Brenda Michelson

• Let Your Ideas Go – Nilofer Merchant – Harvard Business Review

  “Now, I wasn’t always a believer in openness. I once ran right over other people, because I wanted to be “right” more than I wanted to build an idea that became real in the marketplace. And I personally liked being in charge and controlling and telling other people what to do. I came up through business with the old mentality. In my 20s, I ran a 200M unit at a Fortune 500 company. I remember one particular time when I was locked in a death match with a colleague over whose idea would win. I kept my idea in a closed fist, and fought tooth and nail to both prove it was best and I was the best. I won. The board adopted my plan.

  And yet ultimately I lost. I was fired a month later because the team didn’t trust me. I also lost my best friend with whom I had once run a marathon. It was a spectacular failure that helped me move past the industrial era thinking I was trained in.

  I started to understand, for any idea to win, I had to let them go, I had to let other people in. After now another 12 years of working through different approaches, I’ve come to a new understanding. It is this: the future is not created; the future is co-created. Whenever we want something bigger, and better, and faster, we need to be able to let go of a tight grip and open up.

  Openness is powerful, even catalytic…”

  tags: ideas openness

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• Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at stati

• Why We Need More IT Leadership, Not Less – Valuedance

  “We don’t really need executives to blog, friend, or tweet, but we do need them to understand how their current IT capabilities stack up against the competition; how IT-enabled changes to business processes and information could enhance the customer experience; and what it means to sponsor a project, drive IT adoption, and realize value from IT-enabled investments.  It’s time (actually way past time) for executives to assume personal accountability for understanding and managing IT and to cascade digital accountability and authority down through their organizations by incorporating IT-smarts in job descriptions and hiring criteria.”

  tags: cio leadership susancramm

• Rafael Nadal demonstrates Babolat Play & Connect interactive tennis racquet

  This is ‘data-gadget-sports’ cool. And hey, my tennis game has nowhere to go but up.

  “But tech can also make us better athletes by providing us with information about our sporting performance – whether it’s shoes which log a basketball player’s jumps, or outfits which give dancers feedback about their moves. Tennis players could soon be getting in on the tech-helping-hand action with the introduction of an interactive racquet.”

  tags: tennis babolet data

• The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization: An information graphics and visualization reading list

  Good list. I’ve read some — Roam, Tufte, Yau.

  Perhaps this one should be next for me:

  2. Nigel Holmes on Information Design, by Steven Heller (Amazon)The art director of The New York Times interviews one of the best infographics designers ever. 140 pages of insight.

  tags: information graphics visualization

• When Venture Capitalists Become IT Consultants – Businessweek

  I see this with my clients. Establishing relationships with VCs is a part of a good listening post strategy

  “When Equinix (EQIX) Chief Information Officer Brian Lillie wants new business tools, he seeks advice from a venture capitalist, bypassing sources like IT consultants or the biggest names in enterprise software.

  He takes that unusual route because many of the latest innovations in cloud computing and software-as-a-service are coming from startups, not enterprise mainstays like Oracle (ORCL) or International Business Machines (IBM). Venture backers who get early looks at emerging companies as they consider cash infusions can be the best guides to the most promising new technology.

  tags: CIO CTO VC

• Chevron explores the use of open source software called Hadoop to reduce costs. – The CIO Report – WSJ

  ““The ship collects ridiculous amounts of data,” said Walker. Chevron gathers information that includes five dimensions – the x and y coordinates of both the wave’s source and target – along with the time it was collected. The company uses Hadoop software to sort that data. It’s one step in more than 25 steps Chevron takes with the data to create a picture for engineers to use to locate oil reservoirs. Chevron uses a supercomputer to create models and simulations of the underground environment.”

  tags: chevron open source hadoop

• Technology Business Management Council Creates New IT Benchmark – The CIO Report – WSJ

  Good idea. Share experience and metrics in commodity stuff. Free up CIO agenda for differentiating uses of technology.

  “A new non-profit group, launched today during a videoconference attended by over 500 members, says it wants to help CIOs by developing best practices and benchmarks they can use to run their IT organizations. The new group, the Technology Business Management Council, is an outgrowth of IT optimization services vendor Apptio, and inherits the vendor’s methodology for managing IT organizations. The organization’s governing council includes respected IT executives, including its co-chair, Cisco CIO Rebecca Jacoby, as well as First American Financial CIO Larry Godec and Clorox CIO Ralph Loura.

