Twenty years ago, Peter Drucker wrote about the coming of the new, information-based organization, which twenty years later we now take nearly for granted as incarnate everywhere. While information-based organizations rely on and have been largely created by advanced IT, Drucker notes that not all such organizations require advanced IT. Advanced IT lets firms eliminating […]

The financial community recently seems to have added a new twist to the advice given in Shakespeare’s Henry VI (Part 2) with regard to lawyers in the wake of the US $130-billion-plus write-offs that are increasing daily due to the subprime mortgage debacle.
The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce recently fired its chief […]

On December 16, 2007 USA Today published an article on this subject:
“India is the world’s largest democracy, so it seems fitting that the New Delhi-based information technology services giant HCL Technologies is attempting what may be the most ambitious effort yet at installing a workplace democracy. That may sound impossible, but so did running nations […]

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 […]

After studying human organizations for more than four decades, organizational learning guru Chris Argyris accurately, if not cynically noted that organizational problems show up worldwide. All cultures create similar dysfunctional organizations. He further notes that the failure for organizations to perform and learn isn’t just an organizational problem, but also an individual problem. In order […]

Cutter Fellow Steve Andriole is at it again! He’s come up with a list of the top ten things he’d say to “management” about technology. I’ll just post three of his items here for you to react to, but do read his entire list in this week’s Business Technology Trends & Impacts E-Mail Advisor.
4. Please […]

The following is from a chapter in the book The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, which I have read and highly recommend. Meant for those with an academic research bent, the book brings together a lot of research regarding what makes for experts. Most of the book is dedicated to understanding individual expert […]

I want to pick up on something Ken Orr mentioned in his recent Trends Advisor essay on summer reading. He wrote briefly about research that has confirmed a human faculty theatre artists have exploited for a couple of thousand years, and which we can put to use in working together. In the theatre it’s the […]

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 […]