(I've been meaning to do this for months - probably years, actually, but been too lazy/busy. When I upgraded my Radio Userland software recently, the WYSIWYG editing no longer worked. Lazy/busy won out yet again, but this time it was easier to move the blog.)
11:39:47 AM    
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"Besides wanting the usual attributes of low crime, great schools, and a thriving job market, members of the creative class want to be in a place that is exciting and challenging, is open to new ideas, and values them as individuals." says Blogger Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, and public policy professor at George Mason Univerisity, in an interview by Realtor Magazine Online (Nov 1, 2006).

Top spots include San Francisco; Seattle; Boston; New York; Chicago; Denver; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Austin, Texas; and the Research Triangle in North Carolina, or see the more recent list of Fast Cities from Fast Company. What can a Wannabe City do to move into these lofty ranks? In his speech on IT Conversations, Dr. Florida makes the case that it's not as easy as creating a good job climate..

OK, Wannabee City, take note: the triad of work-live-play can't stand without all three of its legs. Take a look London, Canada's Creative City Task Force for a bit of inspiration on improving culture.

6:57:55 PM    
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CIO magazine has an excerpt from a new book by Niall Sinclair, Stealth KM: Winning Knowledge Management Strategies for the Private Sector.  Two messages stand out from the usual what-is-KM paragraphs provided.

First, that story telling is alive and well in the corporate world. Stories are an incredibly powerful way to transfer knowledge by combining content, context, and emotion to provide deeper understanding and easier retrieval of information.

Second, that KM is also alive and well in the corporate world. Yep, we're doing it without using the term. Unfortunately that likely means we're not doing it as proficiently as we could be were we to make use of the field of knowledge that exists on the topic already. The author's advice is to go into "stealth mode" makes sense to me. Do the right thing for today's needs, but call it by whatever term your executives prefer so that it can be funded, supported, and effectively implemented.

I recently told a friend of mine that the term "knowledge management" was so "five years ago" as a buzz word, that it made sense that the government agency he works with had just started to look into it. When it came to sharing knowledge among workers, "KM" was the first buzzword to become the darling of the technology press, then "portals" were going to solve all our problems. Millions of dollars were spent based on these predictions, with very little to show for it. "Collaboration" was the next buzzword of choice... if we couldn't make people download their brains into a computer system, maybe we could just get them to talk to each other directly. Currently the "collaboration" frenzy has died down as well. What will the next version of this knowledge sharing concept be called? Maybe it won't have a name at all, but simply progress forward in stealth mode. But don't count on that one lasting, either.  Once we start seeing more "best practices" and less "lessons learned", you can be that someone will coin a new buzzword. Vendors simply can't make money off of stealth technology.

1:23:18 PM    
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My innovation bookshelf overfloweth, but I'll add another one anyway. It just looks too good to pass up. Thanks to Innovate Forum for the tip!

What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services by Anthony Ulwick, CEO of Strategyn, describes an approach for "outcome-driven innovation" that challenges existing customer-driven paradigms and promises to turn innovation from an art to a science. The secret, he claims, is to stop listening to the customer's verbalized needs, focusing instead on the customers' desired outcomes -- the  "metrics that customers use to measure success when executing the jobs, tasks or activities they are trying to get done." The book is based on scads of case studies indicaticating a good research base for the theories, and has an impressive list of endorsements headlined by Clayton Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, Seeing What's Next).

The concept makes sense intuitively. I'm reminded of my early years in software architecture-- what was then called a "programmer/analyst". At first I applied the skills that served me well as a student: following directions. I realized quickily that when I gave my internal customers what they asked for, they were never happy. Some might see this as terrific job security, but I've never been one to enjoy repetition, no matter what it paid. Over time I learned to "gather requirements" by listening carefully to users, asking friendly questions about their jobs overall, observing them doing real work. By truly analyzing their underlying needs, I was able to give them what they actually wanted instead of what they merely asked for. The mental shift from my student experiences was surprising, but the results were undeniable as happy customers asked for my help in progressively more challenging tasks.

12:54:25 PM    
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"There is something deep within us that responds to those who level with us, who don't suggest our compromises for us."

