Group items tagged

The blog I use to describe what's happening with 21C.

Jay's notes on books, posts, and interviews. This is a general catch-all for 21C input.

Steve Denning has a great take --  and lots of material on "radical management." That's very 21C.

An archetype for 21C Cloud. Interview video with full text transcript.

Jerry Michalski and Jay Cross

Scrum in 1 minute
Scrum is about getting back to the time when the company was small and everything was easy and ran smoothly. Back then projects were small, teams were small, releases were small and communication was easy. Best of all, we were efficient.

In Scrum we split our big project into small projects as we work on timeboxed iterations called sprints. We split our big team into small teams (still with all the skills we need) and launch often. If we are more than 20 employees we probably have a problem knowing what the other departments and customers are needing so let's bring someone into the team that can represent them. To help communications from the team to the rest of the company we have our plan and current status visible. The plan is called the sprint backlog and the status is shown on the scrum board. Here is an example:

Tom Friedman has penned a thought-provoking oped, "One Country, Two Revolutions."

In discussing the ongoing social media revolution underway in Silicon Valley, Friedman turns to 21st century leadership:

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed - everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don't have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges - from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before - as individuals.

The BrainYard Lots of presentations

The economic, social and environmental volatility now facing business means organisations having to operate in a dynamically transforming landscape.

The nature of change itself is transforming. Organisations are now increasingly exposed to dynamic change: change upon change upon change - while dealing with one change, another affects us, then another, and so on. This dynamic change upsets the traditional business paradigm we have been working to over the last few decades.

* Networks provide the underlying structure to a massive part of life and the universe * That network structure applies on many levels, including our brains, the internet (and the collective intelligence it is catalyzing), applications, organizations, and business ecosystems * We can usefully think of these networks as sometimes literally coming to life * The key factors that enable networks at the societal and organizational levels to come to life are Connectivity, Standards, Integration, and Structure * Organizations need to be balanced between structure and chaos to create the conditions for agility, responsiveness, and success * Business ecosystems are central to value creation today, yet require rich flows of information that are predicated on trust and effective strategies for spanning organizational boundaries * Applications are themselves networks, coming to life through modularity, distributed architecture and development, and integration with human processes, thus supporting the living networks of organizations and business ecosystems

Weird to have BMW pushing walking. Megacities as efficient ways of living.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind." ~ BUDDHA

While the Buddha may have said that over 2,500 years ago, today's neuroscience is helping us to understand the mind's complex hard-wired mechanisms with stunning speed.

A 2007 study, conducted by Norman Farb at the University of Toronto showed that most of us are not consciously focused and are on "auto-pilot" 46.9% of the time. Our minds are wandering, not attentive to the tasks at hand or on immediate outside experience, instead we're looking into our own thoughts.

Preview Gary Hamel's February 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review, Moon Shots for Management.In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century. The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge

In chaotic times, an executive's instinct may be to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. But the truth is that relinquishing authority and giving employees considerable autonomy can boost innovation and success at knowledge firms, even during crises. Our research provides hard evidence that leaders who give in to the urge to clamp down can end up doing their companies a serious disservice.

Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control-establishing nonhierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company's decisions-guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare. Two of them, however, compellingly demonstrate that if it's implemented properly, this counterintuitive idea can dramatically improve results.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about flow as being in the moment. What does this really mean? How might it be relevant for the day to day challenges of organizational life?

How do we move in organizations? Do we give into tides of constraints dotting the shores with recognizable successes and failures? How do we discern the faint melodies of possibilities offered by shifts of how and who we are… and what place should we assume in the ecological menagerie of conditions, gifts, talents and opportunities enlightening our constellations?

Story-based tactics, processes and tools help us probe the complexity of organizational life.

We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

The 50

From speaking to friends, colleagues and recalling my own experiences I've complied The 50, a list of 50 things I believe every graphic design student should know on leaving college. Some of these points are obvious, others less so - but all are brief, digestible nuggets of wisdom that will hopefully go some way to making the transition from graduate to designer a little bit smoother.

Share the 50

The 50 has been crafted to be shared, spread and debated. Each point has been synthesised into just 140 characters (complete with a #the50 hash-tag) making them memorable and Twitter-friendly. Tweet your favourites, share them on Facebook, and send this URL to your friends - The 50 needs to be seen by as many students as possible - because feedback is crucial for the next step…