Back in 2006 I read the following point on Hugh Mcleod's blog, Gapingvoid: "If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives." At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that "companies should define customer segments ont he basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes" (p. 152) rather than the conventional constructs related to demographics. MORE
The title for this post is drawn from a recent assessment of SharePoint 2007 offered on Thomas Vander Wal's bog, Personal InfoCloud. Thomas' post, as always, offers a unique point of view on what Enterprise 2.0 consists and, specifically, how SharePoint measures up. MORE
Digital ethnography is an increasingly feasible research technique as smartphones decrease in cost and more people carry them around. The photographic capability of smartphones is an important resource in making digital research ubiquitous, giving people the ability to capture images and record observations as they go about their everyday lives, and characterize those observations for ethnographers. MORE
An early Skilful Minds post introduced The Great Innovation Debate, focusing on the distinctions between Tom Friedland's conception that when it comes to innovation the world is flat, and the alternative point of view espoused by Richard Florida that the world is spiky. Meaning that the aggregation of creative people in cities, in proximity to one another, largely drives innovation and economic growth. MORE
To get to the main point quickly, let's do what few people offering thoughts about collaboration actually do. Let's explicitly discuss what it is. First off, collaboration isn't just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals. Advocates of Enterprise 2.0 MORE
On several occasions I've discussed dialogue in relationship to organizational self-orientation, open innovation, brand strategy, and learning. MORE
My previous post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I contended that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano in an important post recently. In this post I'll continue that line of thinking by considering a combination of David's third and fourth questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy. MORE
So, here social media sits, between fear and faith. Needless to say, the truth about social media's implications for business design lies somewhere in the middle. The fact of the matter, as Todd Defren tells us, is that we need to begin seriously discussing "how Social Media Thinking will impact the greater whole of the company.". Customer Experience Enterprise 2.0 Experience Design social business design social media socialCRM MORE
I first read Edwin Abbot's Flatland several decades ago. It is considered the first science fiction novel, after all, since its first printing in 1885. I must say though, the simplicity of the story never really hit me until I watched the following Carl Sagan interpretation of it recently. MORE
46 
I've discussed ethnography several times before, the first taking note of the trend toward virtual anthropology and the next talking about the significance of Tom Boellstorff's ethnography of Second Life, followed by a couple of posts about ethnography in relation to empathy and globalization. Indeed, Cheskin's Davis Masten and Tim Plowman characterized digital ethnography as the next wave in understanding the consumer experience in a Design Management Journal article as early as 2003. MORE
My last post, Institutional Innovation and Podular Design, noted a number of insights from the Aspen Institute''s report, Institutional Innovation: Oxymoron or Imperative? One insight which I did not discuss is relevant to understanding the changing way teams work together in organizations and, by implication, in a Connected Company. MORE
We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that "as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling." MORE
A recent Economist article discusses the relevance of Dunbar’s Number to friending in Facebook, and its relation to the size of social networks, especially networks of close friends. The article addresses a similar issue outlined in an earlier post here on the influence of influentials on Twitter, which focused on findings of a recent study by members [.]. Social Networks social media facebook friends social core social media marketing social network social networking twitter Web 2.0 MORE
The trade-offs in deciding whether to implement a lingua franca policy are pretty well known. Pressure from other global players such as suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors who increasingly use English is one. Diversification of organizational tasks across departments in different countries creates bottlenecks without a lingua franca, increasing inefficiencies. A third reason relates to making mergers and acquisitions among global companies smoother in organizational terms. MORE
There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time. MORE
The Interaction Design Foundation is publishing Gamification At Work by Jankaki Kumar and Mario Herger for the public tomorrow. I just finished reading the book and taking notes thinking I might review it. However, rather than do a simple review of the book’s content, I decided to situate the major points from the book into a post on […]. MORE
The Altimeter Group’s report from earlier this year, The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, offers the above graphic to exemplify the way social networking develops as the social activities of businesses mature. I tend to feel skeptical about many developmental models in social business simply because markets differ, sometimes in fundamental ways, […]. MORE
Don't Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Play is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time. Specifically, my point is that those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles. MORE
