Wednesday, October 09, 2002

Strategy+Business: Diary of a Change Agent. Diary of a change agent Strategy+Business (free registration required) [News.com: News Around the Web] I have to get The Soul in the Computer: The Story of a Corporate Revolutionary. Read the summary at Strategy+Business - it's a strong overview of how Barbara Waugh initiated change throughout her career at HP (18 years and counting). For me, the key graph from the S+B article is: The impetus for organizational change in most companies is a desire to improve performance, but change is also geared toward improving a company’s reputation. Customers, regulators, neighbors, and prospective employees judge a company not by performance metrics or by the share price alone, but by the quality of the company’s products, the character of its community presence, the attractiveness of its jobs, and its record on such issues as pollution, sweatshop labor, and diversity in the work force. If outsiders’ judgments matter at your company, then people like Barbara Waugh are exceptionally important, because the climate they create, far below the level of executive command, has a great deal of influence on a company’s ability to improve in these arenas. Indeed. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 8:58:51 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Personal Knowledge Publishing and its Uses in Research. Detailed analysis, history and discussion of weblogging as it is (or can be) used in research. The purpose of this article is to "help you grasp the significance of this practice and better understand how you might benefit from getting involved in personal knowledge publishing." The author - correctly, I think - points to the phenomenon of "personal knowledge publishing" as having "grown out of weblogging" and is "at the beginning of a growth curve that could make it an important vehicle for sharing knowledge and fueling innovation in years to come." [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] I've put a fair amount of effort into that piece, so I hope readers will forgive me for compulsively linking to it to stimulate its circulation a little bit. Of course I think it's worth reading, otherwise I wouldn't have put it on the Web. [Seb's Open Research] 10:46:38 AM    trackback []     Articulate []

Water - Slush - Ice, and a slice. The metaphor describes how innovations go from ideas to implemented projects. Here's a diagram that illustrates this process: Weblogs are an excellent example of a "highly networked community that encourages innovation." The water to ice metaphor describes a way to move these ideas from interesting conversation to successful projects. Interesting piece from back in July by Andy Chen [Kumquat's musings] » I'm not sure yet whether idea management is a leaky pipe, but if it is then knowledge logs are, as Andy says, a very good way to handle the water-slush-ice transition. Andy's weblog is new to me, but chock full of interesting ideas and insights.  I'll be reading more. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 9:44:49 AM    trackback []     Articulate []