Heading from Engagement to Passion in Future Work Performance #e20s #socbiz

I'll liveblog large parts of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit. I'll try to publish my notes as soon as the talk is over.

First talks at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit are by Jon Mell and Dan Pontefract about 'Heading from Engagement to Passion in Future Work Performance'.

Flat army

First, Dan Pontefract about 'Flat army'. Pontefract starts with some stories about his experience in corporate life. Why do organizations feel like jails? Research (Gallup a.o.) shows employee engagement is horrible in most large organizations? In the US research shows this leads to huge losses in productivity. Disengagement is a huge issue in organizations.

How do we avoid disengagement in organizations? Most people want to find purpose at work. At Telus, the company Dan works for with 40.000 employees, they use several different models to encourage engagement in leadership, collaborative tools, etc.

Telus had engagement issues. Half of the employees were not engagement. They decided to address this in 3 areas: learning, leadership and collaborative technology. They integrated it into the way they work and evaluate it. Engagement scores improved year over year.

Dan shares some of the things they did with collaborative tools: share insights and thought leadership via Telus, gamification to help build better teams and wiki's for learning.

Wondering about the flat army

After Dan's talk I'm left wondering how much country culture and the size of the organization influences employee (dis)engagement. I worked for a large corporate for 10 years. I did see disengagement, but I never felt disengaged. So, is disengagement also a personal trait, something you personally decide to be or not to be?

Smarter Workforce

Then, Jon Mell about 'Smarter Workforce'. His talk with focus on the HR function. IBM does yearly studies on this. An interesting quote from the last study is: "Companies will evolve through globalization ant IT adoption, but always - at the center - are people. People are the foundation." (IBM Survey) HR is evolving into something strategic, less administration, more human capital management.

Key trends in the 'world of work':

1. the rise or social in the workplace
2. the rise of big data and analytics
3. the rise of cloud and mobile technology
4. the rise of the independent worker

New HR think:

• people leave that I would rather stay
• people stay that I would rather leave
• people come to work to work and don't give their best
• etc.

Jon is focusing on replacing guesswork in talent management in social with precision. Really trying to measure what social does for the company (from a HR perspective). E.g. increasing quality of hire with simulations and by have potentials join a community before they join the company.

Wondering about the Smarter Workforce

I really like the fact that IBM is looking at the data and metrics behind social in HR processes. Much more of this should be done. On the other hand, a balance has to be struck so we don't fall back into the pitfall of trying to measure everything. Wondering what the right balance is. Any thoughts?

What's the real issue with Information Overload?

What's the real problem underlying information overload? Nathan Zeldes has been finding answers to this question for years. Recently he wrote a must-read post on the answers he found. There are all kinds of reasons we keep on using email in an unproductive way. But the underlying issue, according to Zeldes, is mistrust. To solve the information overload problem within organizations we need to address this "dark side" of overload. If we don't we'll never structurally solve the problem. Address this dark side and change the underlying culture, Zeldes advises.

I agree this is a way to fundamentally root out mistrust. But what if this is not possible? What if the company just doesn't see the problem and therefore does not want to spend time on this extermination process?
I think every person can start by settting an example. Be counter-cultural! Show how the way you use email is more effective and productive. It's the long bottom-up approach, but this road empowers you, instead of waiting and complaining until "the rest of the company" gets it and starts the "improve trust program".

Relating your purpose to your current tasks

Oof, it's been a while since I blogged... Hope you missed me! ;-)
A post by John Stepper triggered me to rejoin the blogosphere. Of course I've been paying attention to the blogposts, reading and commenting on them. But I simply didn't make the time to write a blogpost of my own.

John wrote an interesting blogpost about an internal course he's giving. And the topic of the first course is defining your purpose. That's a very big topic. And it's hard for people to define what their purpose is. John bumped into this issue when running his course.
I recognize this big time! This is what I was struggling with when I started working. I read lots of productivity books and they all said: "Define your goals and purpose. Do what you're passionate about." So, you start to wonder what it is. You see all these smart and successful people around you that seem to have a clear purpose. They can articulate it as if they always knew what there purpose is.
I found (and find) it really hard to define my purpose. I'm much better at it than 10 years ago. Why is it so hard? For one, because lots of the stuff I have to do at work (and home) has nothing to do with my goals and passions. E.g. filling out what I spend time on for my boss is not something I'm passionate about. In the second place, I also think defining your purpose is something you know inside but is hard to make explicit. Like we learned in knowledge management: There are some things we just know, but find hard to share and/or write down. Sometimes we can talk about them. But often we just know.

