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Business Week: The Most Important People in Your Network

Business Week: The Most Important People in Your Network

Employees that were rated as more innovative didn’t have bigger networks; rather, they had more bridging ties—ties that connected them to other employees who were themselves not connected.

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If we are circulating too much with people we have known forever or people who themselves are all spending time in the same meetings and interactions, then we are not getting the performance impact we can from social-media tools. Bigger is not better. The magic lies in the new ideas and perspectives that can come from connections into different networks.

Business Week: The Most Important People in Your Network

From this Business Week article… (Source)

Employees that were rated as more innovative didn’t have bigger networks; rather, they had more bridging ties—ties that connected them to other employees who were themselves not connected.

If we are circulating too much with people we have known forever or people who themselves are all spending time in the same meetings and interactions, then we are not getting the performance impact we can from social-media tools. Bigger is not better. The magic lies in the new ideas and perspectives that can come from connections into different networks.

AIIM: Governance: Don’t Use it Loosely

AIIM: Governance: Don’t Use it Loosely

Sure, a committee of business leaders should be formed to vet ideas, opportunities, challenges, but ultimately a decision must be made. Groups of individual with competing interests have trouble making decisions. Thus, designating a single individual who ultimately can make the “final” decision is critical from our experience. Too many organizations soft-pedal this factor, which leads to drawn-out debates and inaction.

Iron Mountain: Obtaining an Information Advantage through Unified Records Management

Iron Mountain: Obtaining an Information Advantage through Unified Records Management

Records management is about organizing and classifying information for retrieval. This is part of the challenge with digital information because technology has made it possible for us to ignore indexing and classification since the digital format allows for sophisticated searching. Auto-classification is really an extension of this expectation, but has actually served as more of an excuse to allow for poor electronic records practices, hoping that auto-classification will one day be able to clean up the mess.

Reading: The Story of the Malakand Field Force by Winston Churchill

Reading: The Story of the Malakand Field Force by Winston Churchill

The story of a young Winston Churchill in 1897 fighting fanatical tribal warriors in modern day Pakistan–see his chilling description of what we hear all too often in today’s news:

Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword–the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men–stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism.
Wikipedia 

I haven’t read this book yet, but came across of a reference to it in my current team read at the office (The Mission, The Men and Me, more about that in a future post) and was delighted to find the free Kindle edition of the eBook on Project Gutenberg. I believe this is the hardcover edition depicted by the cover image above.

Steve Jobs Playboy Interview from 1985

Steve Jobs Playboy Interview from 1985

It’s a great read when you know what the future holds, both for the industry, for Apple, and for Jobs himself. His foreshadowing of the Internet is particularly prescient, and passages like this make me think of his commencement address at Stanford:

If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away. What are we, anyway? Most of what we think we are is just a collection of likes and dislikes, habits, patterns. At the core of what we are is our values, and what decisions and actions we make reflect those values. That is why it’s hard doing interviews and being visible: As you are growing and changing, the more the outside world tries to reinforce an image of you that it thinks you are, the harder it is to continue to be an artist, which is why a lot of times, artists have to go, “Bye. I have to go. I’m going crazy and I’m getting out of here.” And they go and hibernate somewhere. Maybe later they re-emerge a little differently.

WSJ: In China’s Orbit

WSJ: In China’s Orbit

Interesting article about 500 years of western predominance, and China’s grand strategy. Some facts to get your attention:

China’s has been the biggest and fastest of all the industrialization revolutions. In the space of 26 years, China’s GDP grew by a factor of 10. It took the U.K. 70 years after 1830 to grow by a factor of four. According to the International Monetary Fund, China’s share of global GDP (measured in current prices) will pass the 10% mark in 2013. Goldman Sachs continues to forecast that China will overtake the U.S. in terms of GDP in 2027, just as it recently overtook Japan.

Tip of the hat to @rfallini.