The MoPOP Disney Heroes & Villains exhibit: Last week, I was privileged to join other journalists and writers at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture to preview the touring display of Disney costumes originally shown at D23. For Serious Insights, I concentrate on logistics and design. As suspected, project management, IT, and some very diligent task…
First of all, if you do the DOs of meeting design, you can probably avoid most of the Don’ts. But sometimes people need a reminder about bad behavior influences design. The Management by Design methodology explores a number of ways to arrive at rules like this, by applying ideas like simplicity, equitability, forgiveness, flexibility. It…
Scenario Planning and Agility: The Case for Scenarios In an Uncertain World Scenario planning and agility. Too often, managers and leaders focus on how to control the near-term. They don’t take the time to consider if what they prioritize as important today, will be useful, valuable, or applicable to some future state of the organization. …
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Why Best Practices Suck: Best practices are like vampires: They can suck the life out of an organization, kill its productivity, drain its creativity, and bleed its initiative. If you seek perfection in perpetuity, your organization’s learning apparatus will become an animated corpse cursed through the ages to feed on its ancestors. Every organization…
Technology lock-in… “We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change ourselves, or the way we…
Be it Angry Birds or Galaga, Fallout or Call of Duty, knowing what good likes like is pretty easy. You gain an achievement, rack up three stars or land on a leaderboard. In the pre-social gaming days, it was a local leaderboard, the one on the game you were playing at Shakey’s Pizza during lunch…
Continue Reading What Leaders Can Learn from Playing Video Games: Why Excellence is a Mystery
What Leaders Can Learn From Playing Video Games: Mentoring Angry Birds players rack up high scores from exhibiting the most destructive of behaviors. In the world of management, however, it is important to think about the young birds, before they become angry, and how to help them find their place. How can you help them prosper? How…
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Do you think Shareholder value is stupid? Maybe you should. I was just referencing friend and colleague Stephen Denning, a Forbes contributor and author of The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative. Denning asserts in his Forbes post that: a growing number of CEOs agree: shareholder value theory is stupid. In the…
Continue Reading Salesforce CEO Slams ‘The World’s Dumbest Idea’: Maximizing Shareholder Value
Uncertainty and globalization Uncertainty and globalization are joined at the hip as the world vacillates between open borders and hostility, creating tension and opportunity. For every trend, there is an uncertainty waiting to derail it. Some outside force prowling at the edges of visibility waiting to pounce on what so many consider an inevitability. I…
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Emotional Infrastructure or HOW CLINGING TO CORE COMPETENCIES IS BREAKING YOUR ORGANIZATION’S HEART ORGANIZATIONS ARE MORE COMPLEX THAN EVER, AND FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON GARY HAMEL’S IDEA OF “CORE COMPETENCIES” IS BOTH OUTDATED AND DAMAGING TO YOUR COMPANY’S EMOTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE Since Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad put forth the idea of “core competencies” in a…
Happy New Year from Serious Insights! Strategic Thinking in Review Here are the top 10 2014 insights from SeriousInsights.net: What is an Information Worker? Welcome to the Serendipity Economy Scenario Planning: Getting to the Matrix How to write a good scenario planning focal question? Five Flappy Bird Addictions That Will Make You a Better Manager Why…
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Join knowledge workers all over the world in learning how to make collaboration better. Over the last year, Serious Insights Principal Analyst Daniel W. Rasmus has worked with vendors and consumers of technology to understand why collaboration technology doesn’t provide the business value it should. This research resulted in a new report: Why Collaboration is…
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Angry Birds Layoffs Rovio announced layoffs today as reported in Wired Rovio Layoffs Prove Mobile Gaming Is an Industry of One-Hit Wonders (October 2, 2014,) and elsewhere. I don’t believe, however, that Rovio’s issues stem from the inherent nature of mobile gaming. If we look at their iconic games, we find “innovations” that distract from gameplay…
Should I Delete E-mail During Vacation? A post on the BBC new magazine asks the question: “Should holiday email be deleted?” First, let me say to American readers that in this case “holiday” means “vacation.” What they mean to ask is: “Should I have incoming E-mail deleted while on vacation?” My answer, yes, but with a caveat. If you…