It took me a while to wrap my brain around the second half of the quote. The first half is simply "be authentic", but the second half is a bit more subtle. Is it pointing out how one person can inhibit another from being authentic themselves, thus inhibiting a real conversation? I'm going to really consider this idea, because I think I might unwittingly "suggest compromises" to others in an attempt to keep them from feeling uncomfortable when faced with tough questions.

The quote is from Susan Scott's article "Companies, careers, built or lost one conversation at a time". Scott is the author or Fierce Conversations, and Founder and CEO of Fierce, Inc. Her premise is that real, authentic conversations are what's missing in both our work and personal relationships. Scott offers these three questions to get real conversations going:

1. What's the most important thing we should be talking about today?
2. What do we believe is impossible for us to do, that if it were possible, would change everything?
3. If nothing changes, what's likely to happen?

I can only imagine what kind of conversations would have flowed from here in my former place of business. Scott maintains that "When the conversation is real, the change occurs before the conversation is over."

It's not a recent publication, but I will be adding this book to my reading list! It even has an intersection with distributed work... Scott concludes her article with this:

"And don't try to have important conversations via e-mail. The most powerful communications technology any of us will ever have is eye contact. The next is voice. Dead last is words on a page or a screen. "

5:15:28 PM    
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John Hagel III and John Seely Brown, co-authors of the book The Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization, take a negative view of corporate strategies centered around geographies (there - I've tied back to my distributed work theme). He also doesn't think much about strategies that are tied to core competencies (certain executives might take note here!). Instead, the goal should be developing "the capacity to accelerate capability building" - or more simply, the ability to innovate.

The exerpts below are from a June interview published in Wharton's Managing Technology called Can Your Firm Develop a Sustainable Edge? Ask John Hagel and John Seely Brown. (My emphasis added)

"It is the notion that increasingly executives need to think about strategic advantage in dynamic terms as opposed to static terms. While traditionally strategic advantage was based on geographic distance or core competencies, which were typically defined as static, increasingly the only sustainable edge has to do with the capacity to accelerate capability building. Companies must be able to build distinctive capabilities more rapidly than anyone else. What we focus on are management techniques that are emerging to help build that kind of dynamic strategic advantage."

on distributed collaboration:

"One of the questions we ask ourselves is, how do you learn as much from a partner as you learn from creating something yourself. This puts a new spin on why distributed collaboration around the world might be critical in creating this sustainable edge."

on the role of firms in the knowledge economy:

"Ultimately what we see is the re-conceiving of the role of the firm. Traditionally the role of the firm has been to increase the efficiency of transaction costs, whereas we see more and more that the firm has to provide opportunities for capability building of the people within the firm. If the firm cannot do that, people will leave and seek out environments that can help them accelerate capability building better. It's a very different way of thinking about what the firm needs to provide to its employees, and the role of the employees within the firm."

11:25:54 AM    
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Group Rethink By Michael Fitzgerald (MIT Technology Review, June 2005) delves into the the concept of collective intelligence. Technology has vastly increased the breadth and depth of group communication, enabling innovative group approaches to problem solving. For example, BP created an internal futures market to find ways to reduce its emissions, instead of the more traditional "committee of experts" approach.

Another example is Howard Dean's use of the Internet during the 2004 presidential campaign. In The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, Joe Trippi 'argues that in 2004, the Internet was to the presidential election what television was in 1956--something present in 75 percent of homes but not truly understood by most politicians and political operatives. But by 2008, Trippi says, the Internet will be at the heart of the political process.'

Fitzgerald references a number of current books to make its point, including one of my very favorites, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, by Tom Malone. I like Fitzgerld's highlight from the book, which I've blogged in the past, so please forgive me for quoting someone who's quoting someone:

'Malone says such markets, combined with blogs and other technologies that make it easier for employees to share information, will enable, for the first time in business history, "the economic benefits of large organizations, like economies of scale and knowledge, without giving up the human benefits of small ones, like freedom, creativity, motivation, and flexibility." He is convinced that companies like Google, which uses internal blogs to keep management ranks flat, represent the future of industry. Tomorrow's companies, he predicts, will be led not by dictatorial, alpha-ego CEOs but by "cultivators" who understand that productivity and profits soar when all of a company's intellectual capital is being tapped.'

1:30:29 PM    
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