Squeezing the balloon

The biggest danger when we’re trying to make things better is that a change in one area simply causes a reciprocal change somewhere else. Often called ‘squeezing the balloon’, it can be a very frustrating thing for those trying to make a difference. The Washington Post ran a story this week about how the Amazon […]

While You Slept Last Night…Big Data, Privacy and the Public Square

While you slept last night, the world around you continued to amass information about everything, including you. Banks processed your purchases. Your credit information was updated and redistributed. The electric company recorded your power usage. As Malte Spitz showed us in his TED piece, your cell phone on your nightstand dutifully reported your location. We’ve […]

Trimming back as the key to improvement

Living in Southern California and having an orange tree in your yard isn’t that big of a deal. We waited years for the first fruit to appear, and when it did, we knew immediately we had a problem. The branches on a small tree couldn’t hold the heavy, green oranges. It was about to split […]

Get the right people in the room and most process issues can be fixed in 15 minutes

…and the first seven minutes are for pleasantries. A bold claim, but there are some critical points in the sentence: the right people in the room most process issues The right people – this means the process owners who have a collective and shared understanding of the end to end process.  As process owners they […]

How to avoid the toaster apocalypse

Our old toaster was really dying. The good news? We had a routine. Every time the toast popped up looking like a refinery smokestack, we would rush to open the windows, the kitchen door and hope the smoke detectors slept peacefully. For the really bad times, we’d throw a fan in the window and use […]

Business Model Innovation Through Process Change

More and more companies I see these days are making strategic process changes to drive unprecedented business model innovation. Forbes has embraced online collaborative publishing as it adds a substantial online presence to its traditional print magazine. Healthcare organizations are implementing electronic health records systems so they can migrate from islands of medical services to […]

A remarkable piece of history died

I wasn’t even born and my husband was almost four years old when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 20, 1969. It was an amazing achievement by a group of people who had an entire country’s support, urged on by a President, John F. Kennedy, who set the goal in his famous speech […]

Traditional ERP has become a dinosaur

The following is a guest post by ————–, an expert in ERP and business process currently in the ERP witness protection program. His opinions are his own. Traditional ERP has served us well but has built-in limitations that make it a dinosaur. I’m not the first person to make that observation. Legacy ERP, just like […]

Racing to the bottom

Apple came out on top today in a patent fight with Samsung. $1,049,000,000 on top. It doesn’t stop there, either. On September 20th, the two sides will meet again to talk about whether Samsung pays to license the patents that are deemed infringement or is banned from selling its infringing products. Even more interesting was […]

IT’s shrinking slice of the pie

Impatience. That’s the worst thing that can happen to a CIO and his IT department. In the old days the CIO was responsible for everything that managed information, commanded an enormous budget and sat in a very tall chair at the CEO’s table. This was the norm until the ‘Internet of things’ took over and […]

Updated: Lance Armstrong and the death of dreams

Updated 1/17/2013: We took an 8-year old to see Lance Armstrong win his seventh Tour de France in 2005. He read the biography and was inspired by the story of Lance’s come from behind victory over cancer and rise to the highest level of the toughest sport in the world. His excitement was wonderful. It […]

Hey, that’s not my job

We built our current business world on the premise that it takes a hierarchy of management to get work done. The idea stems from the assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution and is based on the fact that most people used to produce physical ‘stuff’. People, especially uneducated, unmotivated and bored people, needed to be […]

Getting there faster than your opponent

Observe, orient, decide, act. These are the four elements of the OODA Loop developed by a USAF pilot, Colonel John Boyd. Known as “Forty Second Boyd”, he had a standing bet as an instructor pilot that from a point of disadvantage, he could defeat any opposing pilot in forty seconds or less. He ultimately saved […]

Sometimes improvements aren’t necessary

As a French citizen living in the US, I’m legally bound to read Le Monde, the closest thing we have to a French national newspaper. In a great story today, the paper talked about the ‘ecce homo’ (behold the man) painting of Jesus that was ‘lovingly’ restored by a well-meaning, 80-year-old woman, Cecilia Giménez, living next […]

Big Data is still in Spring Training

While we all run around gushing about the amazing ‘new’ world of Big Data we need to keep in mind that the entire concept of Big Data didn’t spring on us suddenly from behind a technology bush. There’s been a technology progression that brought us to this point, and today’s Big Data will be tomorrow’s […]

Crash diets don’t work

Seth Godin wrote a piece today on why crash diets don’t work. He said the latest fad in losing weight is just a distraction from what we don’t want the face…the need to reinvent how we see ourselves. Want more sales? Make more sales calls. Want to lose weight? Go to the gym and change […]