... a beginner at something

Innovation Insights

One of my paid hobbies has been innovation for the company, as in making new technology work for us to help us complete our jobs for clients, easier, faster, or more reliable. More than a year ago, one of my responsibilities shifted from process innovation to business development. Loving it.

In my free time, I took basic courses in project management, both waterfall and agile, read business books like Tribal Leadership and The Culture Game, all good and valuable, but none of these prompted me to post.

The framework for directed innovation does. It is old enough to be proven in business and criticized in public, yet new enough (to me, anyway) to get excited about innovation insights. (You too, maybe?)

Let's begin with quoting from one of many insightful articles from the company Strategyn, whose logo I borrowed for the image, The New Language of Innovation.

Project Management intro - tools I like

early draft with One-Page-Project-Manager

Last week, we looked at my experience with Dan Clapper, PMP,  at Temple University during the introduction to project management course BPM 101.

Today's takeaway: tagging tried and tested tools.  If you follow the links to the suppliers, you can see the explanations better than I could do with sharing several screen shots. And if you come back later, you will see the newest version there instead of an aging record here.  

The output of the tool on the right worked so well for me, made the draft within hours of reading a bit of the book and downloading the templates.

Project management - just got easier

 

definition of agility, by bertboerland (2005)

To people somewhat involved in projects - and who hasn't been - the word alone may bring up personal experiences and a general notion, well, most projects fail. HBR said so in 2003 (source) and ten years later, the situation appears not all that different, in academic research, and it seems to get worse, according to the Project Management Institute,  who have solutions on offer and whose newest standard PMBOK5 adds a chapter on project stakeholder [engagement] management [addition mine].

 

Examining how I could accelerate innovation in the company, I saw the need to  learn about professional project management.  This is a story in two parts:
1. how,  where and what I studied recently, and
2. what tools I picked up along the way work for me. 

Social Might Connect

 

Artists inform scientists what might be worth trying.
Engineers build what might be worth buying.

Marketers find people, offer win-win for mutual profit.
Industrialists make it affordable and cheaper - this might not work much longer.

Financiers take risks and take rewards, cyclically bubbling.
Teachers help future artists, scientists, engineers, marketers, industrialists, and more find their vision and calling. This might work.

Others create safe spaces for stillness and peace, to find personal truth. This might be worth trying. 

Longing for 2013

Here we are, in the new year, and some of us choose to make resoutions. Fine if you like to, but for many it is better not to, writes Chuck Blakeman.

Instead of resolutely setting goals, I went to follow a faint calling to examine and re-discover what am I still longing for, silently, at the turn of the year. Yes, there it was, as always, noticed and celebrated rarely in the rush of getting things done. 

These longings are personal, I am sure you have yours, and no, you need not look for any now, or even reveal, just as some of mine may not resonate with readers, and some other may not be good to put in public. So if you long to know what are mine, ask in private. 

Tohoku and virtual community

The ongoing recovery operations for Tohoku were a topic at the recent Green Mondays event in Tokyo Mike Baldwin and I attended on the occasion of our first ever F2F meeting. Mike interviewed Patricia, the author/coordinator of Tohoku Comfort Food, where she said many people who were moved to temporary homes will not move out but die there.

 

 

Crowd-asking: Japanese culture

Preparing for her Japan visit to speak at the Sibos financial conference, Jennifer asked in public:

Preparing for #Osaka @cocreatr please share two novels + two movies that will help me better appreciate your culture

 

Within a few hours she got two replies in public and two faves. One book series I recommend to many a gaijin who asks is Japan in Your Pocket.

There is more.

Meltdown in higher education

 

Milford School Bell at Dept of Education by dbking

Back in 2010, Seth Godin predicted The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer):

 

For 400 years, higher education in the US has been on a roll. From Harvard asking Galileo to be a guest professor in the 1600s to millions tuning in to watch a team of unpaid athletes play another team of unpaid athletes in some college sporting event, the amount of time and money and prestige in the college world has been climbing.

I'm afraid that's about to crash and burn. ...

Yes, here it is:

Highlighting the course of corporate transparency

As Nigel Cameron says, the impact of social media will be felt.

New tools connect more people, markets, and customers faster and cheaper, to shape reputation and build business selection pressure towards corporate transparency.  As the race is only going to get faster, how prepared is your organization?

Image: Canadian Museum for Human Rights by oggiedog on flickr