Las empresas tienen que diferenciarse innovar en comunicacion y generar informacion propia Mucho se está hablando sobre el marketing de contenido o Inbound. Y es que parece que hasta que no existe una palabra anglosajona que defina una hecho parece que éste no existe. Mucho habéis oído que el contenido es el rey, y así es. Pero no es que Google impone, sino que la sociedad, la comunicación entre las personas está cambiando, así como la forma de consumir y sus las necesidades y la forma de buscar y encontrar información. No es nada nuevo afirmar que el consumo está en standby y que actualmente cuesta mucho invertir en algo nuevo. Las personas deseamos información, comunicación, ya sea entre nosotras o con empresas. Sabemos que las marcas las formamos todos: empleados y consumidores. Las empresas tienen que personalizarse, diferenciarse, que innovar en comunicación, que generar información propia, explicar su historia, sus productos, su personalidad, formar parte de ello, de la sociedad, como alguien que ofrece soluciones, no sólo productos.
MUD: Minimum Usable Design Advertisement There is a paradox that fits my life. Doesn’t matter what aspect of my life I am talking about because it always seems to apply. Even more so when I think about this paradox and the design of this website and other websites. I really hate this paradox. “To walk through the woods, you first need to walk halfway through. This example is based off of Zeno’s paradoxes, which are even more mind-boggling than the one above. No matter what stage of a design I am in, I am always halfway there. A Totally Made Up Theory Let’s use our good ol’ sparring partner Google as an example. If the very first half makes the design at least 50% usable then what would you design first? Next step is to get halfway from where we are now to where we need to be. If you continue on with this process of knocking out half of what you need to do, eventually you will get close enough to your goal where good enough is as good as you are going to get. An Example The 50% mark. Now the design is 75% there.
The chemistry of magical facilitation (1) – mind the BOSSY HERALD I had mentioned that I would sooner or later set my blogging foot again on facilitation island and would seek the island’s treasure trove to trace the original chemistry that makes magical facilitation happen. Well, I guess I’ve just landed on the island and am now on my way to find the trove. Facilitation magic takes the power of the collective to the next level (Photo credits: mello.luiz/FlickR) This journey will take four steps: Mapping the big picture to understand the wide angle and political side of the event you are designing or facilitating – i.e. the subject of this very post;Tracking the details of that wide angle, to ensure your take on that wide angle and politics is viable and operational;Zooming in on appropriate facilitation methods to go functional and finally…Diving in dynamics, at the heart of the workshop, to inject the relational and emotional. It’s the chemical combination of these four elements that makes your facilitation magical. 1. Big picture. Related blog posts:
Work Together: 60+ Collaborative Tools for Groups With businesses and families spread out more and more, we've dug up 60+ sites that will help everyone be on the same page. Business Productivity 37Signals.com - Maker of collaboration tools including Basecamp (others listed below). 8apps.com - A mixture of social network and productivity applications. BlueTie.com - Online collaboration directed towards small and medium sized businesses. Businessitonline.com - Centralized cash flow, documents, calendars and more for a team or small business. CentralDesktop.com - A full work suite for project teams including spreadsheets, file sharing, calendar and more. Colligo.com - Allows you to work on projects off-line and then sync them when you can login. ConceptShare.com - Share concept designs and allow invited workers to mark-up, comment, and give feedback. Confluence - An enterprise-class wiki with features such as PDF exporting. ContactOffice.com - Allows groups to share documents, calandars, contacts, and files. Creative Collaboration Mindmapping
Why Boredom Is Good for Your Creativity Like most creatives, you probably have a low boredom threshold. You’re hardwired to pursue novelty and inspiration, and to run from admin and drudgery. Boredom is the enemy of creativity, to be avoided at all costs. Consider these remarks by comedy writer Graham Linehan, in a recent interview for the Guardian: I have to use all these programs that cut off the internet, force me to be bored, because being bored is an essential part of writing, and the internet has made it very hard to be bored. I know how he feels. Of course, Steven Pressfield would have no hesitation in nailing this kind of boredom as Resistance – the invisible force that rises up within us, whenever we set our minds to a difficult creative challenge. Like Linehan, I’ve come to expect the boredom and prepare myself to deal with it. Resistance knows how hard the task will be, and uses boredom to nudge us away from it, while offering us all kinds of easy ways out. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Over To You
