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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Sunday, September 25, 2005
Rip-off 101: How Textbook Industry Manipulates Prices
The textbook publishing industry is coming under fire for exhorbitant prices and abusive practices. We take a look at recent commentary on the state of the industry, a new research report that documents the state of the problem with corrective recommendations, and some innovative students who are fighting back. [More...]
Terry Frazier at 7:15 PM
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| Trackback URL | Categories: Business & Finance, Copyright, Education, Future of Print, Learning, Publishing
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Picture the Process
Australian process guru and ontological coach David Buchan has begun using flickr and, as is usual with David, has begun to brainstorm specifics on how it can be a tool for improving the way we work. This would not have been an interesting conversation a month ago, but with Yahoo! buying flickr a stable future seems much more likely for the online photo service. I like Davids three points at the end, addressing what are likely to be common objections to his idea.Using photos to job memories
Shawn Callahan extols the virtues of using photos to remember what has happened on a project.
Remember the last time you sat down to flick through a photo album and see the photo of Uncle Johnnie (substitute your own relatives here) building the sand castle with little Katie and you instantly recollect the story of how Johnnie got incredibility drunk that night and fell into the bonfire. The next morning he vowed to be a tea totaller. The same story recollecting effect can be created in your organisation with each each project you undertake.I really like this idea and agree that flickr is a good solution. If you're reluctant to start a photo archive today it may be because you are thinking...
- I don't have time to categorise everything so that I can find it again - well, flickr uses tags which are quick and sorts by date using the information from the digital camera itself. Photos of a project ar relevant to the people that were on it. They will remember the categories/stories themselves. For others it really doesn't matter so there is no need to invest the time
- I don't have time to take good photos or I'm not a good photographer - who cares? You want to capture the moment as it was, not as you thought it should be portrayed.
- The rest of the world will see us or the client will wonder why we are taking photos rather than doing work - injecting some humanity into work is always a good thing. And the rest of the world? Perhaps you will inspire them.
Terry Frazier at 12:25 PM
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| Trackback URL | Categories: Collaboration, Learning, Productivity
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Learning From Our Mistakes
Ex-Microsoft project manager Scott Berkun has written a very good article on how to learn from your mistakes. The article was written in July, well before the Katrina disaster, but is even more pertinent now:[...] An illustrative example comes from the book Inviting disasters Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the edge of technology. It tells the story of a floating dormitory for oil workers in the North Sea that rolled over during the night killing over 100 people. The engineering experts quickly constructed different theories and complex explanations that focused on operational errors and management decisions.Found via Denham Grey.All of these theories were wrong. It was eventually discovered through careful analysis that weeks earlier a crack in a support structure had been painted over, instead of being reported and repaired. This stupid, simple and small mistake caused the superstructure to fail, sinking the dormitory. Without careful analysis the wrong conclusion would have been reached (e.g. smacking the Atari) and the wrong lesson would have been learned.
Until you work backwards for moments, hours or days before the actual mistake event, you probably wont see all of the contributing factors and cant learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back youll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation. You may even need to bring in an objective outsider to help sort things out. Youd never have a suspect in a crime lead the investigation, right? Then how can you completely trust yourself to investigate your own mistakes? [...]
Terry Frazier at 10:37 PM
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