Successful Workplace

What type of company makes a good target to be acquired? There are the obvious revenue, strategic, market, product, and R&D considerations. Those are all opportunity plays and are in themselves good reasons, but what about the risk? How do you decide in advance which companies can be acquired without being destroyed? For that, there […]

At the Structure Data Conference this morning, Kleiner Perkins partner Michael Abbott encouraged people to think about apps from the perspective of engineers and designers. What strikes me about his comment is how nothing has changed from the early days in technology, where everyone agreed the end user experience needs to be managed alongside the […]

That’s the creative tag line for Makie Lab, a UK-based startup that allows children to design their own custom dolls via the iPad, print them on a 3D printer, and have them delivered in the space of two weeks. It is a personalized service standout story. Space This service knows its audience. If there’s one […]

Recently, I’m finding that I’m working with more and more startups. This is exciting – to get an early glimpse at tomorrow’s industries and products. It’s also rewarding in that it shows that today’s startups (as opposed to their extinct Web 1.0 ancestors) are consciously leveraging the proven body of management theory in savvy new ways. I took […]

We have a basic human need to know what’s happening around us. More and more, companies are addressing this need by exposing parts of their process that never saw the light of day in the past. Done well, it reduces anxiety and helps make customers into fans of whatever company they’re engaging with.  Three recent […]

Throughout the weekend I’ve been hooked on a simple app that actually tells me very little.  Last week, based on stellar reviews (and maybe some hype), I signed up for an account with the email inbox management app Mailbox.  That’s when the waiting game began. Unlike many online services that do slow rollouts, only alerting you when […]

Companies put a great deal of focus on goals and strategies and often less effort goes into the tactics and guidance for how work actually gets done. If you’ve seen the viral video for the Harlem Shake, it illustrates what most companies look like under their corporate covers. Doing the Harlem Shake Enjoy this short […]

It is easy to think we’re the first to live in such disruptive times. Not even close to true. I recently visited a Civil War battlefield and had a great conversation with one of the reenactment actors who happened to be a history buff.  In our twenty minute conversation, he told me two remarkable, very […]

Employees doing the hardest work almost always have the best view of how to improve the work they do. But all too often this insight into work process is squandered simply because no one asks for their feedback. They are paid to work, not to think, no? No. Not at Toyota. An elegant solution to […]

Sometimes change is so gradual yet so ubiquitous that we don’t see the enormous implications of what’s really happened until somebody says it in a new way. I recently had such an experience when I read Google’s Michael Jones on How Maps Became Personal in the Atlantic.  A lot of the ideas in this piece jumped […]

2012 is coming to a close and I’m taking stock of my BPM experiences with clients over the past 365 days. After reviewing my notes and files, the theme of governance showed up again and again as the most challenging problem or previous project failure. All this made me want to dig a little deeper […]

I eat a lot of pomegranates these days. These fantastic fruits provide potent antioxidants and have anticancer properties. They also reduce blood pressure and atherosclerotic plaque. Pomegranates are in season and taste delicious. But my wife was starting to hate them. Deseeding Like all things in life, I started out as a pomegranate deseeder novice.  Several months ago, I used to do this by […]

Recently I was working with an organization which acquired a smaller company with $100 million of  annual sales.  Fast forward one year.  The newly merged business unit was struggling to bring in $30 million in sales. Sales continued to be flat for another two years before they started to grow again and didn’t reach their […]

I remember the amazement I experienced the first time I saw Google’s autocomplete in action. With this small feature, Google revolutionized knowledge management. No longer did users have the hit-or-miss experience of having to enter multiple searches to figure out the best term. Google provided real time feedback on the the most commonly grouped terms. […]

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? […]

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 […]