Thursday, September 05, 2002

Fostering Change Without Getting Fired. I found this post over on Steven Vore's Weblog: Sean Murphy in reply to Corporate Culture-Shifting: "Changing the culture is something I am battling with right now. We are trying to implement a Knowledge Centered Support environment, where everyone collaborates and shares for the benefit of the team. On a good day, I get comments like "They shoot collaborators, don't they?", but most often I feel like the message is treated as white noise. Upper management has not really bought into making the culture shift because they keep whipping the operational managers to meet numbers. How is it possible to get the shift to happen? It makes logical sense to a lot of use, but change is scary and seems like more effort will be required. I would love to hear from others on how they have effectively engineered change in their culture in a timely manner. Thanks." It's a common refrain coming from the front lines. Suggestions, fellow culture-changers? You may want to check out Tempered Radicals by Debra Meyerson. She writes about the experiences of people who have decided to create change within a work place that doesn't match their values rather than leave the company. She focuses mostly on creating change on issues such as diversity, fair-trade products, family-friendly work hours, etc. However, I think the strategies that she discusses are just as valid and useful for trying to move an organization towards a more knowledge-based organizational culture. Her key themes are: leading by example, small early wins, turning threats into change opportunities, and taking a long view. No quick fixes, I'm afraid. [High Context] 3:17:00 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Attracting and Keeping Good Folks. Chris Sells: Once a good person has been hired, keeping them is a matter of letting them do what they're good at, helping them get better at what they're not so good at, making sure you don't waste their time on stuff that doesn't matter, showing appreciation for a job... [vowe dot net] 3:16:27 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Thinking about new things. Classification is the enemy of invention. Phil Wainewright: We cannot organize without shared definitions and classifications; but we cannot create without challenging preconceived ideas. This is the paradox at the heart of innovation (and indeed the flaw in any vision of canonical business semantics). [Sam Ruby] Succinct explanation of the tension between inventing new things and communicating them into a market with existing categories and frameworks. You can't simply choose to play one end or the other of this tension. You have to resolve it. If you try to stay firmly within the status quo you had better hope the status will stay quo for a while. I'm not betting on that option. If you strike too far off into the wilderness you risk starving before the rest of civilization catches up with you. Don't we live in fun times? Be daring but not too daring. Strike off in a new direction but leave a trail of breadcrumbs. We know more about how to do this exploration when the territory is real territory. It's trickier to do it when the territroy is in your head. One part of the safety net is to become more mindful of the unexpected. Another part is to have more robust tools and processes for thinking quality thoughts. It's a bit like skiing or snowboarding. In familiar terrain you want to do it without thinking. But, even if you're really good, you want to be mindful and conscious of technique as you get into more unfamiliar terrain. As we start moving off into new ideas and new ways of doing work, we need to become mindful of our thinking techniques. More so than we ever are (or need to be) when we're in familiar terrain. [McGee's Musings] 3:15:47 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Hope in the universe For decades American politics has been trapped in a cycle that benefits no one except the media companies that own TV stations: Politicians felt they had to advertise on TV to get elected (generally they were right). Politicians had to raise enormous sums of money to pay for those TV ads. The money went from contributor's pockets directly into media coffers, with only a brief stop-off in campaign warchests. Politicians ended up beholden to contributors and devoting much of their energy to fundraising; the electorate got fed worthless "attack ads" and 30-second soundbites; only the TV station owners profited. Today's New York Times reports that, glory be, the era of TV political advertising may be beginning to fade:   The once-overwhelming influence of television advertising on political campaigns is declining, Democratic and Republican leaders say, leading them to embrace aggressively old- fashioned campaign tools like telephone calls and door-knocking in this year's Congressional elections. While candidates continue to devote most of their resources to television, they say the power of commercials to affect an election's outcome is being diluted by the glut of cable television stations, the popularity of such commercial-free premium networks as HBO and the anesthetizing frequency and similarity of political advertisements. If this trend story proves accurate, it could be the best news in a long, long time. [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment] Also see an article at the American Prospect on Paul Wellstone's old-school campaign in Minnesota. [Andrew Bayer Is Dreaming of China] 2:03:39 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

[RadioFAQs] Radio Tip: RSS tutorial. Mark Nottingham: RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters. (42 words) [dive into mark] [Don W Strickland: RadioFAQ] 1:31:50 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Weekly Archives for Radio Weblogs. One week ago, I released some code Lawrence wrote to enable Radio to generate Monthly Archive pages for your Radio weblog. Today I released some parts, also by Lawrence, that let you do Weekly Archives. Here's my weekly archive for this week -- week 35 of the year 2002. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 8:04:52 AM    trackback []     Articulate []