Google Chrome Comic
September 4, 2008There’s been a fair bit of hype about the release of Chrome – Google’s new open source web browser. Yet another browser is of little interest (or use) to me, but have you seen the comic book introducing how the browser works’?
The famous Scott McCloud — who I’ve talked about before — created the comics adaptation. This is so awesome! I just love it.
Go see for yourself.
Forget Bullet Points - Tell Stories
July 18, 2008Convincing people of the power of narrative and encouraging them to tell stories rather than use bullet points in their presentations is often quite difficult. Trust me, it’s harder than it sounds.
In a podcast interview with Elliott Masie, Dan Pink gives a great example that shows it is quite natural and makes perfect sense: When you come home from work and are asked “… how was your day?”, do you get out a series of power points? No. You narrate!
Lies, lies and statistics
May 9, 2008I loved this Dilbert cartoon today. It points to the danger of taking a purely qualitative approach to problem solving. It also reminds me of some of my own very funny stories presenting data in planning sessions.
Creative Mind at Work
August 29, 2006
I know, I’ve been quiet. I’ve been meaning to write this post for a week, but just never got to it.
This time last week I attended a breakfast seminar run by my local (Banyule) Council. The keynote speaker Jason Clark, is the founder of Minds at Work, who–according to the promo–are a commercial collective of professional thinkers hell bent on changing the world!
An engaging, entertaining and interesting talk, Jason focused on how to harness and encourage creativity in the workplace, and used audience participation to facilitate and lead the discussion. Personally, I would have liked him to spend more time talking, introducing concepts and discussing his experience, whilst spending less time on the group activities. However, I would recommend that if you get the chance to attend one of his seminars that you take it, even if it is just to get out of routine for a day.
You never know, you just might learn something!
Ownership of Ideas
May 8, 2006My eldest daughter Madelyn (9) just received her first school assignment, which requires her to research a theme and choose from a number of different topics and presentation methods. On the weekend, I was enlisted to help out.
Helping was much more difficult than anticipated because, whilst I was able to come up with many great concepts and ideas; I found myself acting like it was MY assignment. My role in this excercise was to assist Madelyn to come up with her own ideas and thoughts and provide her with some direction, not to add my own ideas.
During this experience, I was reminded of an article that I read recently, which discusses the temptation to impose one’s own ideas on other people in the persuit of adding value and the effect that this has on the committment and ownership of ideas.
Therein lies the fallacy of added value: Whatever is gained in the form of a better idea may be lost six times over in the employee’s diminished enthusiasm for the concept.
So–upon reflection–I learned a couple of valuable lessons:
1. Be careful how you ‘encourage’
2. It’s better to “teach someonehow to fish” rather than to “feed them the fish”.
This is probably a lot harder to put into pracice than it sounds. So, do you let other people be winners?
