Service, product, service, simplified
What is a service? What is a product? How do they relate with each other? And what’s a simple way to describe all of this? Yes, I’ve written a fair bit about this already – for example, ‘Product and service‘, …
Complexity / Structure
The weight of the past
What’s the weight of the past? For me, right now, it’s about two tons. Literally. I moved back to Australia in mid-March of this year. Courtesy of the pandemic-lockdown, every part of my initial plans for the move were shredded,…
What is knowledge?
What is knowledge? And what is its relation with data and information – or wisdom, for that matter? The starting-point for this was a question on LinkedIn from Josef Miklos, over in the Czech Republic: I am struggling with the…
Where have all the good skills gone?
[to the tune of “Where have all the flowers gone?”] Where have all the good skills gone? Long time passing Where have all the good skills gone? Long time ago Where have all the good skills gone? Gone to robots…
On skills: 10, 100, 1000, 10000 hours
10; 100; 1000; 10000. A lot of things those numbers could apply to, of course, but in this case they’re ballpark figures for the number of hours of learning-based practice that it takes to develop specific levels of skill. (We…
Change-mapping: Plan and Action
In the Change-mapping method, what exactly is Action? Doesn’t action happen everywhere? The short-answer to that second question is actually ‘Yes’ – action does indeed happen everywhere. In which case, you might ask, what’s the point of having Action as…
Explore, expand, exploit
It seemed straightforward enough as a description of the development process: explore, then exploit. (I forget which book we saw this in: one of Alex Osterwalder’s, I think, but I’m not sure.) Explore, to find out what the requirements are,…
On Change-mapping – books and more
Our new book is out! – ‘Change-mapping: Connecting business tools to manage change‘. (‘Our’ because it was a collaborative effort between myself and designer Joseph Chittenden, who contributed not just the graphics and layout but much more besides… – huge…
On cults
What is a cult? What is it that underpins a cult? From where do cults gain their power? And how do the same principles apply within organisations? Over on Twitter, Mel Conway (of ‘Conway’s Law‘) asked this question: We all…
Building-blocks for a viable business-architecture
What’s the minimum that we need as a base for a viable business-architecture? That’s a shorter summary for a multi-part question recently sent to me by Chilean business-architect Richard Moira Lupin: What should a company have, what maturity, what capacity, what…
Things I learned while doing 24/7 eldercare
I’d been sort-of looking after my elderly mother for some years now – the whole of the past decade, probably, though more and more so over the years. Earlier this year it had reached the point where I couldn’t really…
On power
What is power? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Who has it? Who doesn’t have it? Who should have it? Who shouldn’t have it? And why? – or why not, for that matter – to any of those questions…? Perennial questions indeed, in just about…