kSensei Blog

“I’ve given up on my brain.
I’ve torn the cloth to shreds
and thrown it away.

If you’re not completely naked,
wrap your beautiful robe of words
around you,

and sleep.”

- Rumi

Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Weblog

In a posting on resistance to change, David Anderson discusses the common practice of recognizing and rewarding firefighters and other such organizational “heroes.” He concludes that…

“…senior management must start to reward people for behavior which is congruent with controlled performance and they must build self-esteem around that behavior. The heroes must be coached and assisted to adapt to a new pattern of behavior - one which anticipates and absorbs uncertainty rather than one which heroically reacts to it.”

To have to rely on heroics is no way to run a business. It’s easy to say, “So stop rewarding it.”, but, as Dave points out, the culture and the operational system that spawns the need for such behaviors need to be addressed in order to do so.

Via Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Weblog

StickyMinds.com : Column info : Skills are Only Half the Equation for Success
Managers work hard to hire the right people for the job. Yet sometimes, the work doesn’t go as well as we think it should. Was it a bad hire? Has the person developed a bad attitude? Maybe, but before you jump to conclusions, look at the other half of the performance equation.

Source: StickyMinds.com

Machiavelli’s work, the collection, formulation and organisation of lessons learned from the Roman Republic – knowledge management that is – has been highly influential in modern history. Il Principe seems to have been the favourite reading of both Napoleon and Stalin.

Machiavelli’s immoral reputation is largely undeserved.

Those who have studied the Discorsi alongside Il Principe know that Machiavelli’s only object of study was the effectiveness of political or military measures. Moral aspects of these measures were not taken into consideration. It is therefore unfair to say that Machiavelli’s work is immoral. Amoral is probably a better adjective.

Wireless Business Applications: Nextel - Sleeping Giant of Wireless Data

Long dismissed as a “blue-collar” only carrier, Nextel is the sleeper candidate among the carriers to win big with wireless data. Instead of focusing on consumer entertainment at $3 average revenue per month (ARPU), they have focused on wireless business data applications at $50 ARPU.

HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: Leveraging Your Team’s Interpersonal Skills

What does it really mean to be good with people? This Harvard Business Review excerpt examines the “relational” aspect of business.

Nokia Funds Lightweight Mozilla Browser ‘Minimo’

Nokia invertirá en “Mínimo” un browser basado en el trabajo de la Mozilla Foundation. Este browser será diseñado para dispositivos móviles.

Si un teléfono gana funcionalidad de browser, dejaremos de verlo solo como teléfono. Será momento de hablar de terminales de acceso móvil, ya sea para redes de voz o de datos.

Demo: Wearable Robots

Stories about superhuman strength permeate popular culture from Atlas to Zeus, Superman to Schwarzenegger. But now, says University of Utah robotics expert Stephen Jacobsen, it�s time to deliver in the real world.

“Si usted no cambia de dirección,
podría terminar llegando allí donde se dirige.”

Lao Tse

The Project Manager’s Prayer

“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

Reinhold Niebuhr

RCR Wireless News

Motorola Inc. has unveiled what it describes as the first cross-technology Push-to-Talk over Cellular solution rooted in wireless networks.

Motorola supports the same protocols espoused by other major players like L.M. Ericsson, Siemens AG and Nortel Networks Ltd. Nokia Corp. is taking another route in what some experts believe may create interoperability obstacles with PoC.

There are no final standards yet,but there are directions, and they are towards PoC as an IMS service running over IP.

OK, If there are no standars yet, then this is another legacy solution?

Technology: Open Source

The religious wars over open-source software—especially Linux—are over. What lies ahead is a steely-eyed pragmatism about the software’s pros and cons.

Wired 12.06: The Wired 40

They are masters of innovation, technology, and strategic vision - 40 companies driving the global economy.

Individuals in higher-trust societies spend less to protect themselves from being exploited in economic transactions. Trust is an economical substitute for extensive contracts, litigation, and monitoring in transactions and thus economizes on transaction costs.

This quote taken from this paper, published by IBM, explain models of trust and reputation systems, Experimental Games for the design of reputation management systems

Physiologically people are unable to sustain trust of each other without fun or at least contextually relevant happiness.
I agree that the problem comes when someone is an expert in jolly without being deeply caring and cogniscent of the community context, but fun like innovation, courage and love of people focusing on context is being thrown out of organisations by managers whose tangible measurements have no understanding of goodwill as the quality system communalising people relationships. Such funless professionals are destroying the systemic relationships that sustain an organisation’s wealth producing capabilities.

Chris Macrae - www.valuetrue.com

HBS Working Knowledge: Leadership: How Team Leaders Show Support—or Not

What does a team leader do so that employees know they are being supported? A Q&A with HBS professor and creativity expert Teresa Amabile about new research.