All in business
Phillip G. Armour discusses is the nature of people in groups. There are people (often leaders of some sort) whose behavior sets the tone for the whole group.
Lucas McDonnell had a nice post on 6 signs your knowledge management strategy is in trouble. One could imagine some other signs too.
The April 2009 McKinsey Quarterly has an article that got my blood boiling by just reading the title, "The irrational side of change management." Fortunately, the article by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller isn't quite so inflammatory once you actually read it.
Patrick Lencioni was the keynote speaker today at the Project Flow conference. He did a great job of speaking on the topic of "Building a Culture of Teamwork and Engagement" with a focus on telling hilarious stories about business and himself. I suspect you could pick up a lot of the below from reading his books, but here is a summary of the 90 minutes he spent with us today.
Are you subject to lots of clichés? Are you a frequent user of clichés? Be careful. Phillip G Armour writes about this.
Mary Abraham, always interesting, has a good one that relates to something I heard recently from one of my clients.
Another interesting discussion from Sig at Thingamy: mindless stuff and leadership vs. management. He starts with an example of "managing" teenagers and gets to the key that they can only be led.
Just to be clear that Director Magazine is completely negative on blogging, here is an article in the May 2007 issue, Strategic business blogging by Matthew Stibbe.
After writing about how important it is to understand the business problem first, here is a story from CIO Magazine where the project started with the technology.
People have expressed plenty of paranoia about social network analysis techniques that exploit existing corporate data stores. So, it shouldn't be surprising to see reports of companies that are selling their tools to snoop on their employees.
In TOC Application Expert training, we are talking about the goal of Viable Vision projects to achieve ongoing growth in companies.
Jeffrey Phillips has some interesting thoughts on what he calls The Ad hocracy in organizations that appear to prefer doing things without well-defined processes.
Computerworld interviews the authors of some new research on IT and productivity. Looks like some interesting though easily misinterpreted results.
I read Bruce MacEwen fairly regularly for pieces like this one, "Do the Management Gurus Have Clothes?" I see a link to Theory of Constraints in his discussion.
What are the common notions about "lost knowledge?" It turns out the common notions aren't always correct, according to a study from Lori Rosenkopf at Wharton.
Information (knowledge?) is the currency of business today, so making it available and making available the tools needed to manipulate that information is a critical task. Jeffrey Phillips has some interesting thoughts about IT blocking this need.
An interesting find from Dana Dolan on discussing productivity and whether collaboration projects require a leap of faith. I focus on the productity end of the question.