August 24th, 2008
First off, I am beginning to hate flash. It happens too often that my beta flash player completely crashes my browser.
This is very conflicting because I think Flash brings so much to the web…
Anyway, I was halfway writing this story when it crashed right from under me… Boring…
As I was saying, A few books i recently “read”. Reading in quotes because I am addicted to audio books. I commute quite a lot. Almost always an hour or more. Sometimes its too early to bother friends, colleagues or clients and then it is nice and productive to listen to an audio book.
As I am a readaholic this is perfect.
7 Habits
The first book i ploughed through is the unabridged twelve hour “The seven habits of highly effective people”. I didn’t think I would like this book as the author is very religious, and this does not sit well with me.
But as it turns out, I got a lot out of the book. Be proactive, Start with the end in mind, Put first things first, Think win-win, Try to understand first then to be understood, Synergize and Sharpen the saw. They are actually helpful and form a good basis to organise your life.
The best tidbit I got out of the book: “Love is a verb, not an emotion”. Love the emotion is the result of Love the verb.. This makes a lot of sense to me. I am married to my lovely wife Veronique for over ten years. And we are together for 18 years. That means that almost half of my entire life I have been with this woman. Next year it will be exactly half, and after that we will have been together longer in our life then apart. We are still very much in love, and love each other very much. But it is not always the emotion of butterflies. The butterflies can be caused by other things and people. But Love the verb is always there. But I digress..
A whole new mind
This book is a bit over the top. It claims we are entering a new era, the conceptual age that follows up the information age. Caused by outsourcing, automation and abundance. It’s over the top because I think abundance is maybe not really true. With the rising prices of raw materials, the Peak-oil phenomenon etc. etc. What is interesting is the emphasis on whole mind (left and right directed) thinking. Critical for innovation and very much the substance of my companies iSchool offering.
The six senses: Design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning. It makes much sense to me and is nice to hear examples and stories about it.
From good to great
This was given to many employees at a company I coached on user experience, Exact Software. I borrowed a copy and I am in the middle of it.
I really liked what I read so far. I will give a full update soon.
May 11th, 2008
I promised a write up of this excellent book. In short it’s a great book.
Unfortunately I don’t have it anymore. But it’s for a good cause. I gave it away to the Asia Europe Institute in Kuala Lumpur.
I was there in the beginning of March as a visiting professor, teaching “Designing for User Experience”. I also lectured about the importance of design thinking. It was a great opportunity to interact with post grad students from all over Asia. It was good to be back after an absence, I was there in 2003 and 2004.
I will write more about it when my course module for next year reaches completion. Anyway, I have to find myself a new copy of Designing interactions…
design
October 25th, 2007
I haven’t read anything of this author, yet. But the promise of his latest work is very good.
Gary Hamel has apparently written other best selling books on new management styles, but I don’t read a lot of those.
Some quotes in his upcoming work The future of management captured my interest however, because it resonates very much with what we propose with the innvire concept.
His key message to leaders is to shift from a culture of control to one that embraces personal creativity, posturing that this is the only path to future innovation, growth and prosperity.
Some choice quotes:
“You can buy obedience and diligence and even intellect almost anywhere in the world for next to nothing.”
“We’re going to have to get people to bring to work their initiative, their creativity, their passion, and those are human capabilities that cannot be commanded. Those are gifts that people either choose to bring to work or not.”
“The existing management model was built to drive alignment, enforcement and control. What management tried to do over the last 100 years was to regularise the irregular, to drive the variety out of processes…we happen to live in a world today where it’s irregular people with irregular ideas who create all the new economic value and the wealth.”
“Organisations are less human than the people who work there. [people are inherently creative and innovative] but somehow when we get to work that adaptability, that innovation literally gets bleached out of people between 9 and 5.”
“The ability to aggregate human capability via the web, that’s not going to go away.”
This is exactly the stuff we are fighting against with the innvire product. We want to bring creativity, adaptivity and innitiative back to the work floor. We want to help managers give employability a new meaning, by facilitating knowledge workers in their information transformation work. Exchanging ideas, explaining concepts by sketching, stoking each other again.
Let me know if you read the book, what did you learn from it? Should I read it? What do you do to bring creativity back to the workplace?
via researchtalk
design
October 10th, 2007
As i am head of interaction and service design at my company, innberg I just had to get this book, designing interactions.
I just started reading it and have so far only flipped through it, but I already like it very much… I will update this article soon once i read it, and will let you know my thoughts on it.
for now I will say it looks magnificent, and a lot of my heroes are featured in it….
design