What do you think the typical manager might say if you told them their employees don't gossip and engage one another in non-work related tasks enough? Most managers have heard of the watercooler effect without ever having the meaning of the concept sink in to their understanding of how it relates to performance and collaboration. A couple of studies released this summer dealing with performance and collaboration in teams merit consideration. MORE
Common wisdom among thought leaders who examine learning in organizations notes that most of the learning that occurs is done informally, or socially. However, informal learning has its own limitations that we all need to keep in mind as we think through the ways in which it adds value to business processes. Collaboration Customer Experience e-Learning 2.0 MORE
BRPs result in business exceptions and take up almost all of the time employees spend at work. Interestingly, much of the writing I see on Big Data is about making ERPs more efficient or making guesses about when to expect occurrences of a BRP. In other words, both goals are really about making coordination of organizational efforts more efficient and/or effective. Big Data Collaboration Ethnography Innovation Social Business Design Ubiquitous Computing Web 2.0 MORE
One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it. Experience Design Innovation Learning Experience Service Design Social Business Design User Experience Collaboration Customer Experience learnability learnable social learning user experience MORE
One of my earlier posts asked the question, Who's on Your Team? Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn't. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature. MORE
I've discussed ethnography, especially digital ethnography, several times taking note that, whether we use ethnography in marketing or design research remains irrelevant to the methods employed. What matters is whether we develop the research questions around the assumption that sociocultural practices provide the data source for answers. Ethnographers research settings, situations, and actions, with the discovery of surprising relationships as their most basic goal. MORE
I recently received an invitation from Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief at Interaction-Design.org to offer those who read this blog an early view of a new chapter on Social Computing in their encyclopedia. I’m a little late on this writing for you to get a pre-publication view of the chapter but I wanted to make sure and point it out for [.]. Collaboration e-Learning 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Social Business Design Web 2.0 MORE
In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP's voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation. Change Management Collaboration Experience Design Innovation Social Business Design Social Media Social Networks Web 2.0 MORE
Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice. MORE
At the end of February I co-presented at STL UX 2011 with Dave Gray. Our presentation was called Exploring the Usefulness of Chartjunk. The collaboration behind the presentation started as an exchange between the two of us on Twitter regarding whether the whole concept of Chartjunk is a myth. MORE
Social Flow in Gameful Design made the point that social flow contrasts to Csikszentmihalyi's original concept of individual or solitary flow, in which a person's engagement in actions is optimal, where they lose a sense of time and awareness of self in an intrisincally rewarding feeling. Social flow implies a qualitatively different order of the flow experience, a group-level experience. MORE
There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. Much of it misses the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don't experience as play. MORE
People discussing the pace of change that organizations face in dealing with connected customers, globalization, competition, distributed workforces, innovation, etc. often assert that a paradigm shift is needed. I agree with the basic point. However, the way forward is seldom clear and simple when facing the need for dramatic changes in how we think about organizing what we know into practical changes to such fundamental challenges. MORE
Skilful Minds
APRIL 30, 2013
Common wisdom among thought leaders who examine learning in organizations notes that most of the learning that occurs is done informally, or socially. However, informal learning has its own limitations that we all need to keep in mind as we think through the ways in which it adds value to business processes. Collaboration Customer Experience e-Learning 2.0
Skilful Minds
JUNE 24, 2013
The Interaction Design Foundation is publishing Gamification At Work by Jankaki Kumar and Mario Herger for the public tomorrow. I just finished reading the book and taking notes thinking I might review it. However, rather than do a simple review of the book’s content, I decided to situate the major points from the book into a post on […].
Skilful Minds
MARCH 27, 2013
The trade-offs in deciding whether to implement a lingua franca policy are pretty well known. Pressure from other global players such as suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors who increasingly use English is one. Diversification of organizational tasks across departments in different countries creates bottlenecks without a lingua franca, increasing inefficiencies. A third reason relates to making mergers and acquisitions among global companies smoother in organizational terms.
Skilful Minds
MAY 9, 2013
My last post, Institutional Innovation and Podular Design, noted a number of insights from the Aspen Institute''s report, Institutional Innovation: Oxymoron or Imperative? One insight which I did not discuss is relevant to understanding the changing way teams work together in organizations and, by implication, in a Connected Company.
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To charge or not to charge? That is the question many customer training teams are facing today. The answer, however, is not always a straightforward yes or no. Download this guide to learn more.
