Jokes about consultants abound, and, like all good jokes, the experience that provoked them is not hard to discern. An excellent one-liner, quoted by Parcell and Collison in their book ‘No more consultants’1 is: “Consultants ask to borrow your watch to tell you the time, and then walk off with your watch!”2 As you would …
Guest blog by Matthew Loxton1 This discussion is about Process Improvement from a Knowledge Management perspective, but rather than covering the topic from the stratosphere, I have chosen to dig into a very specific and somewhat narrow slice – the use of internal crowdsourcing and tagging as a conduit to producing (and encouraging) process and …
Communities of practice and social networks Practitioners of knowledge management, sociologists, and many other business and academic professionals recognize the importance of ‘communities of practice’ or ‘communities of interest’ and social networks both within and across organisations for general human interaction, problem resolution, creativity and innovation, and personal or professional development. Techniques such as ‘social …
Social media: putting you and your business at the heart of your community Read More »
Knowledge management and creativity/ innovation enhance project management. I am a firm believer in the value of knowledge management to enhance project management. I also believe that the use of formal structures, such as those advocated in Lean and Six Sigma (or process improvement), and project management, give people more rather than less scope for …
‘Topgrading’ by Bradford D Smart1, is a wonderful testament to the existence of talented individuals who can also ‘work smarter’, ‘deliver higher quality work’, ‘demonstrate greater team work’, and ‘find ways to get the job done in less time and with less cost’. Smart argues that it’s the proportion of ‘A’ players in an organisation …
“Topgrading”: it’s possible to be talented AND be an effective team player Read More »
Approaches for building strong quality foundations are well documented in the manufacturing industry, but also occur across all business sectors and types of organisation such as flight airlines, the navy, health services, pharmaceutical research & development and education systems. Steven Spear, in ‘Chasing the Rabbit’1 discusses, with examples from the above, how this quality foundation …
‘Fake Work’, by Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson is an excellent dissertation on a common cause of frustration and wasted time and effort at work. According to the authors’ research, 53% of workers believe that they do work that does not count, and 54% feel that their creativity, talent and intelligence is under-used. Unfortunately fake …
Fake work – a real opportunity to enhance team effectiveness Read More »
In a previous blog “There’s more to decision making than meets the eye… or why we shouldn’t dismiss gut feelings“, inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’1, I made a case for the discretionary use of intuition in decision making. I argued that: There seems to be a particular role for intuition when: a) encountering very …
The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making. Read More »
WordPress has some fascinating tools for monitoring the level of readership of blog postings. Here are the statistics (as of 30th Nov 2009) on all my blogs since I started posting them in July 2009 Title Views Knowledge assets have been walking out o 232 Deep Visuals Ltd – how Kodak’s knowledge 194 There’s more …
‘Simply putting clever people together does not make a team’, and, ‘There are many examples of extremely bright and talented groups that signally underperform’. So say Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in ‘Clever. Leading your smartest, most creative people.’ (1) This book, which Elisabeth Goodman, principal consultant at RiverRhee Consulting, picked up as a result …
