Friday’s Finds

Friday’s Finds:

@CelineSchill –“‘I’m only playing devil’s advocate’ and ‘I’m just here to warn you’ should be forbidden sentences. Propose, instead of censoring.”

@tkadlec – “Was asked the best advice to give to someone new to web dev. My answer was to get a blog and write about what you learn—no matter how basic. Writing helps clarify your thoughts & increases understanding. It’s one thing to use a technology. It’s another to be able to explain it.” #PKM

@jamienotter – “‘The business all around was changing, but the mechanisms to manage and support our employees were stuck in a time warp.’ Adobe’s HR chief”

The genesis of a new way of looking at business: Flow is everything – by @sig

The Organisational Hierarchy is kaput – as single purpose executor of the Business Model it requires reorganisation every time you need to get better, an utterly futile exercise most of the time. Replace it.

Managing is a waste of time. Leadership I need, getting out of bed in the morning I can do myself.

The rise and fall of Wired – by @downes

In times of revolution, the Edge is found where the new science is found. It is found in the underground. It is found in rebellion. It is found at the point of change. It is found where new values collide with old. It is found in new understandings of the world. It is found in new senses of self.

The early Wired tapped all of those pulses. The later Wired does not.

When Marshall McLuhan penned The Medium is the Message, he was tapping into the core of the new understanding of the world on the brink of which we all stood. What he said, in essence, is that the content of the information being transmitted is no more important – and possibly less important – than the means by which the information was transmitted.

Hierarchy is Overrated – by @timkastelle –

All of these are examples where everyone is a chief.  The flat organizational structure can work anywhere.  This works best when:

• The environment is changing rapidly.  Firms organized around small, autonomous teams are much more nimble than large hierarchies.  This makes it easier to respond to change.

• Your main point of differentiation is innovation.  Firms organized with a flat structure tend to be much more innovative – if this is important strategically, then you should be flat.

• The organization has a shared purpose.  This is what has carried Second Chance through their tough times – their shared commitment to the women they are helping.  While the objectives may differ, all of the firms discussed here have a strong central purpose as well.

Friday’s Finds:

“If I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often.” – Leonard Cohen

“If your network isn’t offending you, you’re stuck in an echo chamber.” – Howard Rheingold, via @opencontent

@shareski – “For too many kids, school has been about finding out what you suck at and spending time getting better at things you really don’t like anyway.”

@alexhimelfarb – “What kind of future do we build together when taxpayer & consumer have displaced citizen & the common good?”

Does Technology Improve Employee Engagement? by @dhinchcliffe

In other words, it shouldn’t be surprising that acquiring a powerful new engagement technology, and then not focusing on using what makes it so powerful, results in poor outcomes. A few test questions can illuminate this point: Are you rolling out social media broadly across the organization, yet not methodically opening up business processes to wider participation and scrutiny? Then you’ll get limited results. Are you creating a new intranet with some social features but keeping the publishing process locked down? Not much new will happen. Are you letting employees talk to customers via social media? Then customer care is going to stay expensive and poor quality.

Google’s Employee to Employee Learning, via @jaycross

Telling your employees that you want them to learn is different than asking them to promote that culture themselves. Giving employees teaching roles, says Google’s head of people operations, Karen May, makes learning part of the way employees work together rather than something HR is making them do.

How affordable CNC can re-make industry: thoughts on technology and business structure via @jhagel

What are the organizational implications of this coming disruption?  What is the right model to house this technology?

One possibility is a return to the putting-out system, which preceded the factory.  Perhaps independent contractors, each owning one or two tools in garage workshop, could do components of the job, passing work in progress to the next contractor.  Blade Runner, anyone?

The Idea Peddler: A 21st Century Pioneer, via @zecool

It’s incredibly difficult.  Being an idea peddler, a 21st century pioneer will require high levels of perseverance and stamina.  Much like the pioneers of the 1800’s.  Only different.  Less physical, more mental.