So, what helped me define my purpose? Strangely, the road to my purpose was to get things done. I bumped into the book Getting things done by David Allen. I think this book/method connects my goals/purpose to what I have to do right now and vice versa. My experience is if you can't connect what you have to do now to what your long-term goals are, you'll simply frustrate yourself. But what you can do is get things done (out of the way) to be able to focus on your purpose and passions more.

I'm curious if others have the same experience!

The invisible company

Eryc Branham recently posted an interesting article about 'The invisible company' over on ReadWriteWeb.

I think his post also underlines that companies are inherently social. A company is a collection of humans. And (most) humans are social beings. I find most people don't look at companies this way. I hear lots of talk about social business as if business' are only social if they use social media internally and interact with the market via social media. Companies aren't social when they use social media. But, as Eryc says, social tools can be and should be used to make the social interactions between colleagues visible.

More Structure in Knowledge Work

A while back Thomas Davenport wrote an interesting McKinsey report 'Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach'. It's a thought-provoking piece. It goes against the trend to say knowledge workers should be left alone, they're smart and know what to do. Davenport says we should provide more structure to knowledge work. Providing knowledge workers "well-defined context of tasks and deliverables".

It's time for companies to develop a strategy for knowledge work - one that not only provides a clearer view of the types of information that workers need to do their jobs but also recognizes that the application of technology across the organization must vary considerably, according to the task different knowledge workers perform.

Davenport clearly also looks at the down-side of the free-access model for knowledge work. Are all knowledge workers really up to their task? Davenport clearly says 'no'. There are different levels of knowledge work that we should be open to. He relates to the case-management systems. "Case management can create value whenever some degree of structure or process can be imposed upon information-intensive work. Until recently, structured-provision approaches have been applied mostly to lower-level information tasks that are repetitive, predictable, and thus easier to automate."

I think Davenport is onto something here. What I see is that the IT would like to automate everything in heavy ERP-like tools. Everything is a process, everything can be structured, everything is digital, they seem to say. We know this drives knowledge workers crazy. What are they to do when they run into an exception? What happens when the process changes?

So, there's room between free-access tools to support knowledge work and tools that manufacturing-esk processes. I think the IT Flower shows this well. So, Davenport is wondering: where are the tools that support transactional work? Work that is not completely structured or unstructured. He says "the greatest potential for productivity improvements involve bringing more structured knowledge to workplaces and processes". And: "The key issue ... is to decide which aspects of the relevant process could benefit from more structured technologies and processes and which should be left largely untouched."

I'm not sure if "the greatest potential" is there. I think there's also huge potential in getting knowledge workers to use social tools in the organization. And use them productively. But there definitely is potential here. There's not only potential here for certain types of work, like someone working on files in the government as opposed to a PhD researcher. There's also potential for the knowledge worker who's work consists of different types of tasks. More and less structured work. The big productivity gain is helping knowledge workers switch between these tasks, I think.

What are your thoughts on Davenport's ideas? How does it relate to your daily practice?

Two Types of People

This post has been in draft for a long time... I was on the verge of posting it several times, but held back. I wondered if I should post it. Is it too negative, too open? Well, now I'm posting it anyway. As always your honest comments are welcomed.

In my work and private life I basically run into two kinds of people:

• People that get things done and people that don't.
• People that do what they promised and people that don't.
• People that answer emails and people that don't.
• People that finish their tasks on time and people that don't.
• People that are on time and people that aren't.
• People that forget appointments and people that don't.
• People that .... I think you get the point.

I honestly believe I belong to the first group. I'm not saying that I don't mess up, forget, procrastinate, etc. every now and then. But when I do I say sorry. It's not a normal thing, things should be different.
Furthermore I'm not saying I don't like 'the other type of people'. They're part of life and I just have to deal with them and organize my work to meet that reality.
On the other hand, things can be different. In my case, reading and living by 'Getting things done' helped me move from one group of people to the other. I think... If I'm mistaken, please correct me.

The Importance of Downtime

When you´re reading this I´ll be in a plane to the USA enjoying the first day of my vacation! Talk about downtime...

Watch this great TED Talk about where work gets done.


Good stuff eh?! It relates to my experience. How often are we interrupted at work? It's the managers job to interrupt people, says Fried. And should Facebook really be closed down because it's making us unproductive at work? And with all the meetings, how much time to have to get things done? So, M&M's are the problem: managers and meetings.