The ills of poor event design and facilitation Since there will be a lot of event facilitation for me to do at ILRI, it is likely that I blog more about it in the coming months. It makes sense after all, since productive conversations (and learning) are central to my understanding of knowledge management, and well-designed events generate truly productive conversations. Badly designed ones, on the other hand, take us as hostages and they are still all too frequent. What too many events lead to... We have all been attending ‘death-by-Powerpoint‘(1) conferences and events. Having mulled over those events all too often, here is one attempt at explaining what is wrong with this type of events and why they are taking everyone as hostage: By letting one person monopolise the power to speak in the audience, they are freezing the (costly) time of everyone in the assembly – whether they are interested or not.Precisely, not everyone may be interested in the topic discussed in the plenary session, but there is no way out! Notes: Related posts:
Girl Scout cookie controversy: Kids saddled with financial risk? - OC Watchdog : The Orange County Register Gabriella and her mother may love the new "Cookies Now" program, but Misty Perry Isaacson does not share their ardor. Isaacson, an attorney in Santa Ana during non-Girl Scout hours, is also the "cookie manager" for her daughter's troop. Used to be that the girls (and/or their parents) toted around a multi-colored grid sheet; recorded orders for boxes of Caramel deLites, Thin Mints et al on that multi-colored grid sheet; and then delivered the cookies a month or so later. Now, there's another way. The new way of selling Girl Scout cookies -- which is supposed to be easier, faster and more fun -- asks troops to pre-order cookies based on last year's sales, and then go out and sell them. This streamlines the whole process, eliminates the cumbersome order sheet and has been enormously popular where it's been tested, the Scouts say. The problem, according to Isaacson, is that it leaves girls and their parents on the hook for paying for the cookies they pre-order, whether they sell them or not.
A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hrs of Forced Focus Here are the rules: All work must be done in blocks of at least 30 minutes. If I start editing a paper, for example, I have to spend at least 30 minutes editing. If I need to complete a small task, like handing in a form, I have to spend at least 30 minutes doing small tasks. Crucially, checking email and looking up information online count as small tasks. If I need to check my inbox or grab a quick stat from the web, I have to spend at least 30 minutes dedicated to similarly small diversions. I followed these rules for one full work day. Continuous Partial Attention The motivation for my experiment should sound familiar. For some jobs, where responsiveness is crucial, this work style might be necessary. The solution to this quandary is well-known by now: batching. Check email only a small number of times per day! This is why I launched my experiment. Ignoring the small stuff isn’t an option, but living in a state of continuous partial attention won’t cut it either. Conclusions
Rethinking facilitation and engagement Time to sharpen my skills! And get to do what I like doing best: dreaming up creative solutions! Since I will have to facilitate a lot of events in my upcoming function, it is a good time to think about workshop facilitation methods and approaches I have been using and might want to make use of in the future to trigger great engagement. AND I WANT FRESH STUFF! I often come back to (among others) the following three of four methods: Open Space and related marketplace, World café and fishbowl… Oh, let’s be clear: many people and organisations still have yet to find out about the disarming simplicity and effectiveness of Open space, enjoy the rich results of world cafés or the relentless dynamic of a fish bowl discussion. On the way to rediscovering energy in group work? There are of course lots of facilitation toolkits available out there (some of them I have bookmarked on Del.icio.us). Some initial ideas? What I want to come up with is three-fold: Related posts: Like this: Like Loading...
L’humiliation tue l’innovation La question de l’innovation est récurrente dans les grandes entreprises. C’est une tarte à la crème: tous les dirigeants souhaitent que leurs collaborateurs fassent preuve d’imagination et d’initiative pour inventer des solutions originales permettant de conquérir des marchés et de fidéliser les clients. Mais le concept d’innovation est difficile à cerner, souvent incantatoire, et les managers ont du mal à imaginer ce que cela signifie concrètement que de «développer l’innovation». Les nombreuses conversations que j’aie eues à ce sujet chez AREVA et ailleurs ont fini par clarifier un peu les choses dans mon esprit, à la lumière de ma compréhension de la dynamique des communautés professionnelles décrite dans mon livre en 2007. Dans ce contexte, l’ennemi absolu de l’innovation, c’est l’humiliation. Que de managers cèdent à cette tentation impardonnable de laisser naître au sein de leurs équipes « un sentiment d’ignorance mêlé à un sentiment d’impuissance » (Zygmunt Bauman).