And as a 21st century pioneer, you have to understand that any time you push against the mainstream, against the status quo … you will have to spend periods of time serving as an outsider, an outlier.

I started collating these Friday’s Finds because I knew I was learning a lot via Twitter, and later Google+, but I was capturing very little information, and using even less for my own professional development. Setting up a routine to review my favourites every two weeks helps me to make sense of some of the digital flows around me. For me, two weeks is a good interval. All I need to do is use the favourite (Star) function in Twitter whenever I see anything that may be useful for later. This is a minimal incremental habit that I have developed when reading Twitter. I do the same with G+, where I tweet & favourite items of interest from that platform.

In personal knowledge mastery, the key is finding small habits that can be developed, that over time yield big results, like grains of sand. My sense-making here comes through the habit of a fortnightly blog post. Finding what works for you is the focus of my PKM Workshops. The challenge is to find something that works for you and will last over time. This is probably the biggest hurdle in PKM.

@Kasparov63 – “Celebrate victory, but if you do not understand its nature, that victory sows the seeds of your defeat. This is the gravity of past success.”

@EskoKilpi – The third foundation of social business: short path lengths

There are very few isolated geniuses. But there are many bright people who have continued and improved the work of others. Capable people have capable predecessors, people who act as filters connecting people and high quality information. The key concept in the knowledge-based future is acknowledgment of the importance of these messengers beyond what we have been used to so far. Social filtering, curation, is the new search.

@TimKastelle – What is the Best Organisational Structure for Creativity?

So why doesn’t everyone organise their company in this way? [like W.L. Gore & Associates] There are a few reasons. One is that it’s hard. It is a lot easier to put up some inspirational posters on the subject of creativity, and hope that works. But it won’t. Restructuring a company to reflect the fact that everyone there has creative skills takes a lot of work. Gore has been built this way from Day 1.

The second reason is that many people still don’t believe that everyone can be creative. The Breed Myth is powerful, and widespread. If you believe it, then you hire special people and put them in special rooms. If you don’t, you have to figure out how to put everyone in your firm into a position to be creative.

Curate or be curated – via @mcleod

The cure for information overload is coherent curation — data-driven discovery managed by skilled, thoughtful, and in some cases expert curators. Much as the quality of a restaurant is created by the chef, the quality of the curated end-product is going to be made by the curator. And that — without a doubt — creates new jobs, new opportunities, and even new economies in a world of information abundance.

Friday’s Finds:

@TomGram1 – “Resources not courses”. A new mantra.

“5% of interactions account for 90% of misery” – Rob Cross on how energy spreads across an organization. – via @ActivateN

@austinkleon – Why I make no distinction between Big Writing (books) and little writing (tweets): Twitter as a machine for book invention

In my experience, stock is best made by collecting, organizing, and expanding upon flow. You gather your bits, combine them, and then turn them into something new. But this process requires being able to get at your flow.

For some of our most-read findings, see 20 facts from Pew Research Center – via @zecool

65% of Americans say news organizations focus on unimportant stories rather than on important ones (28%).
Nearly one-third—31%—of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.

How Complex Systems Fail [PDF] Complexity, swiss cheese and failure. The classic 1998 article by Richard Cook – via @commutiny

Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.
Hindsight biases post-accident assessments of human performance.
Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.
All practitioner actions are gambles.
Human practitioners are the adaptable element of complex systems.
Human expertise in complex systems is constantly changing.

Fridays Finds:

@EskoKilpi – “Theory and practice are starting to catch up with the changes brought about by the loosely coupled, modular nature of creative work.”

@humoratwork – “Tomorrow (noun): A mythical land where 99% of all human productivity, motivation, and achievement is stored.”

@MITSMR – The CEO experience trap

Out of the 501 CEOs we looked at, 19.6% had at least one prior CEO job. Our research found that these prior CEOs performed worse than their peers without such experience. Being a prior CEO was negatively and significantly associated with three-year average post-succession return on assets.

