• The Science of Change – The key is that we need to change ourselves. We need to transform, not them. We don’t need to occupy Wall Street, we simply need to occupy Main Street because that is where they occupy us. It is not enough to marvel at our numbers, civil disobedience, and cardboard signs. We need a Science of change so that we can do so.
• steve jobs and the no @$$hole rule – Bottom line: I still believe in Sutton’s rule, but Jobs was exceptional. Almost no one had his deep knowledge of the high tech business or such an acute sense of style and design. Few can build an organization tailored to their personality. Most @$$holes will never be in Jobs’ league and will merely make our lives miserable. Long live the no @$$hole rule!
• live.hackr : Reader- – die gesamte dontdoevil-narration ist natürlich so viel wert wie klopapier, wenn sie sich mit facebook – und also das erste mal mit einem echten herausforderer – konfrontiert in einen moron verwandeln, der seine infomonopolistischen marktmacht ohne rücksicht auf verluste (auf seiten der user, wohin sollen sie den gehen, muhaha) ausnützt, um dem eigenen hoffnungsträger g+ ein gewisses momentum zu verleihen; wobei sie das alleine natürlich nicht evil macht, aber – wie diplix schön sagt – billig, schlampig und doof.
• Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? – >* – Fantastic post that articulates all my views on the matter better than I could ahve. I was looking forward to G+ integration and was appalled to find they just ripped my friends' shares out completely.
  The red subscribe button is hilarious in comparison to the rest of the monochrome scheme.
  I just hope they're soaking up feedback and prepared to move quickly on it
• Warum Sharing nun schlechter ist und wie man Vieles besser machen könnte | Google Reader schlanker und plussiger | News-Foren – Das für mich dominanteste Beispiel: Ich konnte bislang sehr bequem
  einigen Leuten *im Reader* folgen, ohne deren sonstige (für mich
  größtenteil irrelevanten) G+ Posts lesen zu müssen.

  Nun muss ich mir die für mich interessanten Teile aus deren weitaus
  umfangreicheren G+ Streams herausfiltern. Das ist mir persönlich zu
  zeitraubend und blöd.

  Ich verzichte nun komplett auf das Sharing und das Konsumieren von
  gesharten Inhalten.

• Unklartext – Das Schmidt-Steinbrück-Buch hält nicht, was der Hype verspricht. Anja Höfer im Gespräch mit Reinhard Hübsch. SWR2 Journal am Morgen vom 27.10.2011
• Kuchen für Alle! – Wir sind die 90%
• More Than Facebook: The Time Is Right For Social Business – Forbes – What’s keeping other companies from following their lead? Many executives recognize that social media is powerful, even if they still wonder in the back of their minds whether it’s just a time sink. Yet, even when they decide that there is potential, these execs get hung up on trying to figure how to apply social technologies to their companies, how to engage and empower their employees to participate.

  Here’s the trick with social business: Focus on people and culture.

• The Connected Company: Environment and Organization Come First « Dachis Group Collaboratory – Technology solutions will be applied to management challenges in time. Market forces make it nearly inevitable.  It remains to be seen if they’ll be effective without management interventions that consider the culture and human side of the equation.  It’s important to allow for new roles and ways of thinking to grow organically within an organization as a foundation for this transition.

  Our collaborative discovery sessions with clients reveal patterns to the environmental needs of major organizations. We’ve found that is helpful to share with clients a list of socially calibrated attributes that may prompt internal evaluation and change.

  How does your organization compare with this list? Are you ready to make a transition to managing a socially calibrated organization?

• Moving the Economy: The Future of the Maker Movement – Forbes – I’m motivated and moved by the idea, the belief – that the people who invent and build and make things have the power to change the world. People who “remix” something or hack a better way.
• Mobile Proliferation Killed Linux Hopes For World Domination | Forrester Blogs – _Analyst_ writes about things he doesn't understand. Sigh.
• SparkleShare: Webinterface für das Repository… und ein Fazit – Nachdem ich mich nun im Zuge meiner Blog-Artikel eine Zeit lang mit SparkleShare beschäftigt habe, möchte ich nun zum Schluss der Serie ein kleines Fazit dazu ziehen
• „Halloween – Warum verkleiden, wenn im Büro genug Horrortypen lauern?" – eine Typologie aus dem Gruselkabinett der schlimmsten Großraumvampire, Bürozombies und Schreibtischplagegeister
• Lokaltermin: Was darf es sein, Ernst Greten?: Management – impulse – Das Erstlingswerk des weltberühmten Architekten und Bauhaus-Gründers Walter Gropius. Dessen Glasfassade mit den durchsichtigen Gebäudeecken das sachliche, internationale Bauen vorwegnahm. Ein Schlüsselbau der Moderne.
• The cure for corporate inertia | opensource.com – Why are management processes the last bastion of resistance when a company is trying to change? I think there are three linked reasons.

