behavior

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 […]

Context breaks Taylor’s hold on strategy

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Last week’s post “Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine” called for the end of Taylorism. Thankfully, I am not the first to call for the end of Taylorism or to write about human characteristics which businesses frequently ignore. There are many before me who have added significant insights into this debilitating management doctrine and all […]

Replacing Taylorism as our Management Doctrine

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Over the last 239 years, organizations have been applying hierarchy, and top-down command-oriented management. This mindset erupted with the dawn of the steam engine in 1771, and in the late 1800s it was honed to razor sharpness by Frederick Winslow Taylor – the father of efficiency thinking and the science of productivity. Taylor’s work is […]

Taylorism – A Pox upon Agile

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This past Thursday my colleague Kirk Knoernschild pointed out a blog post by Alistair Cockburn about Taylorism creeping into the world of agile. Alistair’s post ignited a discussion within Gartner’s IT1 team reflecting on how it applied to our own agile work practices. What follows are some of my insights about the dangers of Tayloristic […]

Gamification – a Small Play for Game Dynamics

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Gamification, where organizations incorporate game dynamics into applications, is one of the latest trends.  Many view it as a silver bullet to load into marketing websites, innovation tools, worker productivity tools, ERP systems, and social environments. The hope is that these applications will attract and retain ‘players’ that will get hooked into playing their new […]

Watson: Impressive Finding not Thinking

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National Public Radio (NPR) seems to wake my imagination.  This morning they had a story about IBM’s Watson. Watson is IBM’s computer that is squaring off against two Jeopardy champions – the shows air for the next 3 days. I wonder how many people will begin to believe that Watson actually thinks? I’m sure it […]