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Balancing LifeGo to more information on balanced life Programming in the Lotus Position. Naked Business, Tia O'Brian, Upside July 29, 1999. "Normally, I don't think of IBM engineers as Buddhist monks. Especially in Silicon Valley, where adrenaline rushes are the naturally occurring addictive drug of choice. But such a character does exist, and he's now trying to revolutionize the way high tech's worker bees cope with their 24/7, stock-option-driven lives. Meet Les Kaye, a retired IBM engineer turned abbot of the local Zen Meditation Center turned corporate meditation trainer." Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. An Interview with Robert Putnam. While no article on how to live a more balanced life, this groundbreaking article (and the book that came from this) show the relationship between our time commuting and the decline of contributing to and participating in the community where we live. Quite provocative. See the book and the website, too. Is it really possible to simplify? Elaine St. James column from Universal Press Syndicate. Many of us are the product of our culture, which says that having too much and doing too much are the accepted standard we should all strive for. But so many of us are finding that that standard complicates our lives and keeps us from enjoying the things that really matter. Keep It Simple. Article about Elaine St. James by Michael Warshaw in Fast Company Magazine, June 1998. The entire issue was devoted to Getting a Life. "One way to get a life is to simplify the one you have. Simplicity guru Elaine St. James offers principles and techniques to make your life less complicated and more rewarding at work and at home. Now, what's so complicated about that?" CommunityGo to more information on community Internet Community Primer Overview and Business Opportunities by Richard P. Adler and Anthony J. Christopher of Digital Places. Excerpt from Net Success includes the following sections: 1. What Are Virtual Communities? 2. A Brief History of Virtual Communities 3) How Authentic Are Virtual Communities? 4. Capitalizing on Virtual Community Opportunities 5. Participating in the Community 6. Building a Virtual Community 7. Encouraging Member Participation 8. Staffing a Virtual Community 9. Virtual Worlds, Real Estate where Virtual Communities Gather 10. Conclusion. Community Defined: What We Know Carol Anne Ogdin. Smith Weaver Smith. Talking Knowledge. November 1998. "Forming community is a complex process that has been going on since before the first humans walked the Earth. Until modern times, however, community formation has seldom been done with conscious intent or plan. Yet, successful communities have discrete characteristics that anthropologists have documented. It's self-evident that cultures and communities that survive long enough to be studied have characteristics more desirable than those that failed to survive and were therefore not available for study." The E-Business Community must be embraced. Don Tapscott. Computerworld 09/28/98. "Though it's been with us less than two decades, it's increasingly evident that today's state-of-the-art virtual corporation is really just a transitional structure that's nearly obsolete. New and superior forms of doing business, based on the Internet, are emerging. The most important of these is called the E-Business Community." Social Capital. Training Magazine. November 1998. David Stamps. Do social bonds create economic wealth? And can they be measured in a way that influences corporate decision-making? At a time when most large corporations regard themselves as players on a global stage, do economic and social ties to a single country--let alone to a single local community--still matter? Eyeballing Community Penelope Patsuris and Adam L. Penenberg. Forbes 11.16.98. It's about community. There are no campfires and only a virtual welcome mat but a community is what many sites are after... The Paradox and Promise of Community. Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers. Excerpt from The Community of the Future (Jossey-Bass); 1998. "We human beings have a great need for one another. As described by the West African writer and teacher Malidoma Some, we have an instinct of community. However, at the end of the 20th century this instinct to be together is materializing as growing fragmentation and separation." Cyberspace Inn keeping: Building Online Community. Copyright John Coate. SFGate.com Early January, 1998. "...the once-obscure notion of online or virtual community has become commonplace to the point that it is now in vogue to declare almost any online gathering of people a community. Recently I said in joking to a friend, 'these days an online community seems to be defined as any group of people any place, for any length of time, for any reason, that communicates.' And, indeed that may be right: I can concede that it is plausible to use the word community to describe a huge variety of social configurations." Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure? By Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson. Community is an important aspect of life for most people. Cooley (1983) says that all normal humans have a natural affinity for community. He suggests that the primary factor inhibiting the formation of communities, no matter what their scale, is that they are difficult to organize. Extending the moral ideals inherent in nearly all individuals to the notion of community requires a system or institutional framework An interview with Howard Rheingold by Full Circle Associates. April 1999. It answers the following questions: What has been your experience with the value of content and community? Has it helped a community form and grow? Is it a driver or a side issue? What are the effects of online communities on our off-line lives? What is your take on the current state of online community today? What are people doing with it? Who are the people taking part? Why? What is the most surprising trend that did or did not happen with online communities? What do you think are the major trends in online community? What will the next year, five years bring? Building online communities by S. Ryan (12/2/97) To be successful, Web sites need a loyal audience that returns again and again. Besides creating useful, lively content and updating it regularly, one of the best ways to keep people coming back is to create a sense of community. 10 tips for building online communities. Creativity and Thinking SkillsGo to more information on cognitive/thinking skills Human CapitalHuman Capital in the Business Web by Don Tapscott, David Ticoll and Alex Lowy. Workforce Online, June 5, 2000. "Imagine the impact of millions of these fresh-thinking, energized kids, armed with the most powerful human capital in history, hitting the workforce. This wave has just begun. The Net Generation (N-Gen) will transform the nature of the enterprise and how wealth is created, as their culture becomes the new culture of work. This generation is exceptionally curious, self-reliant, contrarian, smart, focused, able to adapt, high in self-esteem, and globally oriented ..." Getting the Most from Your Smartest People: What distinguishes great teams, such as those that made Snow White or built the stealth fighter? They solve problems others deem impossible. Alan Farnham. Fortune. March 17, 1997. "If two heads really were better than one, nobody would need to read this pair of books, which, from different vantage points, take aim at the same problem: group stupidity. Persons individually smart, when put into groups, have arrived at decisions fabulously dumb..." Haiku, Cherry Blossoms, Sushi and... Notes? Japan's culture is unchanged by technology. Tom Davenport. CIO Magazine. November 15, 1996. "I've always suspected that technology by itself doesn't transform the cultures of organizations or societies (or that if it does, it takes decades to work its magic). This belief was reinforced by a recent trip to Japan... " A New Way to Think About Employees: They are not simply human capital or company assets. Thomas A. Stewart. Fortune. April 13, 1998. "They are not simply human capital or company assets. They are investing themselves in an enterprise, and that means they should expect an equitable return. In 1988, D. Quinn Mills, a professor at Harvard Business School, published IBM: The Profitable Art of Full Employment. The book celebrated the no-layoffs policy at IBM, one of the most successful companies in capitalism's history. On its payroll that year: 387,112 people."
Education & TrainingGo to more information on lifelong learning Go to training & learning FAQs Go to more information on adult learning Go to more information on learning-to-learn Peter Drucker is High on Webeducation. Peter Drucker. Forbes Global, May 15, 2000. "Education is already grabbing a major chunk of America's gross national product. I believe that the US now spends around $1 trillion on education and training. This number will increase rapidly, but the growth won't be in traditional schools, which currently take about 10% of the GNP (kindergarten through high school, 6%; colleges and universities, 4%). The growth will be in continuing adult education. Online delivery is the trigger for this growth, but the demand for lifetime education stems from profound changes in society. In simplest terms, people who are already highly educated and high achievers increasingly sense that they are not keeping up." E-Learning: Meeting the Needs of the Business and its Employees. Released June 2001 A cost-reducing approach that increases access to training and delivers highly customized information, e-learning can seem like a savior for organizations. Yet some organizations become so captivated with the opportunities of e-learning that they neglect its purpose. Accelerating Learning at a Power Construction Company. This article was co-written by APQC and originally appeared in KM Review. [Requires Adobe Acrobat] Net-Based Training Goes the Distance. Sarah Evans. Special to The Washington Post, May 15, 2000. "Xerox, like countless other businesses, is rushing to take the e-train. As with so many other aspects of our daily lives, the Internet is changing the way companies train their workers, with Internet-based lessons rapidly overshadowing traditional manuals, memos and face-to-face encounters in corporate classrooms, according to industry experts. Learning Histories: A New Tool For Turning Organizational Experience Into Action. Art Kleiner and George Roth. Editor: Suzy Wetlaufer. June 3, 1997. 