  Management processes are a long way from the action. They support primary value-adding activities, but are often two or three steps removed from the marketplace, so feedback from customers about the need to work differently or more quickly is filtered and lost.
  There are strong vested interests at play. Board members like to offer advice and make decisions, lawyers like writing contracts. Turkeys don't vote for Thanksgiving. Enough said.
  Management processes are usually dependent on each other, and together they create a tightly-woven matrix that cannot easily be pulled apart. If you try to change one process, you upset a further two or three others, and pretty soon you are taking on the entire system.

• 10 ways to craft a career that will stand the test of time | opensource.com – five forces that will shape work and careers:

  ever greater globalization of innovation and talent;
  the development of ever more sophisticated connective technologies;
  profound changes in demography and longevity which will see many live until they are 100 and others live in regions where 40% of the population are over 50;
  broad societal forces that will see trust in institutions decrease and families become ever more re-arranged; and finally,
  the impact that carbon use and Co2 will have on how we think about our own consumption patterns.
  Taking this rich cocktail of forces into consideration here are my 10 tips about skills, networks and choices.

• Post-Privacy-Buch: “Fesselt die Datenschützer!” | ctrl+verlust – Hellers Buch ist ein kompletter Gegenentwurf zum Privatsphären- und Datenschutzdenken in Deutschland. Seine Argumente treffen das Grundverständnis vieler unserer Werte und Erzählungen ins Mark. Erfreulicher Weise wird Heller bei aller Radikalität nie eifernd, sondern bleibt immer nüchtern und sachlich.
• ETH Zurich Multimedia Portal: video, audio, podcast, webcast, live-streaming – Richard Stallman – Richard Stallman, A free digital society … über 2h Vortrag an der ETH Zürich

• Papierloses Büro – 10 Virtuelle Faxdienste im Überblick –
• http://www.relationship-economy.com/?p=14566 –
• Transforming into a social business – questions the technocentric way that many organizations have approached social business (or rather social software) this far and suggests a business-oriented approach to socializing business operations, focusing on how to use social technologies to support prioritized business operations and on supporting the transformation with the right change management approach.
• Social business tools are a strategic investment; driven by the business not IT – It’s business leaders, not their IT colleagues, who are driving purchasing decisions. Which makes sense: business leaders are tasked with deploying technologies for strategic advantage. They must move fast to gain a competitive edge.
• Hacking the IKEA Lack: One Table, Ten Different Ways –
• Fehlersuche: Shellskripten gesprächiger machen – Shellskripting ist ein Prozess, bei dem nicht immer alles so laufen muss, wie man sich das vorstellt. Gerade bei komplexeren Skripten bricht das Skript mal gerne im Probelauf ab. Doch wo steckt der Fehler? Mit einem einfachen Trick kann man das Skript dazu bringen, mehr Informationen auszuspucken. Dazu fügt man im Skript ein: set -x
• Daniel Treadwell – Google+ – Google+Blog for WordPress UPDATE 1.0.4 Google+Blog for… – Google+Blog for WordPress is a plugin that allows you to import your Google+ Public posts (and their comments) as blog posts into your WordPress setup

Via Anders Sundelin:

In his recent article in Long Range Planning, Business Models as Models, Charles explores the question “Are Business Models useful?” where he points out that they act as various forms of model: “to provide means to describe and classify businesses; to operate as sites for scientific investigation; and to act as recipes for creative managers”.

“Where do new ideas come from? This film is about design strategists and how they identify the right ideas. It was produced by the global innovation consultancy Continuum.”

Yahoo! is planning to shut down Brickhouse, the business unit I loved then and home to cool innovations like Yahoo! Pipes and FireEagle. Sad news, I always thought this to be an interesting innovation environment (think Allen curve , i.e. avoiding “the exponential drop of frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases.”). Well, enhancing collaboration and spreading of ideas will benefit from IT collaboration infrastructure, yet having functional areas designed into innovative work environments remains a good idea in my book.

Meanwhile Procter & Gamble and Google are doing a job-exchange program, where employees from the two companies spend weeks in each other’s staff training programs and meetings at the other company. Nice idea, this friendly (and cost-effective) consulting by people working in similar fields without being direct competitors (learning in best practices programs might achieve the same but is probably less flexible and somehow so old-school). And Clay Christensen argues in an interview with MIT Sloan Management Review’s Martha Mangelsdorf (“How Hard Times Can Drive Innovation“) that the economic downturn will have a positive effect on the environment for innovation:

One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend. And, statistically, 93% of all innovations that ultimately become successful started off in the wrong direction; the probability that you’ll get it right the first time out of the gate is very low.