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Skilful Minds
JANUARY 31, 2013
In Social is the plural of personal JP Rangaswami contends that institutional innovation is required to achieve the potential that social software offers organizations in general, and for-profit companies in particular. JP's voice is one of several important contributions to current thinking about innovation. Change Management Collaboration Experience Design Innovation Social Business Design Social Media Social Networks Web 2.0
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 11, 2013
BRPs result in business exceptions and take up almost all of the time employees spend at work. Interestingly, much of the writing I see on Big Data is about making ERPs more efficient or making guesses about when to expect occurrences of a BRP. In other words, both goals are really about making coordination of organizational efforts more efficient and/or effective. Big Data Collaboration Ethnography Innovation Social Business Design Ubiquitous Computing Web 2.0
Skilful Minds
JUNE 19, 2013
The Altimeter Group’s report from earlier this year, The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, offers the above graphic to exemplify the way social networking develops as the social activities of businesses mature. I tend to feel skeptical about many developmental models in social business simply because markets differ, sometimes in fundamental ways, […].
Skilful Minds
JANUARY 2, 2013
An early Skilful Minds post introduced The Great Innovation Debate, focusing on the distinctions between Tom Friedland's conception that when it comes to innovation the world is flat, and the alternative point of view espoused by Richard Florida that the world is spiky. Meaning that the aggregation of creative people in cities, in proximity to one another, largely drives innovation and economic growth.
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Off-the-shelf elearning is applicable for a wide audience, but it won’t address your organization’s unique situations or distinctive content. So are these courses all that helpful? For sure! Read on for 7 secrets to make off-the-self learning your own.
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Skilful Minds
APRIL 1, 2011
Back in 2006 I read the following point on Hugh Mcleod's blog, Gapingvoid: "If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives." At the time I thought it conveyed nicely the point made by Gerald Zaltman in How Customers Think that "companies should define customer segments ont he basis of similarities in their reasoning or thinking processes" (p. 152) rather than the conventional constructs related to demographics.
Skilful Minds
DECEMBER 9, 2010
We know that most learning in the workplace is informal. Most observers put it at around 80%. Recently, John Hagel and John Seeley Brown contended that "as much as two-thirds of headcount time in major enterprise functions like marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management is spent on exception handling."
Skilful Minds
AUGUST 14, 2010
What do you think the typical manager might say if you told them their employees don't gossip and engage one another in non-work related tasks enough? Most managers have heard of the watercooler effect without ever having the meaning of the concept sink in to their understanding of how it relates to performance and collaboration. A couple of studies released this summer dealing with performance and collaboration in teams merit consideration.
Skilful Minds
OCTOBER 20, 2009
Word of mouth communities and networks using social software are increasingly spread over regional, national, and international borders, making them much more important to those who market branded products and services, online and off. The recent buzz around the concept of social business points to the growing importance of social networks and communities to the evolution of business practice.
Advertisement
It's no secret that front-line managers are essential to your organization's success. They form the base of your leadership development funnel and, most likely, account for over half of all your organization's leaders. Improving how front-line managers perform yields mouthwatering increases in how individual contributors perform.
Skilful Minds
MARCH 22, 2009
The title for this post is drawn from a recent assessment of SharePoint 2007 offered on Thomas Vander Wal's bog, Personal InfoCloud. Thomas' post, as always, offers a unique point of view on what Enterprise 2.0 consists and, specifically, how SharePoint measures up.
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 23, 2009
My previous post discussed the Open/Closed culture fallacy in social business design. I contended that leaders of large corporations are typically unable to answer the key strategic questions posed by David Armano in an important post recently. In this post I'll continue that line of thinking by considering a combination of David's third and fourth questions in light of the open/closed culture fallacy.
Skilful Minds
NOVEMBER 17, 2011
I recently received an invitation from Mads Soegaard, Editor-in-Chief at Interaction-Design.org to offer those who read this blog an early view of a new chapter on Social Computing in their encyclopedia. I’m a little late on this writing for you to get a pre-publication view of the chapter but I wanted to make sure and point it out for [.]. Collaboration e-Learning 2.0 Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Social Business Design Web 2.0
Skilful Minds
NOVEMBER 8, 2011
One of my earlier posts discussed the learnability of a service as a key challenge for experience design. Today I ran across this early video from Don Norman on learnability and product design. I thought I would share it. Experience Design Innovation Learning Experience Service Design Social Business Design User Experience Collaboration Customer Experience learnability learnable social learning user experience
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Even if you don’t have a formal program in place, customer onboarding is already happening at your organization. The question is, are you dictating it and guaranteeing a great experience? If not, this guide can help help.
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Skilful Minds
JULY 12, 2010
Digital ethnography is an increasingly feasible research technique as smartphones decrease in cost and more people carry them around. The photographic capability of smartphones is an important resource in making digital research ubiquitous, giving people the ability to capture images and record observations as they go about their everyday lives, and characterize those observations for ethnographers.