Can Citizens Roll Back Silent Army of Watchers? – via @mgeist

It’s not just that someone might find out things about us that they have no need to know — important though that is — it’s that government and corporations intercept and analyze our data, sorting us into categories for differential treatment. Can you name your threat-risk assessment (TRA) at CSIS or your postal-code-based consumer segment? No. But those classifications can make a big difference to your actual choices and life chances.

Friday’s Finds:

“Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words. Trust movement.” — Alfred Adler – via @goonth

@ShawnCallahan: “Our memories evolved to hunt, gather & avoid danger. Now we have great memories for places, faces & emotions. Why stories are memorable.”

Tomorrow’s Products & Companies Will Live Or Die By Their Stories:

As I’ve said before, storytelling is perhaps the most important skill a 21st century business can develop. This is certainly the case with marketing — stories build deep relationships with audiences in ways advertisements don’t and coupons nigh can’t. But it’s also the case with product.

That’s because today people don’t want a drill — or a t-shirt or carton of eggs or television set — they want to know where that drill came from, how it came about, and what the drill-maker is going to do with the money they’re about to pay it.

Not all people, of course, but increasing numbers of them.

Knowledge Management is not mere dissemination:

KM should be conceived less as a purely technical information-based area and more as a communication and behaviour-change area, because putting knowledge to practical use needs a certain degree of behaviour change on both sides. Knowledge producers need to package the product in a way that can be easily applied, [e.g. PKM & Curating] while the users need to be “persuaded” to conceive knowledge as a practical tool that can be applied in their field. In other words, KM should close the gap between the theoretical and conceptual constructs and the practical applications.

WaPo: “Are GMAT scores inversely related to entrepreneurship?” – via @ChrisFinley

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics [$40] makes the surprising finding that high GMAT scores may be correlated to some of the negative traits of American business: lack of ethical orientation, male domination of executive ranks, uncertainty avoidance, and individualism. What’s more, GMAT scores may be inversely correlated with entrepreneurship.

Friday’s Finds:

Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on social media and post a wrap-up of what has caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and also in order to take some of what I’ve learned and put it on a platform I can control, my blog. This is the 200th of a continuing series of posts, especially for my friend Hans deZwart, who seems to appreciate this eclectic mix of views and news.

@ffunch – “If you merely follow a fellow, a hello is hollow. But jump off together, enquire in choir, and even a glance will advance.”

@flowchainsensei – “For the majority of folks, organisational silos are all they have ever known.”

“Google’s most famous perk—that engineers could work on side projects 20% of the time—no longer exists.” – via @yayitsrob –  Original Quartz Article  + Google Engineers’ Response : “Apparently, 20% time is jokingly referred to within Google as “120% time” to indicate that, while engineers have the opportunity to pursue their own projects, it’s only on top of their existing (often quite demanding) schedules.”

@dsearls – Big Data will remain a Big Dud until individuals have their own

But we’ve seen this movie before and we know how it starts: with assumptions that it can’t be done. It can, and it will.

We are going to be able to do far more with our own data — and data, period — than big organizations ever could.

@oscarberg – Our future relies on our social networks

The greater the challenges we face, the more we need to extend and enhance our social networking, communication and collaboration abilities. Our social networks, and thus the means we have to support these (such as online social networks and social technologies in general), are key ingredients in any approach to deal with challenges we need to face ahead.

@JMOChicago – Culture VS. Structure [lots of first-hand examples of how to use minimal organizational structure, as well as advantages & disadvantages]

One thing that caught me off guard early on when I was hired into the Human Resource Development group was the complete absence of an organizational chart.

Friday’s Finds:

Quote of the Fortnight:

@nestguy – “Writing for Medium is like joining a hip gym where all the benefits of your workouts are transferred to the gym owner’s body.”