'In our personal lives experience is often the best teacher or so the old saying goes. Why not, then, in corporate life? After a major event , a new product failure, a wild business breakthrough, a downsizing crisis, or a merger, many companies seem to stumble on in ways that miss the lessons of the past. Mistakes get repeated, while smart decisions do not. Most importantly, the old ways of thinking which led to past mistakes are never talked about; which often means that they are left in place to spawn new mishaps ad infinitum." ERP Training Stinks! CIO Magazine, June 2000. Corporate Learning at Highsmith. Inc. Magazine Future vision for Education. Horizon, July 1999. So, What Do We Do About It? Roger Shank. ILS website. Column #10, posted 6/6/00 "People write to me all the time asking what we can do about the mess education is in. Lots of folks agree with me, they just can't see a solution. About fifteen years ago I was complaining about the state of education to the Commissioner of Education of Connecticut, where I lived at the time. He asked me what the solution was and I said 'software.' Now, the truth be told, I wasn't so sure that software was the answer. Kids need to interact with people, not machines, and I sure as heck wouldn't want my kid staring at a computer all day. On the other hand I don't want my kid in a prison masquerading as an educational institution either. I said software because I knew then, and I still believe now, that software is the Trojan Horse of education." Battery Hens or Free Range Chickens? by John Abbott. This speech by the President of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, provides a timely and far-reaching description of how to improve learning through meta-cognition. First written in 1989, it was revised and delivered as a keynote speech to the Canadian Child Care Federation's Linking Research to Practice: Second Canadian Forum held in Ottawa in November 1999. The Object is Learning: New component standards promise to change training world. Rhonda M. Morin. Service News March 1999. Wayne is one of the people interviewed in this article. "Imagine being able to create a Web-based training course within minutes, or drill down to one particular training unit, circumventing the pieces of the course you don't need. Now imagine being freed from vendor hyperbole and expensive products, because you have access to basic components that standardize training and allow you to produce homegrown apps. Sound too good to be true? Well, according to some experts, it's right around the corner. These components, or 'learning objects,' are fast becoming the hottest thing in training, and, experts agree, are the way the industry will move in the 21st century. In the simplest terms, learning objects are pieces of content deliverable over the Web. Video, audio, text, interactive content-or a combination thereof-are all examples of learning objects..." Upstarts: Virtual Campuses Marc Ballon. Inc. Magazine. May, 1999. Here's how startup University Access partnered with universities and PBS to sell long-distance learning programs. Plus: why corporations are likely customers for virtual campuses. The Professor Fails The Test. Roger Shank. ILS website. Column #6, posted 6/18/99. "O.K. Let's face it. No matter what I say about measurement, there will be those who want to measure anyway. They will want to measure for the same reason they have always wanted to measure--not because they want to know if Johnny has learned but because they want to know if Johnny knows more than Billy. Measurement has always been about competition. Companies want to hire the best person. Schools want to accept the best students. We care about grades because we want to know who won. No matter how much this is a bad thing for education, it will be very hard to convince all those people who are so heavily bought into this model of education that this is a really bad idea. Maybe these tests can be saved, or we can devise some new ones. It is hard to imagine that we can change the system since politicians love those tests so much. Research on maximizing the learning effectiveness of multimedia applications Lawrence J. Najjar. Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. June 1998. This paper discusses principles of educational multimedia user interface design. The purpose of the principles is to maximize the learning effectiveness of multimedia applications. The principles are based on the results of studies in psychology, computer science, instructional design, and graphics design. The principles help user interface designers make decisions about the learning materials, learners, tasks that the learners perform, and tests for measuring learning performance. Topics discussed in this paper include: 1) The use of pictures and animation and its effect on learning and retention 2) Supportive versus decorative multimedia 3) Synchronizing visual and textual materials 4) How differences in aptitude affect learning 5) Active versus passive processing of information. Go to other User Interface Design articles >"> Are You Smart Enough to Keep Your Job? Fortune. January 15, 1995 Learning in the Key of Life. Jon Spayde. Utne Reader online. "Canna you learn what you need to know to live a meaningful life--especially when you're out of school and no one's insisting that you read this book or take that field trip? It's far too easy to stop learning anything you don't have to. We lead hectic lives, and by the end of the day just getting dinner on the table seems like an insurmountable challenge; who's got the energy to tackle Tolstoy, Fellini, or the latest music sensation from Cape Verde? Yet..." Learning to Learn: Many companies talk about becoming learning organizations. But rather than concentrate on what employees should learn, senior executives should focus on how. W. Timothy Gallwey. Context Magazine, Premier Issue December 1997. The Schank Tank: Can an AI guru find fulfillment by pushing corporate traininware? Roger Schank decides that the best way to make a machine think is to first make it teach. David H. Freedman. Wired Magazine Issue 2.08. Emerging Business Trends & New EconomyGo to more information on New Economy Themes Bordering on Chaos: There are stranger places to see the latest in complexity theory in action, but delivering cement in Mexico is a pretty good start. Peter Katel. Wired Magazine Issue 5.07, July 1997. Digital Civilization: Nicholas Negroponte says the digital revolution is over because the rebels won completely. Chunka Mui. Context Magazine. Summer 1998. "[In this interview] Mr. Negroponte talked about new economic models, about how electronic commerce may vary by country and by age group, and about a potentially explosive product called electronic paper. As always, his stories were fascinating, his ideas compelling, his language powerful..." Destruction is Cool! But decentralization is damned hard to do. Tom Peters. Forbes ASAP. 2.98 After 50 (combined) years of watching organizations thrive and shrivel, we two held to one... and only one... basic belief: To loosen the reins, to allow a thousand flowers to bloom and a hundred schools to contend, is the best way to sustain vigor in perilous, gyrating times. It's an old idea and yet it remains new, mostly because we still haven't figured out how to make it work. Encyclopedia of the New Economy. John Browning and Spencer Reiss. Wired Magazine. Summer 1998. Inventing the Organizations for the 21st Century. David Lampe. MIT Sloan. Knowledge Profiteering: Think knowledge management is a fad? Savvy entrepreneurs of this century and last (Cyrus McCormick, Nathan Rothschild, George Westinghouse, Bill Gates) have proved its value time and again. Leonard M. Fuld. CIO Enterprise. June 15, 1998. "Management guru Peter Drucker predicted the future importance of the knowledge worker more than 30 years ago, but the knowledge profiteer (KP) has been around for generations. Instead of just dealing with information, KPs make deals using information." The Mismeasure of Manpower: William Dickens on our flawed understanding of productivity in the digital age. William Dickens. Feed Magazine. 7.13.98. The New Economy: What it Really Means. Stephen B. Shepard. Business Week. November 17, 1998. New Rules for the New Economy: Twelve dependable principles for thriving in a turbulent world. Kevin Kelly. Wired Magazine Issue 5.09, September 1998. Pioneer Steps Out of Net Rutt by Michelle Delio. Wired Magazine, September 4, 2001. The Internet is boring, according to a prominent Internet pioneer who recently left the online world in search of more intelligent life forms. Jim Rutt has been involved in almost every significant Net-based business of the past two decades. But he now believes that the age of interesting advancements on the Internet is over ... at least for the foreseeable future. "Mostly all I see in the Internet's future are mundane business applications, ad-driven content that will drag the intelligence of the Net down to the lowest common denominator, and the ever-growing selection of mostly boring porn," Rutt said. Ten Driving Principles of the New Economy: Business 2.0 Premier Issue Summer 1998. "The New Economy is being driven by a profound development: Individuals and companies worldwide are being electronically linked, a process as significant as an organism developing a nervous system. So it's no surprise that the rules of the game are changing. Many of these principles have been stated before. But taken together they constitute a revolution in the rules of business..." What a concept! The real key to success comes from listening to the customer. Mark Tebbe's Between the Lines column in InfoWorld. Sept 21, 1998.
