The term ‘burning platform’ has its origins in a real life/death scenario faced by an oil worker in the North Sea and now commonly used to help change agents and stakeholders articulate organisational or personal motivation (WIIFM – What’s In It For Me) for change. ‘Burning platforms’ form the basis of ‘sticky’ or unresistable messages …
Having recently completed OPP’s Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) Step 1 qualification, I was fascinated by Dr David Hillson’s letter1 in this months’ APM Project Magazine Inbox, and Patrick Bird’s article in the previous issue on ‘Type Setting’2, which prompted the letter. Both the originating article and the responding letter refer to the ability to …
Personality Type and Project Management – with reference to MBTI Read More »
Reflections from IQPC’s 6th Annual Smartlab Exchange, Berlin, February 2011 ELNs, LIMS, and LESs IQPC kindly invited me to speak on Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management at this year’s Smartlab Exchange conference in Berlin. Although I have been responsible for Biological Data Management and Laboratory Notebooks in an R&D environment during the course of my …
Operational Excellence and Knowledge Management in an R&D Laboratory Environment Read More »
I’ve just finished reading Michael George’s “Lean and Six Sigma for Service”1, a very useful refresher on many of the key concepts of Lean and Six Sigma, as well as a useful perspective on the challenges and opportunities for applying the tools and methodologies in non-manufacturing environments. Learning from books like these is always helpful …
Lean and Six Sigma in R&D and Service Delivery – opportunities and challenges Read More »
Follow this link for my write-up of the recent NetIKX Seminar: Using social media to achieve organisational goals. Themes covered include: A shift from skepticism about, to evangelism for Social Media? Social Media can be used by Library and Information Departments for a diverse range of purposes The adoption of Social Media will be evolutionary, …
NetIKX write-up: Using social media to achieve organisational goals – the next steps Read More »
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever. Crunchy numbers A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats. A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog …
There are some interesting inter-relationships between intuition and knowledge management (KM) This blog follows on from part 2: “Intuition revisited – implications for process improvement and Lean Six Sigma”, and part 1: “Intuition revisited – or how it could be important to a business environment”. All three blogs are based on Gary Klein’s book “The …
Intuition has an important role in process improvement In a previous blog “The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making” I emphasized the problems with, rather than the opportunities for intuition. However, as Gary Klein(1) points out, the analytical techniques practiced in Lean Six Sigma also have their shortcomings. A point also …
Intuition does have an important role in business In a previous blog “The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making” I emphasized the problems with, rather than the opportunities for intuition. One of my blog readers, Deborah Peluso, kindly pointed me to Gary Klein’s 30+ years of work on intuition with the …
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 …
