All in business
A great discussion of systems thinking by Fred Kofman, which ties into much of what the folks in the Theory of Constraints camp talk about. In the first minute, he says several times some version of, "To optimize the overall system, you must sub-optimize the subsystems."
I read the 20-year-old Raving Fans recently. It has some great ideas that help people think about how to grow and develop your business. The key is to turn your customers into raving fans.
Are successes because of the design or despite the design? What about failures?
Why do businesses exist? What is their purpose? Can we identify just one thing? Steve Denning talks about Milton Friedman's statement that the sole purpose of corporations is to make money for its shareholders. The short form is that Friedman based his article on flawed logic.
Context matters. I've said this for years. And now, Sam Sommers has a new book out that says the same thing. Plus a video introduction.
Interesting set of executive "habits" associated with failures from Sydney Finkelstein - originally published eight years ago. I like the "lack of respect" early warning sign.
James Slavet has an interesting set of "Five New Management Metrics You Need To Know" on the Forbes technology blog. Rather than look specifically at throughput, he suggests some internal metrics that might be leading indicators.
Another book in my long backlog was Ray Immelman's "Great Boss Dead Boss." I finally picked up a copy and thoroughly enjoyed it. As with many good books, the ideas have me looking at the world in a slightly different way.
John Hagel spoke this evening about his new book, The Power of Pull, at the Berkman Center. I took a boatload of notes and this is the result of that.
I have said this before: many organizations have far more good ideas than they have the resources to execute those ideas. I was listening to a recent Harvard Business IdeaCast and my ears perked up when they started talking about multitasking.
Mark McDonald on the Gartner blog network says that The nature of change is changing with a new pattern being related to much flatter organizations and wider information flow. He says that change is becoming social-driven, rather than process-driven. Interesting.
James Robertson's "Knowledge managers: stuck in the shadow of immortal figures" has inspired some interesting discussion, both on his blog and in at least one email discussion list.
In the middle of the behind the scenes video on how they built the Rube Goldberg machine for the OK Go video, Adam Sadowsky repeats the words in the title of this piece.
Matt Homann posted a list of Ten Rules of Law Firm Retreats, but I think these are equally applicable to just about any time you take people off to discuss how things are going in the business or how to improve the business.
Mark Gould has a discussion of "best practice" that reminds me just how important it is to have a regular policy of looking for other examples of how something has been done before doing it myself.
In case you think I am a dyed-in-the-wool Theory of Constraints promoter, I point to this article by Dan Trietsch from a 2005 issue of Project Management Journal.