Successful Workplace

Little changes are boring and big changes always get the spotlight. The Internet of Things promises to increase internet connections from approximately 2 billion people centered devices today to 52 billion people and “things” within 10 years. Wow, what would our grandparents think of our new world? Has anyone ever lived in such a time? […]

I just read Daniel Goleman’s piece on storytelling & leadership. I thought about all my own lessons learned as a sales manager; and how easy it was for me to stop doing the things that served me well as a salesperson, when I became a manager. You know those times in life where you catch […]

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. In the cage, hang a banana on a string and put a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water. […]

This afternoon I was able to sit in on a session delivered by TIBCO’s Ivan Casanova, Creating 21st Century Applications in an Event Enabled Enterprise. Data in motion, data at rest Ivan took the audience through a detailed look at how the Gartner Nexus of Forces plays itself out in the real world. He provided examples […]

GE set the newswires and webzines aflame when they released the report Industrial Internet: Pushing the boundaries of Minds and Machines. It is a comprehensive (at least at the industries GE supports) report and it would be easy to spend hours just looking at the beautiful graphics. CEO Jeff Immelt himself wrote an article for GigaOM […]

Gartner’s Application Architecture, Development & Design Conference kicked off this morning in Las Vegas with the question, “Will there be an end to the increasing pace of technology change?” We all know the answer to that question, so the follow-up question is, “How do we protect legacy investment while remaining competitive…change without breaking the bank?” […]

Today kicks off the 2012 Gartner Application Architecture, Development and Integration Summit (AKA AADI) in Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s bright…no, still dark…and early and I’m ready to head over to Caesar’s Palace for the breakfast. Even before the getting to Las Vegas, I was able to use Gartner’s app to find the agenda and to create a personalized […]

Bah humbug There are many reasons you could hate Christmas; the endless adverts for electronics, clothing and jewelry started in late October and every shop is playing Christmas carols nonstop. The Company Christmas Party which Jeremy Clarkson described as “It is the damp log in the fire, the mould on the smoked salmon, the advertisement in the […]

In July Steve Ballmer announced SharePoint 2013 to an eager audience and gave access to the preview. New Social features, improved MySite interface, Skydrive for document storage, improved collaboration, Azure workflow, newsfeeds, improved records management and compliance….it’s a bucket list that seems to tick all the right boxes for an enterprise social platform. But the […]

In theory, actively engaging your front line employees in improving the way work is done makes perfect sense. It allows front line workers to learn by doing. It builds capability. It gets the work done. It builds emotional commitment to changes. Yet in practice, leaders seldom choose to actively engage the front line when redesigning work. Why? […]

These days, the Internet is divided between the makers and the takers. That is a bit loaded and a bit simplistic, but hear me out. I have felt this way from the beginning of the web era. Let’s start in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996. My dear friend Justin and I had a loud argument in […]

There’s lots of hype around Big Data but every now and then something finds its way through the buzz and confusion. In today’s TechCrunch, there was an excellent read by Dr. Michael Wu, Principal Scientist at Lithium, an organization that describes its role as “helping companies unlock the passion of their customers”. Wu explains very […]

Unsubscribe. That’s become a constant activity leading up to Black Friday and afterward, too. And these are emails coming from the places that I know and trust. The ones I’ve gladly given my email to in to past. They were good about sending me emails once in a while and for that reason, I actually […]

Our 10-year-old plasma TV died a few weeks ago. Knowing the big deals were about to start, we put off buying another. At the same time, we refuse to shop on Black Friday. In fact, if we can avoid it, we steer clear of anything that looks like a shopping mall, strip mall, department store…it […]

One process that we all hate performing is expense reports. If you don’t hate them, you’re probably an accountant and nothing can be done for you. For the rest of us, it is a dreaded requirement. In my workplace, the process for expense reports is a pretty standard one. We have to send PDF’s of […]

We’ve watched so many ideas move from the consumer world to the workplace in the past several years. Search, iPhones, apps, and social networks have all become standard in the enterprise. The consumerization of IT has had a major impact on the the working world and there’s no reason to believe it is over. So […]