Transformation

Employers ask for Facebook passwords but not social skills

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Lately there has been a lot of buzz about employers asking potential employees for their Facebook passwords. I heard yet another story about this over the weekend. While I don’t feel employers should be asking for social media passwords, this post is more about the irony that employers want social passwords but are not asking […]

IT job postings ask for the wrong thing

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My report “Job Postings – Hiring for IT’s Past” published today on Gartner.com. This Gartner for Technical Professionals (GTP) report is a wake-up call for IT organizations because it shows that most IT organizations are hiring for the wrong requirements. In late 2011 and early 2012 we sampled current job postings in six major job […]

Inversion of Control

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According to Wikipedia, inversion of control (IoC) is an object-oriented programming practice whereby the object coupling is bound at run time by an “assembler” object and are typically not knowable at compile time using static analysis. The binding process is achieved through dependency injection. In practice, Inversion of Control is a style of software construction […]

Rethinking the Enterprise “Mess” Using a System Thinking Approach

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I have long considered the discipline of “architecture” as a problem solving technique that brings together art, philosophy, engineering, physics, culture, technology, etc.  Producing a high quality architecture is to provide a platform for the enterprise to balance form, function, and elegance.   Or using today’s parlance: structure, behaviors, and desire.   I know the term “desire”…

Failures in Communication – Don’t Tell Me! Engage Me!

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For frequent readers, you know that I tend to look at issues through a humanistic lens.  Many of my client inquiries start with a request for the best way to represent “x”, or the way to describe something so that people will do “y”.  Instead, I like to think about “What are you trying to […]

Luck, Serendipity, and the Contextual Strategist

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Recently, @davegray @tetradian @nickmalik and I (@mikerollings) had a brief twitter exchange about the role of luck in strategy. What is luck anyway? Isn’t it just a happy accident, an unexpected happening, a simple explanation for the unexpected, a serendipitous association that leaves us in awe of the randomness of life? In that context, strategy […]

i-i-i is about Focusing on the Individual and Not Yourself

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The “i” generation – not quite the selfish focused gang that was recently called out in the UK by its Chief Rabbi and noted by c|net’s Chris Matyszczyk. Like prior generational movements, this one too is misunderstood. The “i” generation is about the importance of the individual which is profoundly different than focusing selfishly on […]

Steve Jobs – Preparing Us for One More Thing

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This weekend I read Steve Jobs eulogy written by his sister Mona Simpson. Anyone with a beating heart can appreciate it and will be touched by it. The love shared between them is apparent, as is the love he had for his family and his life’s work. Yet he was always preparing us for one […]

Fight inertia and resurrect entrepreneurs

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All organizations at some time in their history have experimented, gained knowledge, and operationalized it – experimentation is synonymous with entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs test many theories as they launch an idea. They are not afraid of making errors and learning from their mistakes. As they refine ideas and gain more knowledge through experimentation, they eventually reach […]