Successful Workplace

In a blog today, Theo Priestley asks the question, “Are we that afraid of the customer to create a paperless society?” How is it possible that we’re still talking about that in 2013? As crazy as it seems, paper is stubbornly hanging on across vast swaths of industry, including government, healthcare and even overnight shipping. […]

What do you do if you’re a leader in a large, successful organization with an entrenched bureaucracy, and you see the need for innovation? Can you change the way a large organization — such as the federal government — does its work, when all the forces are arrayed for stability and conservatism? Consider the story […]

I may just have seen the next breakthrough technology company in its infancy. Yesterday, I spent the morning taking a behind the scenes tour of the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center, in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb of Columbus.  The DEC is home to 80 aspiring start-up companies focused in the fields of Technology, Green, and International business. […]

If there’s one thing that defines Apple’s rise over the past decade, it has been the lack of defensiveness on their relentless march forward. CEO Tim Cook spoke this morning at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference and his words were fascinating for what they say about their attitude: Apple doesn’t care too much. […]

What if a box as small as Ouya was all you needed to run your business ? Mainframe is becoming extinct. Software is becoming leaner, faster. Cloud is digitally pervasive. In-Memory data and parallel processing across an Internet of Things will be a reality. Startup businesses are becoming leaner, more agile. And all you’d need […]

In an excellent post on Wired, David Gelernter makes the argument that we’re approaching The End of the Web, Search and Computer as We Know It. In what sounds like a science-fiction statement, Gelernter says that,  “The space-based web we currently have will be gradually replaced by a time-based worldstream.” We have evidence of what […]

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 […]

How many times can you afford to be wrong at work? In life, we are probably wrong everyday. We make wrong decisions, make a wrong bet, or say the wrong things to people. However, life keeps going and we move on pretty quickly, learning something new as we go. In love, we are often wrong […]

Have you noticed how tech savvy children have become but are no longer streetwise ? I read Jaisundar’s thoughts on his own site last week and there was a slight pang of regret in where technology and innovation seems to be leading us all. It was around the time I was trying to figure if […]

As part of life in Southern California, we have the luxury of hiking and backpacking throughout the year. And we don’t just stay near home where it is convenient. The photo is of a recent trip to Nepal where we spent three glorious weeks in the Himalayas (the mountains in the distance). We are those […]

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 […]

If you were born in 1700 Europe, you had very few options. There were many, many things that held you back from being whatever your destiny might have been based on your energy and creativity. Fear was the least of your challenges. Flash forward to now. For anyone with even average drive and creativity, fear […]

Scared. Threatened. Dragged out of your comfort zone. Struggling to make sense of the future. You should be. The opening keynote was inspiring, theatrical and terrifying in equal measure. The key theme for Gartner’s annual Symposium IT Expo in Orlando last week and this week in Barcelona for nearly 10,000 delegates was the Nexus of […]

Microsoft was so successful in software that they missed perhaps the biggest shift, a shift still happening, since the Internet itself. Many other companies are going to miss the shift to the Internet of Things, but they don’t have to. Microsoft as an also-ran Once upon a time, young Bill Gates and Paul Allen, inspired […]

Can creativity beat quantity? For most of the last thirty years, the manufacturing process was the long pole in the tent, so the work went to the cheapest places where mass production = competitive pricing. 3D printing promises to turn this on its head and make creativity matter again. 3D Printing If you watch the […]

The Internet is coming up on 20 years soon and there will be an enormous amount of analysis on how it changed the world. There’s no doubt that it connected, globalized, outsourced, and mobilized our lives. But what it never did…thought some expected it to, was give us money for nothing. Dire Straits cynical look […]