Category Archives: Consulting
Spark!, Now What?
…If you are paid for your ideas, then it is a different story. While it is often prudent for your good ideas to find and make friends with other good ideas, building a more comprehensive good idea, you frequently do not have that luxury. Your ideas often have to mature quickly. More importantly, your ideas often need to be shared with others under a deadline, and in a manner that will drive behaviors. No small task. Continue reading
Spark!
Spark. The sound of an idea coming to life. Once born, it will seek out other ideas and inspire people to build on it, growing into and morphing into many other shapes and sizes… Continue reading
Next Level Thinking
Changing your way of thinking is not easy. Culture, habit, and time pressures conspire to keep the things as they are. getting to the next level, regardless of what level that may be, requires this very change however… Continue reading
Margin Notes
…Another tool I have found is to review margin notes of managers, directors, and above. When available, if you are able to take a look at meeting agenda’s, presentation handouts, status reports, and the like you may notice something quite interesting. The handwriting which people place on these documents are far more than simple markings. The handwriting which in the margins is the individual’s personal take on specific items. In a similar way that handwriting analysts are able to understand a writer from their handwriting (based a direct connection from brain to pen to paper), margin notes are created in the same way… Continue reading
Leading at the Edge
…At the edge, the action is about change. The action is about identifying a vision and working towards transformation of an organization. In the post noted above, Edge IT is defined as functions and services that rhyme with IT Strategy, workforce planning, financial and operational modelling, scalability and capacity planning. This is an area where leadership makes all the difference… Continue reading
Top 10 Posts of 2009
The best audience is intelligent, well-educated, and a little drunk.
-Alben W. Barkley Continue reading
Blindspots
…Every so often reality hits. An outside entity steps in to hold a mirror up to ourselves that provides a stiff body check to our egos. Sometime this is in the form of a player who has not been part of our league and provides a benchmark to compare to. Sometime, and this is the ego crushing part, it is in the form of a videotaping performed by a local tavern to entice vulnerable old men to watch their game while sharing a refreshment or two. Continue reading
Physics of IT – What Have We Learned?
While not a complete list, these notable items clearly show that Newton’s physics do apply to IT organizations. Looking at your IT organization in this light allows you additional ways to think through your decisions, and how to direct your organization to its future state. Continue reading
Physics of IT – The Forces You Bring With You
Achieving meaningful change is hard – and the greater the mass, or greater the force of headwinds, the more difficult it is to succeed. It begs the question of “what forces can we marshall to achieve the change we need?” Continue reading
Physics of IT – Force of Headwinds
We never really begin any of our endeavors in an organization from a point of total calm. There are many forces at play, internal and external, which cause us fight headwinds in all that we do.
In physics, we can calculate the net force in effect through vector arithmetic. From this set of calculations we learn that forces compound in both direction and magnitude resulting in the net force in play. Continue reading
