We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. This is a fantastic quote from Douglas Adams, best known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the answer to life, the universe and everything. This specific quote appears in another book, The Salmon of Doubt,…
Unless you have a software background, you’ve probably never heard of longtime Python coder Tim Peters. In Zen of Python, he suggests 20 design principles including: How is “complex” better than “complicated”? After all, their dictionary definitions are similar and they are listed synonyms in the thesaurus: Since I love writing about words and word origins, I decided to dig…
Practically everyone has a machine-to-machine Internet of Things story they like to tell. It might be refrigerators automatically reordering milk, cows that send texts to farmers when they’re in heat, or understanding the demand for ice cream in real-time. We are living in a networked economy. The traditional understanding of networks is based on the…
Companies want to deliver an incredible customer experience.They also want to turn a profit, increase market share, and engage their employees. If those goals don’t seem surprising, it’s because they shouldn’t be. Forrester’s latest Customer Experience Index report finds companies that outperform their peers in customer experience are likely to turn customers into repeat customers, and repeat customers…
Do you have Florida winning the NCAA tournament? Here in the U.S. we are in the middle of March Madness. Even if you’re not a college basketball fan, you can’t avoid the phenomena: stories of Cinderellas, upsets, and comebacks dominate the media. The NCAA basketball tournament has entered the national consciousness to such a degree…
Unlocking human potential. It’s a manager’s most important task, but also the hardest to measure and understand. How can leaders empower employees to be free of bureaucracy and top-down management, while maintaining consistency and efficiency across the organization? Gary Hamel, co-founder of the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX), and I discussed these issues and others during…
After weeks of weather on steroids, the twittersphere has been blowing up with tales of the snow-pocalypse. My favorite is the story about a Mister Mom who t-boned his own home with a snowblower because he was taking a selfie while twerking. Hashtag awesome. Yes, it’s that time again. Lake Superior State University (LSSU) released…
Imagine you’re sitting on your couch on a Friday night and decide that you want ice cream. Since you don’t have any in your freezer, you order a pint using your mobile device. Your personal fitness tracking device notices your glucose level is high, predicts that you are unlikely to work out for the next…
The buzz around big data is deafening but I believe that much of the conversation has missed the point. Big data is not just a technological challenge; it’s a cultural challenge. Collecting and analyzing data is not enough. We need to start with business outcomes to truly leverage big data. Culture trumping technology was the underlying…
In collaboration with author Gary Hamel and the Management Innovation Exchange (The MIX), SAP launched a crowd-source initiative which poses the question: What is the one thing you’d change to help organizations unleash and organize human potential across boundaries? As I was researching my own answer around the notion of “empathy in business”, I found a Washington Post article titled: A New Model…