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Today the BBC asks, “Could tensions over Ukraine hit space?” The answer: absolutely, but NASA has not behaved like the master planner it should be with missions stretching far out in time. If NASA had effectively, and I say effectively because I can’t believe somewhere in NASA somebody didn’t run a scenario planning project that pointed…
Continue Reading Russia and Ukraine Expose Weak Link in NASA Planning
In the Guliver blog on Economist.com (Check-in desks Time to check-out?), the writer suggest that airlines do away with airport check-in. We do it all on-line anyway, and who would miss the queues waiting for check-i anyway?. Well, for the most part, self-check-in is common, but not universal (59% of people still check-in at the counter). Airlines…
Some organizations don’t plan at the speed of change: “Dan, our strategic plan is about to expire. Can you come and help use create a new one?” I get than phone call pretty often. My first statement is “sure,” followed by, “I do have to warn you that if you work with me, your…
What can we learn about leadership from a Dabo girl? Well, a lot as it turns out. I had the pleasure of hanging out with several Star Trek celebrities over the course of a recent Seattle convention weekend. I was particularly struck by Chase Masterson — Star Trek Deep Space Nine’s Leeta, the most featured of…
If you are young and spend your time on YouTube, or if you track the world of pop culture through Twitter, you probably know Tyler Oakley. If your YouTube experience is limited to talking dog videos, expand your horizons, and go find Tyler Oakley. Tyler has something to teach you about personal branding, and more…
Continue Reading Celebrity Insights: Tyler Oakley’s Take on Personal Branding for the Rest Of Us
Radio Shack (NYSE: RSH) is closing 1,100 stores, in large part, because it’s business has become a commodity. It is a classic case of a strategic misstep and short-sightedness. In 2000 Radio Shack abandoned its heritage name, Tandy, consolidating around the Radio Shack brand. They did this primarily because they had become a neighborhood…
Continue Reading Radio Shack Store Closures: It’s Time For People Make Things Again
Peter Drucker didn’t really believe in leadership as the core skill for business. Looking at his quotes yields an equivalency between efficiency and management, and between effectiveness and leadership. Management does things right, and leaders do the right things. But beyond a few passing quotes, Drucker dedicated himself to helping people do things right. Drucker…
Continue Reading 5 Reasons to Rediscover Management and Question the Focus on Leadership
There are several things former Microsoft Office President Kurt DelBene will need to learn quickly in his new role as Developer-in-Chief of the struggling healthcare.gov website in order to be successful. Here are three critical areas he will have to master. Customer-Facing Transaction Systems. DelBene is an application development expert focused on commercial software for…
Continue Reading Healthcare.gov: DelBene Needs to Embrace Transparency, Collaboration and Customers
Unlike sales-oriented CRM, Customer Relationship Management within IT focuses on relationships that help empower the business with technology, and if necessary, keep IT out of the way until the time is right Be a member of the customer’s team IT Customer Relationship Managers need to balance between what IT management thinks it needs to deliver,…
IT often drives change within organizations. This list of tens focuses on how IT can successfully implement new customer-facing systems and infrastructure. Executive engagement. Buy-in doesn’t cut it. If executives and organizational leaders don’t actively engage, drive, and lead the new applications or infrastructure, change won’t happen. Executives need to understand that adoption arrives by…
It’s Time to STOP Talking About Company Culture From my November 2013 Newsletter: Over the last month, I keynoted the Chief Learning Officer Symposium and KMWorld. At both conferences, many speakers talked about the need to evolve, shift or otherwise change company culture. In some cases, the shift was to support collaboration, in others knowledge…
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Many people working in offices, even factory floors, complain about interruptions. To a great degree, interruptions are things you accept. You may feel like they are push upon you, and sometimes they, are, but for the most part, they are things we do to ourselves out of boredom, frustration or lack of engagement. These…
William Shatner addresses the Creation Entertainment Star Trek Convention in Seattle, WA. August 25, 2013. Photo (c) 2013 by Daniel W. Rasmus. Star Trek conventions are not just places to dress up in your favorite Star Fleet uniform, don a t-shirt adorned with a favorite catch phrase, character or ship, or wait in long lines…