I ran into this related FastCompany post 'Why doing nothing is often better than doing something' (by Richard Watson). Interesting personal experience. I was wondering, is there any scientific proof that downtime is good? And how can be make downtime a good thing instead of 'an act of laziness'?

Well, while you're at work, I'm at work too. Enjoying my downtime to be even more productive when I get back. ;-)

Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone - HBR IdeaCast

One of the podcasts I listen to is the HBR Ideacast. They have lots of interesting talks with people. Sometimes these talks are related to articles published in HBR. Recently they interviewed Sherry Turkle of the much-debated book 'Alone together'. You can find the podcast here: Productivity, Multitasking, and the Death of the Phone.

It's an interesting podcast to listen to and think about. I understand the problem she is seeing and describing (although I still have to read the book). I understand she is worried about it too. But every time I read about her book and listen to what she's saying I think: Shouldn't this problem be addressed by helping young and old people understand the new web and using it in the 'right' way? For instance, help people filter the web, search the web, understand web privacy and build networks using the web. I see a huge need for this around me. And I don't see many schools (and parents) stepping up to this task.

I liked Turkle's 3 areas where more thinking and debate is needed:

• the role that we are going to give to robots in daily life
• about productivity in the workplace and new social tools
• getting rid of the word 'addiction' w.r.t. computer devices

If you've listened to the podcast, let me know what you think. We'll continue the discussion on your or my blog!

Connected Professionals - Novay

There's lots of buzz about 'The Future of Work'. And quite a bit is focused on technology. I don't think that's very strange. Most technology is specific, it's concrete. You can talk about how it works, which features it has, etc.
The Future of Work is about more than tools. It's also about facilities (building, furniture, colors, etc) and most importantly about organization (structure, processes and networks, culture, behavior, etc).
In my opinion one of the groups with the most fundamental research on this topic is Novay, specifically the Future Workspaces or ProWork group. And they ground there research in practice. Their approach is interesting because it's broad, focusing on organizational and technology issues (not facilities).
They've publish about their work regularly on their blog. One of their interesting reports is titled "Connected Professionals. Flexible working in a networked society". It shows their way of working: deep and broad, applied academic research grounded in daily practice.

The report shows that The Future of Work is mostly about organizational behavior change. I think they really do a good job of describing how the nature of work is changing and what the implications are for organizations and employees to cope with them. They point to four facets of work in the new connected workspace that have to be addressed: being in sync, in touch, in control and in flow. These require different behaviors, skills and tools. I see many companies moving to the concept of The Future of Work just assuming employees cope with working-apart-together, new coordination tools, result-driven work, etc.

The report closes with several concepts they developed based on their research and case studies for several companies. The concepts focus on several combinations of the facets of the new work. They show that existing technology usually only addresses some of those combinations and not all.

I hope this posts triggers you to take a look at their work. I'm curious what their next publications will be about.

Manager 2.0 - Key Elements of Leadership Concepts in an Enterprise 2.0 #e20s

I'm at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt! I'll be live tweeting through this summit. I'll also try to summarize the talks as they pass by.

The first talk is about "Manager 2.0" by prof. Richard Collin (Grenoble Ecole de Management) and Rolf Schmidt-Holtz (CEO Sony).

Collin wonders if 2.0 is a good extension in Enterprise 2.0. 'It's just a version number'. It doesn't stress enough the future enterprise will be totally different.

A new space is emerging. Not in the economy of good anymore, but in the economy of information. (Before the economy of good there was the economy of territory.) The north point is not north, Dow Jones, but 'you'.

Information is the new steam. The industrial age is passe. And it's moving fast. He tells about how long it took the book and the pc to move into our world. And relates that to the speed in which the Internet moved into our world. This has implications for leadership!

How should be define leadership in this new information era? Here's one: a leader can be defined by an ability to get others to be connected willingly.

Leader for the Enterprise 2.0 era:

• value bricolage strategically
• design tinkering
• etc.

He's the farmer of trust and a skills harvester.

Trust, walk the talk (is critical), you have to be what you see, be transparent, imagine, recognize and give (say merci!), to update and be update, to dare, focus on IT usage and not on the tools, to stimulate, to coach, solidarity and humility.

Now, Rolf Schmidt is up. What defines a great leader?

What defines a great leader? asks Rolf Schmidt, CEO Sony. They are good communicators, good colleagues.

Listening is important. The CEO don't know anything anymore. The distance between them and employees is too big.

