September 2009 Archives

Brad Hinton has a recent post On clarity, where he suggests that a key element of knowledge management has been ignored: the goal of being able to do something with all this stuff of knowledge management. I was reminded of context.

Lucas McDonnell had a nice post on 6 signs your knowledge management strategy is in trouble. One could imagine some other signs too.

The April 2009 McKinsey Quarterly has an article that got my blood boiling by just reading the title, "The irrational side of change management." Fortunately, the article by Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller isn't quite so inflammatory once you actually read it.

Dennis Stevens has a nice description of how Theory of Constraints and Big Agile relate to each other. I've known that the do, but I hadn't given much thought to the connections.

Patrick Lencioni was the keynote speaker today at the Project Flow conference. He did a great job of speaking on the topic of "Building a Culture of Teamwork and Engagement" with a focus on telling hilarious stories about business and himself. I suspect you could pick up a lot of the below from reading his books, but here is a summary of the 90 minutes he spent with us today.

The fundamentals of CCPM workshop was interesting in that I saw some new simulations (games) and he put the vicious cycle of standard operations in a drawing that made a lot of sense to me.

Luis Suarez pointed to an entertaining YouTube video produced by one of his IBM colleagues, which has me pondering the tendency we (in business) have of jumping from bad effects to a "solution" without understanding the underlying cause.

This week, I get to spend several days in San Francisco at Realization's Project Flow 2009 conference. Hopefully, I get to meet some additional friends.

A week ago, the Sunday Boston Globe carried a piece on Eugene Litvak's work on helping hospitals improve. Flow is the key.

Glen Alleman of Herding Cats has a nice piece that talks about planning, What Does a Good Schedule Look Like? I offer up my list of elements of a good schedule.

Tesco is using weather forecasts to predict demand. Instead, it might be a better idea to design the supply chain to be flexible and fast to respond to actual changes in consumer demand.