Steven’s Notebook

When you walk in the room today — at your office, church, hobby group, poker buddies’ place, or at home — what effect do you have on the people there? As ice cools the liquid in a drink, you can change everyone’s emotional state just by adding yourself to their midst.
Are you managing your own […]

It’s Friday afternoon, and Tim Sanders has some thoughts on sending work-related email on weekends.
These habits can ruin weekends, drive turnover and burnout and weaken relationships.
In other words, not a good idea.
(Unless you’re writing to schedule a job interview with me , in which case a phone call would probably be better anyway)

Good news for any PM who’s also a Mac person in a sea of Windows users. The Omni Group’s OmniPlan is in beta, with an expected price tag of US$149. The best part of all (other than being a sweet-looking Mac app, of course):
OmniPlan can open and save Microsoft Project files natively

That should smooth some […]

Al Hawkins: Productivity and the Law of Unintended Consequences:
I hope they understand that this means an end to the free tech support I’ve been providing, like programming the fax machines and kickstarting the network printers when they hung. No more productivity-enhancing projects, like the wiki and the information entered therein performed during the odd quiet […]

From 43 Folders, a post well worth reading: Writing sensible email messages.
As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll […]

It’s been a while since I wrote about Knowledge Management & Blogging. While trying BlogBridge, I noticed that it comes with a set of pointers to, among other things, some KM blogs.
Here are a couple that have interesting articles posted recently. Knowledge-at-work (see Sharing knowledge - do we know enough? for example), and APQC (including […]

David St.Lawrence was writing the other day about communications. Well, about getting another person to listen to you, which is partly about communicating. As the guys in the sessions I taught would probably tell you — I know I said it more than enough times throughout the course — there’s something I consider paramount to […]

Dina on KM: “the very fact that its called Knowledge Management irks me - how can something like “knowledge” be “managed” - knowledge is flow.“ Right On.
“[S]haring what you know is more important than the knowledge itself.” [16-Jan]
Sharing, the flow of ideas and information amongst people, can be “managed” no more than water, and greater […]

Reflection is known by other names, including “Thorns and Roses,” “Retrospectives,” “Post-event Review.”
We can make our experiences more meaning and effective if we reflect on them afterwards. Reflection is simply the process of talking, sharing experiences immediately after an event or activity.
Reflection provides an opportunity for everyone in the group to have input. Unless we […]

Back on the seventh, I asked if sharing is natural, and pondered if perhaps some of us have been trying too hard to take the direct approach, holding classes and running reports while “implementing” a new “methodology.”
This past weekend, sitting around the campfire watching our Scouts cook their dinners, I had the opportunity to chat […]

“The most direct approach isn’t always the best.” So says the Chinese-cookie fortune that I’ve got taped to my display. It jumps out at me this morning as I browse the weblogs of two gentlemen for whom information flow is a normal course of nature.
“…as I entered the business world, it simply made no […]

Last week I mentioned the importance of good “metrics” when managing Knowledge Workers. This week that came home to roost, as I had to provide input for yearly performance reviews on individuals, managers, and groups.
Since the beginning of our KM journey, we’ve been talking about the behaviors we want to encourage. Sharing of knowledge (creating […]

…plans to implement knowledge management often require prior exercises in changing corporate culture, moving employees from a gatekeeper culture, where knowledge is kept hidden and produced only when it can enhance the employee’s value, to a sharing culture, where knowledge sharing is encouraged and rewarded.
[A.Wohl]
This is absolutely true, without a doubt. The other half of […]