You have the power, but don't have a knowledge, this goes for most CEO's. You have to be engaged, says Rolf Schmidt.

Great leaders rarely come out of big companies. Great innovations come from others, smaller companies usually, with constant dialogue.

Hardly any can come up with a great idea on their own. Points to the book and research by Steven Johnson, 'Where do good ideas come from?' Great ideas come to being by sharing.

Social networks (esp. Facebook) are key. The company is a social network. They developed an internal tool, Just Connect.

Discussion:

• Schmidt: Kill the old people... ;-) There's a fantastic young people coming up. Work hard, great marks at university, but they lack common sense. You need that to be a leader. You have to understand people. You have to be forgiving. Personality, you have to learn that at home, because you don't seem to learn that at university. People don't want to be impressed, but embraced.
• Schmidt stresses that we should stop spending time on email and instead spend time on thinking. Then communicate.
• Large companies will continue to exist. But for them to succeed they need to be authentic. Organize yourself in smaller, leaner cells. Decentralize. Give them daily decision power. But you need good people. That's what it comes down to.

Building a Company on Happiness

Zappos is a bit far away from a Dutchman. We don't have it here, yet. But of course you hear a lot about them. Zappos is praised for its culture, very engaged workforce, use of social media in business, great profit, etc.

Recently I wrote a post about 'Organizing on Passion'. Frederik Vieten, a student doing research at Océ, pointed me to Tony Hsieh's new book, Delivering Happiness. I hadn't heard of it yet, so that was a great pointer. I'm going to order and read it. But I also browsed the site and found a recent talk by Hsieh at Google.

Man, I watched it this talk this evening. And it's absolutely great. If you have an hour, just sit down, watch it and be inspired. What a great company and what a great leader Tony is. Here's the video:

I really liked the way the importance of company culture is stressed and how it can be crafted. I also love the way they select new employees based on questions linked to their core values. One of the most important Zappos values is 'be humble'. Wow! Tony says a company doesn't have to have the same values as Zappos, but if you have them it is key to really commit to them. To prove they are committed to their values they offer $2.000 to every new employee who wants to leave the company.

A neat thing is Zappos trains their employees to use Twitter (to express themselves, for customer contact, colleague connections, etc)

Another wow-moment was about their library. They have an open and free library for their employees and guest. Two key book in their to which Zappos relates deeply are: Jim Collins, Good to great and Dave Logan a.o., Tribal Leadership. Both books are great. And I've always wondered which high-level managers would take G2G and use it as a mirror for themselves as a leader and for the company. Hsieh is doing just that.

Thanks a lot Frederik for pointing to the book, that led to me finding this video!

Organizing on Passion

It's been a while ago since I read the great Shift Index 2009 report. I've been wanting to blog about it, but haven't had time yet. It's loaded with interesting insights. One big question I had is: This report is focused on the USA; how does this compare to Europe or Asia?

One thing from the report that stuck with me, was the importance of 'creative talent' and getting them to engage in 'creative problem solving, often by connecting with peers inside and outside the firm' (p. 11). On page 70 the report goes on to talk about 'worker passion'. The findings are pretty saddening. Lots of workers are not passionate about their work and self-employed workers are much more passionate than the firm-employed. The larger the size of the firm the less passionate workers get...

I went back to the Shift Index after reading a couple of things:

1. Steve Denning's post about the H in HR, which also points to the Shift Index and the importance of engaged workers delighting clients and stakeholders in self-organizing teams.
2. IBM's Capitalizing on Complexity study (to which ReadWriteWeb also recently referred) which stresses (cultivating) creativity is/will be key to thrive in a complex (business) world of the future.
3. Gartner's post about '10 Changes During the Next 10 Years'. Pointing to businesses working in work swarms. These are like teams, but have more emerging properties. They assemble and disassemble when needed. They are based on the spontaneity of workers

Maybe this is the difference millenials will make in the future, as prof. Andrew McAfee and Luis Suarez (a.o.) were debating.

All this got me thinking. As I commented on Denning's post: If this is so important, what would happen if we organized a company (even a large company!) on passion? Of course start-ups work in this way, if they're doing things well. So all workers could bail-out of their current projects, set up new ones, work on stuff (not) related to the company's mission statement, etc. What would happen? Would this work or will the un-interesting work (whatever that may be) be left undone? Or will this just lead to chaos?

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic! And I'd also be interested to hear of companies that are organized based on the passions of their employees.