Knowledge Management & Intellectual CapitalHot Career: Knowledge Manager. Working Woman Magazine's discussion on careers for the future and its interview with Carla O'Dell has created intense interest around the career of knowledge manager. Overcoming the Cultural Barriers to Sharing Knowledge. Richard McDermott, Ph.D., McDermott & Co. and Carla O'Dell, Ph.D., President, APQC. Technology Is Not Enough: Improving Performance by Building Organizational Memory. Rob Cross and Lloyd Baird. Sloan Management Review, Spring 2000. "We learned that organizations remember lessons from the past in a variety of ways. An organization's memory resides in the minds of its employees and in the relationships that employees tap on an ongoing basis to accomplish work. Memory is also stored in repositories such as computer databases and file cabinets. Memory can also be embedded in work processes and in product or service offerings that have evolved over time and reflect lessons learned from an organization's past experiences. In today's knowledge-based economy, managers can improve performance by deliberately developing organizational memory and using the growing stores of knowledge to guide organizational activities and decision making." Knowledge Mapping: A Practical Overview by Denham Grey. Talking Knowledge. March, 1999. "What exactly is Knowledge Mapping? It's an ongoing quest within an organization (including its supply and customer chain) to help discover the location, ownership, value and use of knowledge artifacts, to learn the roles and expertise of people, to identify constraints to the flow of knowledge, and to highlight opportunities to leverage existing knowledge." Brain Power: Who Owns It... How They Profit From It. Thomas A. Stewart. Fortune. March 17, 1997. "Corporate America is now built on intellectual capital rather than bricks and mortar--and that's changing everything." Common Knowledge. Claire Tristram. CIO WebBusiness Magazine, September 1, 1998. "At Booz, Allen, a model of Knowledge Management makes expertise easy and a few experts uneasy..." Envisioning the Knowledge Era: The Information Era is a small step beyond the Industrial Era. What's needed is a giant leap. Charles M. Savage, Ph.D. Exec! The Unisys Online Journal for Senior Managers, September 1998 Grab a Pencil: It's a Knowledge Quiz. Thomas A. Stewart. Fortune. December 8, 1997. "You need to know if your company is investing its intellectual capital properly. Answer the questions below and find out--if you dare." Teaching Knowledge Management and Intellectual Capital Lessons: An Empirical Examination of the Tango™ Simulation. Nick Bontis and John Girardi. Celemi. March 1999. The Knowledge Management Receptivity Survey (KMRS) has been developed as a means for determining the level of understanding and commitment to knowledge management and intellectual capital initiatives. It's Really Anti-Stupidity Software: The anti-stupidity industry has repositioned their technology under another term--knowledge management. Gerry Murray of International Data Corp (IDC). Group Computing Magazine, March/April 1998. Knowing What We Know. Justin Hibbard. Information Week. October 20, 1997. 46-64 Knowledge Management, Taming the Info Monster: Now, coping with data overload (both inside and outside the company) is a matter of survival. Gary McWilliams with Marcia Stepanek. Business Week. June 11, 1998 The Value of Knowledge Management. Carla O'Dell Ph.D., Exec! The Unisys Online Journal for Senior Managers, March 1998. Leadership & ManagementBoooorrriinng! Harriet Rubin. Fast Company, June 2000. "To train athletes, you make them run. To train leaders, you do what exactly? Teach them management? Teach them the numbers? Teach them confidence? Or perhaps you teach them how humanity really works: how to tap into what goes on beneath sophisticated human surfaces; how to find the connection that makes perfect strangers identify with an idea, a project, a vision, even the unknown. Isn't leadership, after all, a higher form of selling, where what you're selling is the future? If you want to sell shares of the future, you need more than off-the-shelf business skills." Good-bye Command and Control. Margaret Wheatley. Leader to Leader No. 5 Summer 1997. "Old ways die hard. Amid all the evidence that our world is radically changing, we cling to what has worked in the past. We still think of organizations in mechanistic terms, as collections of replaceable parts capable of being reengineered. We act as if even people were machines, redesigning their jobs as we would prepare an engineering diagram, expecting them to perform to specifications with machinelike obedience..." Leadership Without Authority: An examination of the Impact of Transformational Leadership Cooperative Extension Work Groups and Teams. W. Brown, E. Birnstihl, D. Wheeler. Journal of Extension: Vol 34, No. 5. October 1996. Soft Skills Can Be Hard For Tech Managers: Inability to deal with people can short-circuit a career. Brian Caruso. Information Week. May 11, 1998.