So, if you give people a lot of money, it gives them the privilege of pursuing the wrong strategy for a very long time. In an environment where you’ve got to push innovations out the door fast and keep the cost of innovation low, the probability that you’ll be successful is actually much higher.

Time to Rethink Strategy? Here’s an Urgent Memo to the CEO by Paul Branstad, Bill Jackson, and Shumeet Banerji on how corporate leaders can move aggressively to seize new opportunities:

we are [...] entering a period during which the value of being able to act strategically and decisively for the long term will increase enormously. Preparing for this moment of opportunity is of paramount importance for your businesses’ position for years to come

Umair Haque says we need to rethink strategy itself:

A world of cheap, abundant, always-on interaction, where value is shifting to the edges, demands a fresh understanding of what’s truly strategic and what’s not.

Jeff Jarvis on how an edge strategy may be reached:

Where orthodox strategy advises hiding information and making things less liquid, what does edge strategy advise? Exactly the opposite: release information bottlenecks and make things more liquid.

Keith Sawyer on the emergent nature of worthwhile innovation efforts:

breakthrough innovation is improvisational – it emerges, unpredictably, from a long series of small sparks of ideas. No single one of those ideas determines the final form of the innovation that will later emerge

citing Peter Drucker:

“When a new venture does succeed, more often than not it is in a market other than the one it was originally intended to serve, with products and services not quite those with which it had set out, bought in large part by customers it did not even think of when it started, and used for a host of purposes besides the ones for which the products were first designed.” (1985)

Simon Wardley has published a video of his talk at XTech (“Why open matters – from innovation to commoditisation.”) Main topics are:
- An introduction to commoditisation, creative destruction and competitive advantage.
- An introduction to innovation
- An introduction to the underlying processes.
- Why nothing in management is simple.
- How this impacts IT.
- Why open is essential for a service world.

And I really should spend more time with ‘Thingamy’, a “Business Model Builder with instant delivery of Business Processes, Accounts and Reports.”

Ringier glaubt nicht, dass irgendein Zeitungs- oder Zeitschriftenkonzern schon den Königsweg gefunden hat. „Mit unserem Unwissen bewegen wir uns im großen Tross aller Medienhäuser. Alle stochern noch etwas im Nebel“, lautet sein Befund, der selbst den Internetriesen Google einschließt.

Nun ja, ob die Diagnose stimmt? Weitsichtige Unternehmen und Unternehmer werden stets aus diesem Tross ausbrechen und Geschäftsmodellinnovationen anstoßen wollen. Und ja, auch die “Etablierten” sollten – aufbauend auf den noch dominanten Positionen in ihren Kerngeschäften – ihre Geschäftsmodelle erweitern, umbauen, redesignen. Auch intern, bspw. wenn sie die operativen Prozesse der Zusammenarbeit optimieren. Insofern ist Ringiers Beobachtung schon etwas fatalistisch (oder euphemistisch ausgedrückt: konservativ) – es wäre bedauerlich wenn das der Stand der strategischen Entwicklung von Medienunternehmen im Internet bliebe.

As Google gets bigger, innovation becomes harder and more costly, says former engineer.

Philipp has made a transcript of the interview, I marked up some of the interesting stuff:

I had a number of accomplishments that I’m really proud of at Google. But I think for me I really wanted to sort of, you kow, forge my own path, if we can do it on our own. When we make decisions, I get to just look up from my computer and say, “Hey, you think we should do this?” And then people say, yes, we should do it.

I haven’t made a single PowerPoint presentation. We don’t even use Microsoft Word documents; we just talk to each other.

It’s a really, really interesting dynamic environment. I think no matter how innovative a culture is at a large company, you can’t really reproduce it. And I think that’s what’s so infectious and wonderful about a startup environment, that I think draws a lot of people to it (…)

With 70 people the odds that two people are working on the same thing are probably pretty low. With 17,000, it’s almost a 100% that two or three people will be working on the same idea, or at least very similar ideas, at different parts of the organization. I think there is a certain amount of cost to just coordinating that activity. I’ve been really impressed with how Google has been able to scale, but inherently it has to change – just because there’s that coordination cost.

I think some bloggers call it “strategy tax.” You know, when you grow, your strategy becomes more and more important, and it taxes sort of everything you do a little bit… because everything you do, it strays from that strategy. You know, there’s a huge cost to that. Whereas I think for smaller companies, the strategy is less well-defined, or certainly the impact of straying from it is much lower.

I don’t know if the conclusions are right, and I especially don’t like the idea of a strategy “tax” somehow distracting and hindering innovative ideas and people. To me, this just shows a poor understanding of strategy, strategic thinking and strategy making. But the perspectives and views into Google are worth noting anyway (“look Ma, no powerpoint”), add this to my other Googley posts.