Researching Enterprise Social Bookmarking

A couple of months ago my student, Arzu Yucekaya Bat, started working on her Master's thesis about social bookmarking and improving our internal bookmarking tool. Her research goal is:

To establish an overview for Océ Technologies B.V on motivations and barriers of the employees to adopt and contribute to the social bookmarking tool and determine possible interventions that will augment information sharing and discovery within this tool and assist to take proper incentives to increase the adoption rate.

Some excerpts from the original assignment are:

• Within R&D an opensource social bookmarking application is being used to collect and share bookmarks.
• Currently the implementation of our social bookmarking application is basic. We are working wider adoption of this tool and have generated several ideas to achieve this goal.
• conduct a short analysis of the literature on how to increase adoption of social bookmarking
• design an appealing application of social bookmarking to increase adoption (based on the current application).

Arzu's literature research has given some interesting insights. I hope to share some next week. Arzu's research will be published in a couple of months (when she finishes). You can follow her progress and engage with her via her tweets.

If you know of research that has been or is being done on this topic, please leave a comment. We'd love to hear from you!

Enough Information

When do you have enough information to make a next step or a decision? As you may know I love to process lots of information. Depending on the type of information I'll dive into it deeply or just dip my toe in it. After processing lots of information deciding when enough is enough has become easier for me. But it's hard for me to describe when I stop taking in information. Dave Snowden's Cynefin model has helped me in this sense. (By the way Snowden is currently summarizing the Cynefin model/approach/concept in several posts.

The Cynefin model basically says: look at cause and effect. Is the cause and/or effect clear? Is the relationship between both clear? Depending on your answer different 'next steps' should be taken. For instance if the relationship between cause and effect is completely unclear. This is the complex domain. Probing is the thing to do. Don't go a read volumes of books and articles. Probe and see what happens, then act, etc.

Even though I love to read lots of information I don't believe in perfection. That's one of the great things I learned from social media. Don't think you will be able to write a perfect report, blog post or book. Don't think you'll be able to process all the relevant content before you start communicating your opinion about the topic. Release as early as possible to get early feedback, to learn more quickly. Listen, think, share and learn.

How do you decide you have enough information? Do you have a problem to 'release early'? If so, why?

Practical Research on Future Workspaces

I've been wanting to point to a series of booklets about the future of work. These booklets have been put together by Novay. One of Novay's projects is about Future Workspaces. They have been and are conducting practical and fundamental research in the are of the new way of working. The booklets contain many insights from there work. The booklets are great to give away to management.

A Slack Day

Some time ago prof. Andrew McAfee had an interesting post about what's most important for the success with Enterprise 2.0. One of the things he mentioned was:

Slack exists in the workweek

Slack... This term has been buzzing in my head for some time. For one because of the fact that there hasn't been much slack in my agenda the last couple of weeks... But also because many people say they are "really busy" and "don't have time for social media".
I organize slack. I work from home regularly if I really want to concentrate on something, like reading and writing (a blog post). Even though I work hard from home I experience it as slack. And when I'm at work I almost always make sure I have one or two hours to read feeds and reflect on them (possibly leading to a blog post, tweet, etc.).
A couple of weeks ago we had a cleaning day at the office. We organized slack for a specific reason. I love these days. Everyone is in a different mode, we're all working on the same thing and there are clear results at the end of the day.
I was wondering: do we need 'a slack day' every week (excluding Saturday and Sunday...)? One day a week for us to sit back, reflect on your job, read inspiring and thoughtful information and share your insights. Or am I wrongly tackling a deeper cultural issue with an organizational solution? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

UPDATE 14-10-2011: Good quote and post about slack.

External and Internal Activity Streams

Every now and then I run into something that really gets me thinking. Recently I ran into this presentation.

ActivityStrea.ms: Is It Getting Streamy In Here?

View more presentations from Chris Messina.

I went through it several times. And I think I'll do so in the coming days. Really great stuff!!

Activity Streams: what are they, how can we collect and understand them? This presentation focuses on public streams, mostly on the internet. But does this story also extend to the streams behind the firewall, inside organization? I think it should, but I'm thinking about how this should work. Of course the firewalls are coming down. But companies will still be protecting their information to a certain extent. My thesis is: These streams will be most useful if the distinction between protected and public information is mixed.

What do you think? And how do you think one stream of internal and external information can be devised? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

(Note: Thx Tom (@tvgtvg) for the discussion that led to this post!)