Travel TipsGo to more information on travel tips Hyper-Travel Marcia Conner. Originally published in the Ninth House Network Think Tank 8/25/99. "There are four types of business travelers. There are the naïve, the ambivalent, the reluctant, and the hyper. The first three groups either travel infrequently or too often. The last group doesn't spend much time thinking about how often they travel; they just know it can't keep them from getting their work done and having a little fun along the way." Usability & Interface DesignGo to more information on User Experience & User-Centered Design Spotting the Shape of Things to Come. Scott H. Young. Perception Research Services. "Walk into your local supermarket and you'll soon be surrounded by over 20,000 products, screaming for your attention through a myriad of different colors, graphics and claims. Most will be unsuccessful in gaining your attention, despite the best efforts of marketers, and packaging designers. In fact, PRS Eye-Tracking research has shown that even when shoppers are directly considering a category, over one-third of the products displayed are ignored completely. They never gain the opportunity to communicate and to sell." Information, Architecture, and Usability Peter Morville. WebReview. Mar. 12, 1999. "What is the relationship between information architecture design and usability engineering? This is a loaded question, and I wade into dangerous waters by addressing it, but the answer has significant implications for a variety of audiences." Thought Activated Computing. The cyberpunk vision of a brain-computer interface becomes real--as a boon for the paralyzed by San Witt and Sean Durkin. Salon Magazine. November 1998. The New Face of Computing: The Windows-style UI is getting a face lift; Web integration is just Step 1. Michael Moeller & Jim Kerstetter. PC Week. June 8, 1998. Capturing the Power of Design. Scott H. Young from Perception Research Services. "Given the growing impact of design, from ensuring consideration in a crowded world, to representing brands in new markets and venues, and influencing the many purchase decisions which occur at the point-of-sale, those companies which invest in effective design are sure to be well-rewarded." Creating the People's Computer: One of the nation's foremost computer scientists, exasperated by the unfriendliness of today's computer systems, suggests what designers can do to make machines serve human needs rather than the other way around. Michael L. Dertouzos. This article is adapted from the book What Will Be [go to Amazon.com's information on What Will Be] Does the Right Software a Great Designer Make? Visuals can clarify a point by giving students a picture. Thus, the lesson addresses not only the auditory learner also the visual learner. Linda F. Szul Ph.D., Dawn E. Woodland, Ph.D. THE Journal. February 1998. Lego-like Assembly Can Make Web Apps a Snap. Eamonn Sullivan. PC Week. January 12, 1998. Local Color: From coast to coast, your web site is killing them. In the rest of the world it may be killing business. A few things you should know about hosting a Web site in cultures you don't know. Lynda Radosevich. CIO Web Business. December 1, 1997. How Usability-Focused Companies Think Tara Scanlon. Eye for Design November/December 1997 "... the companies that are most successful at designing usable products are those in which everyone actually thinks differently. Their assumptions, their goals, and the way they deal with problems have a different emphasis than those at less-successful companies. This set of beliefs manifests itself in the way they run their business." Design patterns take cue from architecture. Jack Vaughan. Application Development Trends. November 1997. "The story goes that Frank Lloyd Wright's mother placed a mobile in his crib when he was just an infant. Hanging from a wire that traversed the crib were three basic figures of geometr--wooden blocks shaped as a pyramid, a cube and a sphere. From this, one can guess, the architect Wright gained the design patterns upon which he'd build his great legacy." Human error and the design of computer systems Donald A. Norman Communications of the ACM, 1990, 33, 4-7. "In 1988, the Soviet Union's Phobos 1 satellite was lost on its way to Mars. Why? According to Science magazine, 'not long after the launch, a ground controller omitted a single letter in a series of digital commands sent to the spacecraft. And by malignant bad luck, that omission caused the code to be mistranslated in such a way as to trigger the test sequence' (the test sequence was stored in ROM, but was intended to be used only during checkout of the spacecraft while on the ground. Phobos went into a tumble from which it never recovered." | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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