With the rise of email and mobile telephony we have come to accept a state of permanent and immediate connection. Norms in business have implicitly shifted where response times are not measured in days or hours but in minutes.

Some key skills – inquiry, listening, systems-thinking, deep focus -are also character traits. That is to say they are wired into our personality – and they often run directly contrary to the social popularity contest that defines much of the Internet. Some of the best and brightest thinkers I know keep a low social profile.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Christopher Alexander, in his startling book, The Timeless Way of Building, asserts that our lives are shaped by no more …

If I were to write a self help book it would bet titled, “You Know When You Know”
The premise of the book?
We are all naturally endowed with an innate sense of what is best for …

While any nuanced thinker gets the fact that every professional services engagement is unique and therefore consultative in nature, any good consultant should understand the value of packaging their offering into products.

I just read read a fantastic Esquire article about Robert Caro, author of the magisterial, multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson.  Caro, despite being a self-admitted “fast writer” doesn’t begin his writing until he is perfectly clear on …

In my field it is clear that you need specialists (i.e. “exceptional” talent) for many initiatives you might undertake; for example search, mobile, ecommerce, privacy issues, social media and so on. No argument there. The problem is that exceptionalism tends to be the default setting within organizations; we begin by thinking we know more than others, that our problem is unique, that we have special needs.

It did make me wonder how often we fool ourselves that the game we are in (whatever that business endeavor might be) is about quality while ignoring the competitor waiting to eat our lunch with convenience.

We are hurtling towards a world of total information capture where email, texting, instant message and mobile video are documenting our everyday speech and action – in effect rendering all speech as text. There will be few places to “talk” without that talk being given the weight and permanence of text.

Applied to business, Collaboration is the promotion of more efficient means of sharing knowledge and a more effective means of making decisions. Technology plays a big role in the former, but it isn’t the complete package. Technology alone doesn’t give an organization collaboration – it gives it information flow by connecting people. How an organization can effective decision-making is all about culture