Social Media and Internal Communications - Breakout Session Océ #intra10

As you may have notice in my tweet behavior I attended Intranet 2010 this week. Just like last year, it was a great ride! Great location, interesting keynotes, interesting participants, good food, etc. I haven't been to many conferences that are so well organized and are simply great from beginning to end.

Jan van Veen, my colleague who is manager Internal Communications, and I also gave a breakout session. It was titled 'Social Media for Internal Communications'. I inserted the slides below.

I would like to thank the Entopic organization for organizing this conference again! And to all participants: We enjoyed your questions, compliments and interactions!

Pres Oce social media for internal communications intranet 2010 congres

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What Matters Now

Sitting in the train I had time to read 'What Matters Now'.

I loved it. It's a very inspiring read. A great way to tap into the minds of great people. And all that for free! All contributors were asked to write a one-pager about a word. E.g. Power, Harmony, Compassion.

Here's some of the parts I enjoyed most:

• Vision is the lifeblood of any organization. It is what keeps it moving forward. It provides meaning to the day-to-day challenges and setbacks that make up the rumble and tumble of real life. -- Michael Hyatt (This relates nicely to my post about Vision vs Scale.)
• The One Percenters are often hidden in the crevices of niches, yet they are the roots of word of mouth. This year, your job is to find them and attract them. -- Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell
• Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, DIY and UGC - all these digital phenomena are starting to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution gets real. -- Chris Anderson
• Don't worry too much about getting things done. Make things happen. -- Gina Trapani
• Wouldn't it make more sense for both men and women to appreciate each other's strengths so we all work on what comes naturally? -- Marti Barletta
• Educate a girl, and you educate her children and gernations to follow. -- John Wood
• The road to sustainability goes through a clear-eyed look at unsustainability. -- Alan Webber
• After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom - fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals. -- Daniel Pink
• Stop waiting around for bosses and companies to get bette and complaining about how you are treated. Build skills - and use them - that will permit you to create the environment in which you want to live. -- Jeffrey Pfeffer
• When focusing on harmony, success becomes defined by different terms. Contribution. Dedication. Cooperation. -- Jack Covert
• Be compassionate to everyone no matter the level of connection. -- Mitch Joel
• Neoteny is the retention of childlike attributes in adulthood. ... It's time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults. -- Joichi Ito
• Robyn Waters, Cheerleader of Possibilities. :-)
• Good dumb ideas create polarization. ... The fiercer the polarization, the smarter your dumb idea. Of course, dumb can be just dumb. You just have to be smart to tell the difference. -- Dave Balter
• Never forget, a small group of people can change the world. No one else ever has. -- Micah Sifry
• I believe the thank you economy will become the norm in 2010 and beyond, and brands that fail to adjust will be left out in the cold. -- Gary Vaynerchuk
• When information is evaluated without context - regardless of highly sophiticated analytics, an infinite amount of compute, energy or time, little if any relevance can be established with certainty. When information is first placed into context with prior observations, relevance can be determined with basic algorithms and insignificant amounts of compute power. -- Jeff Jonas
• You're probably trying to change things at home or at work. Stop agonizing about what's not working. Instead, ask yourself, "What's working well, right now, and how can I do more of it?" -- Chip and Dan Heath
• You grow (and thrive!) by doing what excites you and what scares you everyday, not by trying to find your passion. -- Derek Sivers
• The Mesh is a movement that is taking place all around us and will grow, reform and spread to engage many more of us. It's reshaping how we go to the market, who we partner with and how we find new customers. The opportunity is to embrace the Mesh and hopefully to discover how your current or new business can inspire customers in a world where access trumps ownership. -- Lisa Gansky
• How do you know when you've had "enough?" Not everything, all the time, completely, forever. Just enough. Enough to start, finish, or simply maintain. -- Merlin Mann
• Mistakes happen. How you apologize matters. Don't bullshit people - just say "I'm sorry." And mean it. -- Jason Fried
• More people will tell you can't than you can. Don't listen. Anything's possible. -- Aimee Johnson

Workshop Productive Knowledge Work

Besides workshops about social media I've also been giving workshops about Productive Knowledge Work. It's a lot of fun. And I'm surprised at how many people are looking for ways to become a productive knowledge worker.

One theme that is addressed by the participants in almost every workshop is 'email guidelines'. They say: We should agree not to 'reply all', have clear email subject lines, etc.

I shared the slides I use for you. If you have comments or questions, I'd love to hear them.

Productive Knowledge Work Workshop

View more presentations from Samuel Driessen.

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