Mark's notes

Why Kindles leave me cold

I keep seeing people with ebook readers on the tube and it looks so uninspiring. Here’s what I think you’re missing with a Kindle and why my shelves will always be full:

The weight, thickness and texture of a book is part of the story

You can’t glance at a shelf of ebooks and know which one’s most loved

Heavily broken spines are a far better review than a five-star rating

Forgotten, makeshift bookmarks from train tickets, receipts and letters, scrawled notes in margins, underlined words, numbers from phone-held-between-ear-and-shoulder conversations

Handwriting that isn’t your own

Tears, stains and creases, sand stuck in the glue, dog-eared, warped and crumpled pages

An author’s illegible signature

Books hold the reader’s story too

Reblogged from A knowledge manager's musings

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Doing KM is not the goal. Responding to business objectives, problems, barriers, opportunities and risks is the goal. KM is just an effective approach.

— Don’t do KM - Pursue the Goal Not the Method (Gurteen Knowledge)

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The greatest disease at Microsoft is lack of sharing lessons from failure, especially where innovation is concerned. Microsoft has made many big, visible bets. Many of them have failed, but that’s par for the course. The problem is these expensive lessons are swept under the rug, encouraging others in the company to repeat the same mistakes. Everyone loves to make fun of Microsoft Bob, but few can articulate why it failed. if you don’t understand why it failed, you don’t have any reason for laughing so hard, and you likely aren’t half as smart as you think you are. A case study on Vista, MSN Search, Microsoft Bob, The Tablet PC, etc. should be produced by an outside consultant, and stapled on the forehead of every manager at the company, once a day, until they read them all word for word. Then they’d take advantage of Microsoft’s so called experience and wisdom. Otherwise, they are being set up to make the same expensive mistakes again and again.

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Scott Berkun, “Microsoft and Creative Destruction”

A great analysis of the problems Microsoft faces, from one who has seen the inside view.

timbuk2sf:

small custom messenger
ballistic nylon navy / matrix gunmetal / ballistic nylon dark green
created by MG in Stockport, United Kingdom
build your own

Reblogged from Timbuk2 Custom Bags

Shawn Callahan on learning from failure

From an Anecdote post on KM Australia:

During the conference I heard a some speakers recount the meme, “we learn best from failure.” I’m not sure this is entirely true. Anecdotally I remember distantly when I read about the Ritz Carlton approach to conveying values using stories and I’m now delivering a similar approach to a client on the topic of innovation. Here I’ve learned from a good practice. As Bob Dickman once told me, “you remember what you feel.” I can imagine memory being a key first step to learning. And some research shows it’s more complex than just learning from failure. Take this example. The researchers take two groups who have never done ten pin bowling and get them bowling for a couple of hours. Then one group is taken aside and coached on what they were doing wrong and how they could improve. The other group merely watches an edited video of what they were doing right. The second group did better than the first. However there was no difference with experienced groups.

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Of course, I wasn’t very much of an athlete. But even if I were, I’d say that hitting can’t be taught by a book. The skills involved are too complex and subtle, too internal; they can’t be expressed in words that can be put to much use.

This is a story I tell people who insist that knowledge can be codified, that humans are interchangeable. There are still many facets of life and work that are art not science, and wise managers understand how to manage both.

We are not machines.

That being said, we can build the social processes to facilitate knowledge exchanges between people — experts and novices, and even more importantly, build a culture that values shared learning.

— Larry Prusak: http://www.laurenceprusak.com/

Lockheed Martin’s Unity

Quotes from http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/whatis/what-is-unity-lockheed-martins-implementation-of-a-social-computing-platform-wows-enterprise-20-conferees/:

The crucial question, asked over and over again this week, was addressed head-on by Unity’s designers: “What is the value of social networking in the enterprise?”

Their answer was, in the end, simple: Being able to watch what other people are doing, easily, and then being able to search it and ask questions raises productivity and leads to improved collaboration and knowledge exchange. Instead of tracking what your friends are doing on, say, Facebook with a “friend feed,” an enterprise derives value from tracking an activity stream of interconnected colleagues. At any point, a worker can see what others are working on, access shared documents and ask questions on shared virtual workspaces or directly to the relevant decision maker or technologist.

And:

A crucial question that they were asked to account for again and again will be familiar to CIOs: How did they quantify the return on investment (ROI) for the dedication of internal resources and purchase of software? Each time, the traditional productivity savings of a user finding information was a factor. What really sold them, however, was the soft case of customers interested in their social computing initiative. Unity helped in Lockheed-Martin’s bidding process, especially proposals that involved knowledge managememt.

As the project rolled out, a crucial component was the in development and distribution of a “collaboration playbook.” New standards for playbook and best practices were laid out in its pages. For instance, as a team member, you should ask questions on a group page, not wander over to ask or send a broadcast email; this helps to capture questions and answers for everyone. Adding to documentation whenever possible was crucial, along with teaching people the power of linking and understanding which communication type made sense for different business cases: blog posts, wikis, email, virtual conferences or in-person meetings. In the end, the Unity team created the playbook as much for themselves as they worked as for the company as a whole…

Tags: enterprise 2.0 wikis blogs work behaviours

Deloitte's Big Shift

A short blog post linking to the main Big Shift material on Deloitte’s website. Looking at the long-term transformation of business, and the impact that it will have on structures and processes. Businesses have “competed away” the benefits of productivity gains.

To respond to this performance challenge, U.S. companies will need to let go of industrial- era organizational structures (and the reporting relationships, incentive systems, and managerial processes that go with them) and operational practices in favor of the new institutional architectures and business practices needed to create and capture economic value in the era of the Big Shift. Companies must move beyond their fixation on getting bigger and more cost-effective to make the institutional innovations necessary to accelerate performance improvement as they add participants to their ecosystems, expanding learning and innovation in collaboration curves and creation spaces. Companies must move, in other words, from scalable efficiency to scalable learning and performance. Only then will they make the most of our new era’s fast-moving digital infrastructure.

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The great promise of new connected information work technologies — such as real-time collaboration, enterprise search, mashups, reputation systems, content subscription services, and other social computing applications — is that they provide access to vast resources of information in a context that is useful to people, without overwhelming them with too much random information. They serve as filters for complexity and a means for individuals to impose context and meaning on the maelstrom of data that surrounds them. Most interestingly, they are emergent: that is, the patterns of usage evolve naturally and adapt dynamically based on the needs of users and organisations, rather than following a rigid set of structured rules and practices.

— Rob Salkowitz, Generation Blend, 26

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When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?

— Michael Bierut, “This is My Process” (http://www.designobserver.com/archives/entry.html?id=17485)

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