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A recent Strategy + Business article posed just this question: Strategy or Execution: Which Is More Important? I believe the answer is both. Execution without strategy is aimless. Strategy without execution is meaningless. It is that simple. Think about a strategy to enter a new retail area, say move a US retail brand into the…
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Read the entire post: How to Design Conflict Out of Your Organization at mylinkage.com. How to Design Conflict Out of Your Organization by Daniel W. Rasmus By Kristin Schepici on September 25, 2012 My book, Management by Design, offers readers a methodology that creates purposeful engagement in the design of work experiences. Too often, we…
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Here is a follow-up to the Infographic How to Design a Meeting in a collaborative work environment. This installment focuses on what to do when planning and running a meeting in a collaborative work environment. Next time, the DON’Ts. Work with attendees to co-create a prioritized agenda so everyone understands the purpose of the meeting,…
Continue Reading How to Design a Meeting in a collaborative work environment: The DOs
It seems like this week is the week to argue with bloggers over at Harvard Business Review. May latest read was Cure Your Company’s Allergy to Change by Brad Power. I don’t think fear of change is a structural issue. It is a behavioral and philosophical issue. Let me just focus on the list at…
Making sense of strategy: Explore this insight post from Boston Consulting’s Martin Reeves at HBR: Does Your Strategy Match Your Competitive Environment? Organizations don’t perceive their position correctly against the competitive landscape. Key insight is here: These distinctions are so important because the four different strategic environments require four different styles of strategy execution. For…
On this Harvard Business Review blog this morning, Daniel Markovitz, wrote a piece titled: How to Break Free from Email Jail. I appreciate Daniel’s manufacturing analogy of creating a pull system for information. His designs make sense. However, what Daniel doesn’t acknowledge is that outside of manufacturing, most organizations don’t run like manufacturing floors. That…
This infographic captures the basic principles of meeting design based on the Management by Design methodology. It derives from the consideration of balance and purpose, and the use of technology considered ahead of its use. For more details read about the DOs here and DON’Ts here. Download the PDF here. #howtodesignameetinginfographic
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We all run meetings like we know what we’re doing. We have been to so many meetings we just know how to run them. What we really know is how to model and perpetuate the poor habits and practices of our mentors and coaches, managers and colleagues. In the era of collaboration software, our meetings…
Ten Ways to Keep Customers Close In a turbulent economy, it is just as important, perhaps more so, to keep current customers close, as it is to fill the pipeline with new customers. The loss of a current customer translates into an immediate reduction of current and future revenue, and the need to invest in…
Since Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad put forth the idea of “core competencies” in a 1990 Harvard Business Review article, “The Core Competence of the Corporation,” organizations have taken this insight as permission to outsource various parts of their business operations. With “core competencies” organizations became machines with core functions that made the machine work,…
Continue Reading How Clinging To Core Competencies Is Breaking Your Organization’s Heart
My book, Management by Design, offers readers a methodology that creates purposeful engagement in the design of work experiences. Too often, we just let work happen to us, as managers and employees. In the daily rush to accomplish and fulfill, to satisfy and delight, we rarely take the time to consider why we do the…
Continue Reading How to Design Conflict Out of Your Organization
I have been thinking a lot about collaboration lately. Writing whitepapers, facilitating scenario planning sessions and running workshops. We still have a lot to learn about working collaboratively. Working together just happens most of the time. We don’t think about designing how we work, we just make the assumption that people know how to work…
Continue Reading August – Management by Design Tip of the Month: Design for Collaboration
In Management by Design I suggested that organizations need to invest in their work experience. That means people, wages, policies and practice, space and technology, that combine to create an experience that provides value through the employment relationship that then creates more innovation, lower turn over and high employee engagement. Zeynep Ton, a Professor of…
Continue Reading Retail Needs to Invest in Talent to Remain Competitive
