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Older posts Newer posts
Community vs. Culture
March 21, 2008
When I talk with some of my HR consultant friends about independence, coworking, and the shift to more distributed work arrangements, they always moan: "What about the corporate culture?" While usually I am polite, and say something polite back, increasingly I simply want to say fuck the corporate culture!
Culture is overrated anyway. Corporate culture, as [...]
IDEO U.
March 17, 2008
Noel Tichy, Professor of Leadership and Management at the University of Michigan, suggests that effective leadership depends on having a teachable point of view. That is, if you don't possess something (skill, knowledge, perspective, or some combination), then your ability to lead is greatly diminished.
Using this as a litmus test for leadership, I now realize [...]
24 Hours of Jelly
March 14, 2008
While some people are gearing up to celebrate St. Patrick's Day on Monday, others today are celebrating another momentous day in the calendar year: Pi Day. If you haven't started partying, you've missed the boat, so go back to sleep.
Pi Day is the ultimate insider's celebration, when mathematicians celebrate the ratio of the circumference [...]
Manage This!
March 11, 2008
Debriefing and offloading after a whirlwind at SXSW. Some of the most intelligent, creative, productive, and compassionate people on the planet. Period! Full Stop!
Throw in some Burning Man tribal experience and you begin to get a picture of a parallel world where work and life integrate seamlessly, and the (horrible) compromises that Milk Toast used to [...]
Coworking IS Innovation!
March 10, 2008
IDEO's Tom Kelley offers up one of the most useful overviews of innovation available as a book. The book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, outlines 10 personalities/disciplines that make up effective innovation in firms. This underscores a couple of things. First, that innovation is collaborative and interdisciplinary. Secondly, that cross-disciplinary collaboration [...]
Tribes Gather at SXSW
March 9, 2008
During a walk through the Enchanted Forest last night I blissfully reconnected with the parking lot. Drum circles, art, and incense in the air, the Burning Man/Grateful Dead tribe is well represented here at SXSW.
This triggers reflections on the connections, culturally and aesthetically, between generations and cultural movements. Many things have changed, indeed, and we have all survived [...]
Coworking: “Give up, it’s never gonna work.”
March 8, 2008
About a dozen members of Independents Hall's crew had just arrived at the Austin Convention Center yesterday afternoon, and they were gathering in the lobby before going upstairs. In the downtime, one of the them teased mastermind Alex Hillman: "Coworking's a fad. It'll never work. Just go home."
He was, of course, kidding. He was mocking [...]
All Your Thoughts are Belong to Me
March 7, 2008
I'm at SXSW and, damn, I'm having a hard time keeping up with the twitter.
People are dropping into town right and left... Given the trajectory of the book, we've met a lot of people who are now coming to Austin, and we've connected to many people we've never met in person... yet. It's a chaotic [...]
The Pattern Languages of Work/Life Balance in Seattle
March 4, 2008
Thanks Susan!
In Part I of Your Story, you say: "I began dreaming of neighborhood-based telecommuting centers as a way to combine the walk to work idea with this new nomadic workforce." Later you add: "from the beginning [it was] an inspiration within a mindset of sustainability and allowing people the ability to telecommute (read: drive [...]
Scarcity My Ass!
March 3, 2008
Over a century of management theory and practice has been based on a magical belief in Scarcity. Scarcity of resources, scarcity of time, scarcity of talent, scarcity of technology. What a crock of shit!
We now live in the age of Abundance! As Chris Anderson beautifully argues in his most recent salvo in [...]