QVIews

Growth is seen as a business imperative in a capitalist culture. I've seen the desire to grow lead to many strategic errors. Reading the new Power of Pull book by John Seely Brown and his cohorts, he says that to grow institutions must grow at the edges of the business, not from the core. Apparently…

Kegan and Lahey, How the Way We Talk can Change the Way We Work, 2002 We believe the language of complaint can be revisited for the purpose of being redeemed–that it contains a transformative element or seed. The route to that seed is found in this idea: we would not complain about anything if we…

Working hard today on not becoming an educated derelict. "Press on: Nothing in the world can take the place of perseverance. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination…

Lowell L. Bryan and Claudia I. Joyce, Mobilizing Minds, 2007:  The truth is that almost all of today's companies, from the mediocre to the "superclass," were built primarily to mobilize their labor and capital assets–not the intangile assets that enable profits per employee to rise to levels never seen before. Trying to run a…

Penelope Trunk, When you're feeling lost, don't hide, 2010-Aug-16 I'm convinced that the less we hide ourselves when we are lost, the faster we will get unlost. The world provides a mirror for us to see ourselves more clearly, if we give the world a chance to reflect back to us what is there.

Rolf Smith, The 7 Levels of Change, 2nd Edition, 2002 By first seeing different in ourselves, we learn to value different, and from there we can learn to see and value different in others, and finally,in the ideas and changes that others come up with that may strike us as very, very different…

I resisted what Barry Schwartz said at first, but occasionally I find myself 'cycling' a decision over and over again in my head. If any of these suggestions appeal to you, you ought to read the whole article. Scientific American, "The Tyranny of Choice," April 2004, by Barry Schwartz (PDF file from Schwartz's site.) Few…

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, The One to One Future, 1993: Mass marketing is adversarial. 1:1 marketing is collaborative.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid: The Social Life of Information, 2000 Clustered Ecologies …firms in an ecology produce synergistic effects which isolated firms find hard to imitate. Within such ecologies, the health and innovative ability of firms is not an isolated matter. Firms that feed into also feed off the ecology. The same networks…

On rowdykittens.com, Tammy Strobel interviewed Chloe Adeline. Both of are proponents of a minimalist lifestyle. Chloe said something that will stick with me for a long time.  Smiling for smiling’s sake and laughing for laughing’s isn’t something I see many people doing, so I assume it must be a superpower…but I suspect it’s teachable and…