likely to engage with affinity-based networks and groups than formal structures based on reporting lines. This is how things get done in the real world. Trust is cheaper than control, if you can achieve it.

Co-ordination, rather than top-down management, is often a better way of influencing outcomes in complex systems, and requires its own special leadership skills.

”

- Lee Bryant

"In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:56:06 +0800

“In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. This is common not only to process-based theory but also to practice that follows the general heading of the “learning organization”. Naturalistic approaches, by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.”

- Dave Snowden

"firms come into being in order to enable human beings to achieve collaboratively what they could not..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:54:05 +0800

““firms come into being in order to enable human beings to achieve collaboratively what they could not achieve alone. If one accepts this as the true purpose of any organization, then the main focus of executives’ attention should be on how to foster collaboration within their companies.””

- Hansen and Nohria 2004

"On the ROI of Social Computing Do you know of any organisation that has tried to and succeeded in..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:20:25 +0800

“

On the ROI of Social Computing

Do you know of any organisation that has tried to and succeeded in measuring how it performs at building market intelligence? Or that has succeeded in measuring how efficient and effective the communication within a project team is? For example, do they measure how much communication it takes and how long time it takes to delegate a task to a team member? Do they measure the effectiveness of this communication - if the right decision was made or the right task was carried out in the right time?

I’m all ears.

”

- Oscar Berg

"“No business case will sell social software to a firm that doesn’t already value collaboration in..."

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:43:45 +0800

“

“No business case will sell social software to a firm that doesn’t already value collaboration in its culture…If the ROI is needed to convince an organisation that collaboration is a good thing - then ROI is the least of your problems…”

Larry Hawes

”

"The higher in the hierarchy, the more complex the organization as a whole seems to function. If you..."

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:10:23 +0800

“The higher in the hierarchy, the more complex the organization as a whole seems to function. If you are high in the organization, you’re aware of the size of the organization, and therefore aware of the variety of actors. How they all interact, is difficult to grasp. The lower in the hierarchy, the less you are aware of all the other players that exist in the organization, and the more focussed you are on your tasks which are relatively not complex at all.”

- Complex Adaptive Systems, my understanding « Bas Reus’ quest on self-organization and online collaborative spaces

Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:16:32 +0800

Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two relationships – AB = A’s perspective of the relationship and BA = B’s perspective of the relationship. In the world of mathematics AB=BA, but not in the human world.

Stephen Billing