« La séparation des sciences et des lettres est un artefact universitaire, créé de toute pièce par l’enseignement. – Michel Serres » – via @zecool [The separation of the sciences and the arts is a created fiction by the higher education system.]

Today in 1986, Charles Bukowski wrote a great letter to the man who rescued him from his ‘9 to 5’ job – via @raesmaa

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

The intelligent, the bandits, the helpless and the stupid – by A Man with a PhD

One hallmark of the bandits when they run a company is that they are mostly concerned with how Wall Street sees them, focused on quarterly earnings instead of long term growth, looking at market share rather than profitability. All in order to maximize the money they get. Short term manipulation is better than long term growth.

Selfishness doomed while cooperation evolves, study says –  via @dinoboy89

In their study, released Thursday in Nature Communications, they created theoretical populations of organisms in which some were selfish and some were “suckers,” as Adami put it. If the two personality types were unable to tell each other apart, the selfish individuals would attack one another and the suckers and eventually go extinct, and the suckers would win. However, if the selfish ones could recognize the suckers but not vice versa, then the selfish ones would win, playing nice with one another while killing off the suckers.

Co-operation beats competition in natural selection. “Maybe we should teach ourselves how co-operate better?” – @paulgslatter

“We found evolution will punish you if you’re selfish and mean. For a short time and against a specific set of opponents, some selfish organisms may come out ahead. But selfishness isn’t evolutionarily sustainable.”

Friday’s Finds:

@RossDawson – “The democratization of creativity is truly one of the defining themes of our era.”

“Unless I hear differently“- a better approach to getting work done. Always assume positive intent.

“Quite often when executives share the story of their strategy it’s the first time when all are in no doubt what their strategy means. – @ShawnCallahan”

“The more you face uncertainty, the more inefficient your organisation needs to be, because that leaves room for resilience. – @snowded” via @BryanBoyer

context collapse: “an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into a single moment” – via @courasa

@NancyDixon – Collective Sensemaking: How One Organization uses the Oscillation Principle

principles of Collective Sensemaking:

• Connection before content (Block)

• Learn in small groups integrate in the large group (Weisbord)

• Setting aside time for joint reflection

• Circles connect

• We learn when we talk (Johnson & Johnson)

• Intentionally explore differences (Weisbord)

• Insure cognitive diversity (Page)

• Create a culture of psychological safety (Edmondson)

• Design shared experiences (Weick)

Friday’s Finds:

“Any enlightenment which requires to be authenticated, certified, recognized, congratulated, is false, or at least incomplete. – R.H. Blyth” – via @cyetain

“McLuhan (ca.’75); Academics “have been asleep for 500 years and they don’t like anybody who .. stirs them up” – via @wodekszemberg

You are not an Artisan

The artisan delusion is important because almost everything artisans want to do — all the local-and-sexy work — is actually algorithmically scalable once you filter out the noise. There just isn’t much requisite variety there. Which means it is more vulnerable to being taken over by post-industrial modes of automated production, not less. Because software makes assembly lines more capable, not less.

Dave Pollard: Will the Collapse of Civilization Begin With Global Corporatist Totalitarianism? – via @C4LPT – “while financial, commercial and political collapse are inevitable, social collapse is not”

Corporatist Totalitarianism is the creation of a state that disenfranchises the majority and funnels all decision-making, wealth, power and security to an integrated Corporatist few. They do this ostensibly on the basis that this few know better than the masses how to deal with crises, but in fact they know there just isn’t enough of anything left to go around any more. So, like alphas in an overcrowded rat cage, they deem it appropriate to lie, mislead and deny, and to hoard everything they can steal for themselves and let the rest suffer and starve.

@gleonhard: The coming data wars, the rise of digital totalitarianism and why internet users need to take a stand

Here is my bottom line: the very same data oil that to a very large extend already fuels the $600 Billion advertising industry will fuel something in the neighborhood of a $1 Trillion global data monitoring and surveillance business – and it’s you and me that will make this happen by allowing them to drill into our data i.e. into us.