“You can lead an organization through persuasion or formal edict. I have never found the arbitrary use of authority to control an organization either effective or, for that matter, personally interesting. If you cannot persuade your colleagues of the correctness of your decision, it is probably worthwhile to rethink your own.”

—Alan Greenspan, former chairman of […]

Enterprise use of social networks is in on the rise. But how do we know if it’s working? The October issue of Cutter IT Journal seeks to uncover the metrics organizations are using to measure the value of their social networking efforts. Article abstracts are due July 10. For more information, visit here.

For Abraham Lincoln, it was the telegraph. For John F. Kennedy it was the television. For Barak Obama, it is Web 2.0.
Each of these politicians proved adept at adapting new technologies to communicate. Lincoln took to the telegraph and used it for rapid communication. No doubt the advantages of the telegraph were on Lincoln’s mind […]

I’m curious. When IT leaders find themselves stretched as thin as can be now, how can putting yet another initiative on their plate — even one as important as IT’s contribution to sustainability — work? Cutter Benchmark Review Editor Gabe Piccoli made a strong case in his introduction to the recent green-IT focused […]

Software Engineering Radio, the world’s leading podcast on software development, published an episode on “10 Years of Agile Experience” yesterday. In this podcast Marcus Völter interviews me about introducing agile technology to different organizations, the experiences I made doing this job in the last 10 years, and stratgies I derive from this experience. The podcast […]

The optimists among us would like to think that the abundance of information, easily transmitted, will result in companies that are less hierarchical and more democratic. That perhaps the firm as we know it will become extinct. I was, for a brief, tongue-in-cheek moment, one of those optimists.
Others, like Andrew McAfee at Harvard, suggests that […]

I read a lot about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0–about how companies need to fully embrace the concept of “openness.” And I agree that Enterprise 2.0 offers companies an innovative way to foster significantly better collaboration. But the truth of the matter is that a lot more control is needed in the business/Enterprise 2.0 world (compared to […]

Have you read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s best-selling book “The Black Swan” yet? Like his first, “Fooled by Randomness”, it’s a terrific read - although lots of critics are hammering him for arrogance and self-indulgence, both in the media and on Amazon. Taleb is smart, self-made, opinionated, and a maverick. His main thesis is that human […]