Conditions for “organized emergence”

Emmanuel Gobillot commented on my post on self-organization (here).  I liked his comment so much that I thought it was worth highlighting below:
I have found four conditions which need to be in place for communities to be productive.  I called these
Simplicity (a coherent and simple way to engage),
Narrative (an underpinning story for people to align [...]

Well, approach “x” worked for me when I worked at company “y”

Pawel Brodzinski had a wise corollary for my original post on naysayers (here).  He puts it well…
The distance between rejecting things you don’t believe in and forcing others to do things you believe in is pretty short.
It is great to bring a successful practice to a new situation, but one had better be ready to [...]

Web 2.0 and PMO functions

We’ve just started digging into a large-scale re-architecture of our various methodologies.  As you might imagine, the consequences of our approach include changes to the processes, people, and technologies behind content production and maintenance.  
In particular, leverage social media to author, publish, and distribute much more content than we do today.  We’re pleased with our technology direction.  However, we are concerned about [...]

WSJ Interview on “The Experience Trap”

FYI, a Wall Street Journal article (“Dangers of Clinging to Solutions of the Past”) based in part on interviews w/ yours truly came out today (link here, page B4 in the paper).  Thanks to Kishore Sengupta of INSEAD for pointing the WSJ my way and to Phred Dvorak of the WSJ for conveying the perils of [...]

PM Quote of the Day — Tallulah Bankhead

If I had to live my life again, I’d make the same mistakes, only sooner.
Far be it from me to comment on Tallulah’s mistakes, though she certainly wasn’t known for restraint of tongue and pen!
That said, I love her attitude.  I prefer to learn from other’s mistakes rather than my own.  However, if I’m going to make them, [...]

Innovation Portfolio Planning — Building Capabilities

I’m going back to a Gary Hamel and Lowell Bryan interview (here) on The McKinsey Quarterly site (registration required).  Bryan here focuses on innovation portfolio planning, a topic which PMs should focus on as they look to expand their career horizons:
I like the notion of designing a managing concept or master plan—a master architecture, if you will—for [...]

SAP seeding innovation via ecosystem collaboration

In the wake of our nice Q2-2008 results (here), I’m more convinced than ever that SAP’s ecosystem collaboration model (SDN here) is a un-heralded differentiator.  It may not be so un-heralded anymore…see this article from John Hagel and John Seely Brown (here).  Two of their lessons learned jumped out:
Ecosystems evolve over time, but the orchestrator [...]

PMOs at Law Firms

I found this post a week or so ago; it promotes the establishment of PMOs in law firms (here).  There had been some discussion of PMOs in professional firms at a recent conference — some medical and architect practices are doing it as well — but this was the first I had seen it while [...]

KM that works — ASAP for Implementation roadmap updates

As a follow-up to my ASAP and WBS features post (here), I should relay a quick KM win anecdote and give kudos to my team.  The director who leads our methodology and enablement team drove a simple, but effective, effort to incorporate the conversation from our internal social media into our external-facing methodologies.  A new set [...]

Gestión del conocimiento para los niños

Lo siento, Miguel, me olvidé de este Powerpoint…