Successful Workplace

There are three fundamental ways that companies can improve their processes in the coming decade: (1) expand the scope of work managed by a company to include customers, suppliers, and partners; (2) target the increasing amount of knowledge work; and (3) reduce cycle times to durations previously considered impossible (as I discussed in my last […]

“Please do not vote for Obama.” That was the post that went up supposedly from Gaston Memorial Hospital in Gaston County, North Carolina. It wasn’t their post, and in fact, Gaston Memorial Hospital didn’t have a Facebook account of their own. Therein lies the problem: If we don’t claim our own identity, someone will happily claim […]

At the recent Gartner Summit they talked about the Nexus of Forces which are changing the face of business: “A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities.” I covered this in more detail in a recent blog Gartner Nexus […]

I am exposed to organizations doing some very innovative things with their organizational processes. They are state-of-the-art in managing leveraging process-improvement tools, such as Lean, Six Sigma, or other homegrown or hybrid improvement methodologies. They focus a great deal of effort in refining processes, better managing processes, and/or reducing waste from their organizational processes. I […]

When it comes to operational improvement, organizations today are light years ahead of where they were two decades ago, but there’s no time to celebrate yesterday’s wins. They won’t immunize your organization against this decade’s march of ongoing progress. That’s because information technology — not just the Internet, but also mobile devices, “big data” for […]

Fascinating to see social media climb from adolescence to the point where major corporations are maintaining Houston Control-like centers to respond to social media. From sports teams to corporations, this is the new reality. A CNN Money story cites Dell’s version: Dell’s social media ground control and command center in Round Rock, Texas, has a total of […]

A recent blog post by Seth Godin (@ThisIsSethsBlog) created one of the “POW!” moments for me. The writeup was about organizations that always deal with “problems,” and what happens when there are no more problems to solve. Problem solvers don’t function well when they don’t have any problems to solve. They often seem lost. We’re […]

The good salesperson is truly result-oriented. He doesn’t stop till he gets things done. So he fights a hard fight – though I am sure he would claim it was a ‘right fight’. He pushes and edges his way forward. He calls and counsels and goads. He knows when to sell hard. He knows when […]

Impatience. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a CIO and his IT department. In the old days the CIO was responsible for everything that managed information, commanded an enormous budget and sat in a very tall chair at the CEO’s table. This was the norm until the ‘Internet of things’ took over and […]

Ever dreamt an amazing invention or a catchy song?  You wake up with every intention of harnessing the idea — “OMG, it’s amazing” —  but you can’t find a pen or a piece of paper. Or your dog jumps on the bed so you just blindly start your routine and take her out for a […]

Reblogged from IT :: redux: The London Olympics has kicked off in earnest and someone reporting on the news used the phrase “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” when referring to the UK’s rather lacklustre medal count. And it got me thinking. With the economic crisis as it is everyone is treating enterprise change as […]

Yesterday, I stopped in at my favorite vacation coffee shop in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Looking around, I was suddenly struck that seven out of the eight laptops on the tables were Macs. This sea change in computer preferences is not just limited to hipsters you might expect to find at a coffee shop in a […]

Last week, I listened to SAP’s weekly radio program, In the Cloud with Game-Changers, and the topic was the social enterprise. The program featured a panel of the following very talented social business experts: Brent Leary, Partner at CRM Essentials Sameer Patel, Global VP of Enterprise Social Software at SAP Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Social Media […]

There has been a great deal of debate about whether social media inside the workplace is a fad or delivers real business value.  There are several reasons why social media has gotten bad press. The moniker “Facebook for the enterprise” has not helped, as Facebook is seen as a great way of wasting time outside […]