Posted in Innovation by AST on Monday, June 29th, 2009
Ok, I admit it: I’m lazy. It isn’t that I don’t like to work or that I don’t like doing many things. It’s just that I don’t like doing things that I don’t actually need to do. Here’s the paradox: if I find myself repetitively stuck doing things I don’t think make sense, I’ll work tirelessly to come up with a way to avoid doing them if I think there’s enough value in it for me in the long term. They may say that “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if Laziness wasn’t the father.
Innovation isn’t just about developing cool new products like the iPhone that sell a million units the first day. Innovation is also taking new ideas and putting them in practice to make a task easier or faster, streamline a process, reduce errors and generally make life a little more convenient for those involved. When this is done often enough, the net effect on the individual is generally positive: you have more time to do other things, including thinking more creatively; you reduce your stress levels; and you’re generally a happier person. For a business, the effects are also quite positive: improved customer service; higher worker productivity; and reduced costs. How do you achieve these goals? It all starts with YOU!
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Posted in Leadership by AST on Monday, June 15th, 2009
On Thursday, I attended my first Dublin Chamber of Commerce networking event. After the hour-and-a-half of 5 min “speed networking” sessions and selected 60 second pitches, I was trying to decide whether to leave when I overheard an interesting discussion on organizational change between Lorcán Ó hUallacháin (@onlybrilliant) and Irial O’Farrell (Evolution Consulting).
After joining the conversation, we eventually ended up talking about obstacles to sucessfull organizational change and what you do about them. We were all agreed that a successful change program might require leaders to make some tough staffing choices to cull sources of negative energy, but they were a bit surprised when I suggested that it might be just as necessary to learn from those sources of negativity as it might be to remove their influence. Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Web by AST on Thursday, May 7th, 2009
Which is exactly what my 2½ year old son said the first time he saw me log in to Twitter. I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical at first. I created my account about a year ago when I was doing some research on Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration tools, but I really didn’t know what to do with it. The old adage goes “watch and learn,” so, eventually, that’s what I ended up doing.
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