Skilful Minds
SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
There is nothing like an exception to the way things are done to highlight the need to increase knowledge sharing, especially if the exception is one instance of a pattern that results in bad experiences for customers. As Jay Cross recently noted, people learning at work rely on social, or informal learning, around 80% of the time.
Skilful Minds
MARCH 3, 2010
One of my earlier posts asked the question, Who's on Your Team? Its focus was on the importance of social software applications in the Enterprise to the ability of distributed project team members to recognize who is on their team at any point in time, and who isn't. Organizational analysts refer to the challenge as a boundary definition problem for teams, when members are spread across large distances whether geographic or cultural in nature.
Skilful Minds
MAY 21, 2011
Don't Gamify Wild Bill discussed the importance of designing for voluntary play in serious games. Play is the baseline requirement for any game designed to provide useful indicators for gauging individual and organizational successes over time. Specifically, my point is that those interested in gamifying employee engagement in social business, and who also aim to effectively use collaboration, must optimally design for emergence not just competition and cooperation as guiding principles.
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Do you struggle to achieve measurable results with your learning solutions? If so, you’re not alone. According to CEB, traditional training only creates 37% learning transfer. This guide explores the causes of poor transfer and concrete steps to achieving better outcomes.
Skilful Minds
APRIL 25, 2011
There is a lot, actually a whole lot, of buzz over the past year about the gamification of business, specifically marketing, training, customer service. Much of it misses the simple point that it is the experience with it, the playfulness of it, that makes a game. Not the scoring system, or the rewards, or anything else can make up for a game that participants (customers or employees) don't experience as play.
Skilful Minds
APRIL 5, 2011
At the end of February I co-presented at STL UX 2011 with Dave Gray. Our presentation was called Exploring the Usefulness of Chartjunk. The collaboration behind the presentation started as an exchange between the two of us on Twitter regarding whether the whole concept of Chartjunk is a myth.
Skilful Minds
JUNE 7, 2010
On several occasions I've discussed dialogue in relationship to organizational self-orientation, open innovation, brand strategy, and learning.
Skilful Minds
MARCH 1, 2009
A recent Economist article discusses the relevance of Dunbar’s Number to friending in Facebook, and its relation to the size of social networks, especially networks of close friends. The article addresses a similar issue outlined in an earlier post here on the influence of influentials on Twitter, which focused on findings of a recent study by members [.]. Social Networks social media facebook friends social core social media marketing social network social networking twitter Web 2.0
Advertisement
To charge or not to charge? That is the question many customer training teams are facing today. The answer, however, is not always a straightforward yes or no. Download this guide to learn more.
|
|
Skilful Minds
AUGUST 27, 2009
To get to the main point quickly, let's do what few people offering thoughts about collaboration actually do. Let's explicitly discuss what it is. First off, collaboration isn't just about people sharing information to achieve common goals. Collaboration is about people working with other people to achieve common goals. Advocates of Enterprise 2.0
Skilful Minds
JULY 28, 2009
I first read Edwin Abbot's Flatland several decades ago. It is considered the first science fiction novel, after all, since its first printing in 1885. I must say though, the simplicity of the story never really hit me until I watched the following Carl Sagan interpretation of it recently.
Skilful Minds
FEBRUARY 4, 2010
I've discussed ethnography several times before, the first taking note of the trend toward virtual anthropology and the next talking about the significance of Tom Boellstorff's ethnography of Second Life, followed by a couple of posts about ethnography in relation to empathy and globalization. Indeed, Cheskin's Davis Masten and Tim Plowman characterized digital ethnography as the next wave in understanding the consumer experience in a Design Management Journal article as early as 2003.
Skilful Minds
JULY 15, 2009
So, here social media sits, between fear and faith. Needless to say, the truth about social media's implications for business design lies somewhere in the middle. The fact of the matter, as Todd Defren tells us, is that we need to begin seriously discussing "how Social Media Thinking will impact the greater whole of the company.". Customer Experience Enterprise 2.0 Experience Design social business design social media socialCRM
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It’s well documented that people leave managers – not companies. Download this guide to learn how to shift the perspective from event to journey and how to take learners through Proficiency Journeys to get results.
Skilful Minds
OCTOBER 4, 2010
I've discussed ethnography, especially digital ethnography, several times taking note that, whether we use ethnography in marketing or design research remains irrelevant to the methods employed. What matters is whether we develop the research questions around the assumption that sociocultural practices provide the data source for answers. Ethnographers research settings, situations, and actions, with the discovery of surprising relationships as their most basic goal.
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