  The council is trying to address a problem CIOs have traditionally struggled to resolve– proving the value of the IT services their organizations provide, and making the case for IT investments the company needs to improve productivity and seize new market opportunities.”

  tags: IT management cio

• How Starbucks is turning itself into a tech company | VentureBeat

  Similar to the creation of e-commerce groups in the 90s — mix of business and tech pros — organizations are now creating Digital Ventures for customer touching, revenue generating, business-technology (digital) capability. As e-commerce was led by tech-aware business exec (marketing), digital ventures are being run by Chief Digital Officers (CDO).

  This continues the bifurcation of classic IT into supporting and revenue lines.

  ‘Adam Brotman, formerly senior vice president of Starbucks Digital Ventures, was named to an entirely new executive role, chief digital officer. With the creation of the CDO role, all of Starbuck’s digital projects — web, mobile, social media, digital marketing, Starbucks Card and loyalty, e-commerce, Wi-Fi, Starbucks Digital Network, and emerging in-store technologies — were packaged together and placed under Brotman’s care.’

  tags: starbucks CDO

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• Macrowikinomics: New Solutions for a Connected Planet – YouTube

  New animation-style video from Don Tapscott

  tags: tapscott change society

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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• How Will You Measure Your Life? – Harvard Business Review

  “I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

  That experience had a profound influence on me. When people ask what I think they should do, I rarely answer their question directly. Instead, I run the question aloud through one of my models. I’ll describe how the process in the model worked its way through an industry quite different from their own. And then, more often than not, they’ll say, “OK, I get it.” And they’ll answer their own question more insightfully than I could have.”

  tags: Business hbr christensen

• Busting CIO Myths — Interview with Jeanne Ross

  Governance: “good governance is about making everybody smarter about IT. “When setting up governance, most companies start with IT investments when they should start with implementation reviews,” says Ross. “Companies with the best governance are constantly assessing whether projects are realizing their business case.””

  Purpose: Ross. “Quarterly financial goals are destroying us. IT is about the long-term strength and agility of the business. Let somebody else worry about quarterly goals; the CIO should focus on making the company great forever.”
  That doesn’t mean IT can ignore all quarterly pressure, but CIOs should discourage investment that is driven by short-term thinking. “This is UPS’s genius,” Ross says. “They understand that they need low package-delivery cost and high reliability. They use those metrics to set goals, and they build systems to operationalize their business.” CIOs must push back, she says. “If we measure IT the way we measure the last advertising campaign, we’re in trouble.”

  tags: cio governance entarch

• Cloud & the evolution of the enterprise architect – Cloud Computing News

  I owe a follow-up on James’ excellent article. In short, I believe we need to embrace the mindset of Product Managers, who continually evolve a solution, rather than try for all-at-once perfection. 

  “In businesses that are themselves complex, there are tremendous efficiencies to be gained by the smart application of IT. That element of the enterprise architect’s role doesn’t go away.

  What does change are the skills needed to evaluate how business applications, data sets and services are going to interact-and survive-in a complex, adaptive systems environment. If developers are the DNA of software in the cloud, the enterprise architect becomes the immune system, encouraging the growth of systems that help the business thrive, and killing those that would cost the business.

  In this sense, my friend Brenda Michelson, a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture, put it best: the role is no longer one of enterprise architect, but rather one of the enterprise product manager…”

  tags: cloud computing enterprise-architect entarch

• Big Data, Tiny Insights | Om Malik

  “Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it. Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.” — Sameer Patel

  tags: bigdata

• The Simplicity Thesis | Fast Company

  “Here are just a few ways to get started in achieving minimum complexity:

  Think end to end.  Simplicity relates to the entire customer experience, from how you handle pricing to customer support.
  Say no.  Kill features and services that don’t get used, and optimize the ones that do.
  Specialize.  Focus on your core competency, and outsource the rest–simplicity comes more reliably when you have less on your plate.
  Focus on details.  Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.
  Audit constantly.  Constantly ask yourself, can this be done any simpler? Audit your technology and application frequently.
  The next thing to understand is that simplicity is a relative, moving target. The accelerating speed of innovation ensures that you’re never the simplest solution for long.”

  tags: simplicity

• Crush the “I’m Not Creative” Barrier – Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen – Harvard Business Review

  “You can actually become more creative by changing your mind-set. Anyone can innovate, if they choose to. Disruptive innovators do it by choice, not chance. Their everyday actions swap out an “I’m not creative” mind-set for an “I am creative” one. And then magical (not mystical) things unfold.

  The magic materializes as people engage unique innovation skills (what we call their innovator’s DNA) on an everyday basis. For example, by asking provocative questions, observing like anthropologists, networking with people who see the world in 180-degree opposites, and experimenting with intensity, innovators obliterate the “I’m not creative” brain barrier and, more often than not, break out from the pack.”

  tags: innovation creativity mindset christensen

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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