View from La Sombaille in direction of Le Chasseral (January 1st 2009)
I wish you – the casual reader of this blog – a joyful and shiny new year full of verve. I spent quiet days with my wife, children, family, and friends in Germany and Switzerland. I particularly appreciated the 3-day-trip to La Chaux-de-Fonds: the town of my childhood.
Happy New Year
Written by Felix on January 7th, 2009“Nobody Knows Anything”
Written by Felix on December 16th, 2008says the controversial author Nassim Nicholas Taleb in “The Black Swan”. This is also the chapter in his excellent book (even though the tone is sometimes exasperatingly arrogant) where Taleb offers some hints on how to leverage the unknown unknown.
1. Avoid negative-Black Swan business where the unexpected can have a huge impact (e.g. Madoff) and expose yourself to positive-Black Swans (e.g. research or venture capital).
2. Invest in preparedness rather than in prediction (Black Swans are unpredictable anyway). Instead e.g. of trying to predict the next earthquake in San Francisco, prepare the citizens and the infrastructure necessary to mitigate the impact of the earthquake.
3. Therefore, seize any opportunity to be exposed to a positive-Black Swan. Taleb advocates for living in cities and going to parties to gain exposure to the odds of serendipity. Please have a look at the long list of examples of serendipity in science and technology.
Interested? The following video gives a short introduction to the current financial crisis viewed through the eyes of Taleb and his mentor Benoit Mandelbrot.
SAP’s approach to sustainability
Written by Felix on December 8th, 2008Disclaimer: I’m an SAP employee.
Eventually, the two main topics of my professional career get together with SAP’s approach to sustainability. On the one hand the environmental management topics familiar since the study of environmental sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, on the other hand SAP as an employer of choice who encourages personal development, gives a tremendous amount of degrees of freedom to his employees, and offers a flexible workplace. This was about the “What”-dimension of sustainability which seems to be shared by most of the voters on the current SAP Vote on Sustainability (see also the vote results).
Moreover from a knowledge manager’s point of view, I’m glad that SAP encourages the 2.0-kind of interactions with its stakeholders (see the new Sustainability Report collaborative workspace).
Anyway, what do the figures in the report mean? Let’s take one example: the close to 400,000 metric tons of overall global carbon dioxide emissions by SAP employees (incl. business travel and car fleet) in 2007. The absolute number corresponds to the carbon dioxide emissions of the country of Bhutan. If you divide these emissions by the 44,000 employees you get about 9.2 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per SAP employee. This corresponds to the average emission by a citizen of South Africa. The ratio of GDP (aka revenue) per metric ton of carbon dioxide emission is about 33 for SAP (excellent in comparison with countries).
Thank you, James Farrar (see also SUN’s blog on Corporate Social Responsibility).
Add Visual Thinking to Your Toolbox
Written by Felix on December 1st, 2008I remember the days when I first used mindmapping to sketch ideas, gather requirements just-in-time or plan projects. First, people are surprised and relunctant: they have learnt e.g. that you take note in a digital order, bullet by bullet. So, the adoption rate of mindmapping was not that high in those days. Meanwhile companies like MindJet have sold more than one million licenses of mindmapping software packages.
I must admit that I’ve been a bit powerpoint-overeaten for the first two years with my present company. So, the “Back of the Napkin” hit my attention:
Visual Thinking is an extraordinary powerful way to solve problems, and though it may appear to be something new, the fact is that we already know how to do it.
Dan Roam has published this very useful book on how to make use of the visual thinking skills each of us has. His website outlines the basic toolset, the Google Talk session gives a vivid introduction (see below), and his book shows a lot of real-life examples for your “visual thinking MBA”.
Merlin Mann’s 4+ Years of Dedication to Inbox Zero
Written by Felix on November 23rd, 2008
Very nice presentation by Merlin Mann on action-based email processing delivered at Google Tech Talk. I’ve rediscovered him thanks to the PresentationZen book of Garr Reynolds. Garr highlighted Merlin’s “Inbox Zero” presentation as exemplary: simple, highly visual, augmenting the presenter’s narrative. You may also have a look at Merlin’s “How To… What sucks…” page for more productivity tips.
Visual Thinking for Business Model Design
Written by Felix on November 13th, 2008Alex Osterwalder’s blog on Business Model Design and Innovation shows what a huge lever a blog and the growing community around it is. Alex is creating a visual thinking version of a business strategy book and he offers a pre-release “book chunk project“. He has started a new series on business modell examples (first issue: Google Search). Last but not least, I’ve found the review on Visual Thinking books useful.
Big Blue joins the Change movement
Written by Felix on November 9th, 2008Good timing (or have we reached the tipping point?): IBM has launched a “Smarter Planet” initiative which pretty much covers the main change streams of Barack Obama’s change programme (analysis by James Governor).
I agree with Luis Suarez that this initiative lacks one decisive point: people & collaboration. Technology alone won’t be sufficient as we all know:
Meant is not said,
Said is not heard,
Heard is not understood,
Understood is not accepted,
Accepted is not adopted,
Adopted is not retained.
(Konrad Lorenz)
How do you persuade your senior management?
Written by Felix on November 4th, 2008Matt Moore offers a very good white paper on “Justifying Your Knowledge Management Programme“. The power of persuasion lies in the combination of personal credibility, logical arguments, and story telling. Matt focuses his paper on developing the logical arguments. While the chapters 1 and 3 are rather generic persuasive presentation tips, the six sources of information to construct the argument (presented in chapter 2) are the good ones for KM.
One point that has surprised me is “[...] at some point, you will have to justify [...]“. Well, I can’t imagine that senior management would have started a knowledge management initiative without a solid business case since the days of the Internet bubble.
Additionally, Mary Abraham had also referenced to European Guidelines for Measuring KM, and Kelly Butler from APQC briefly outlined some effective KM measurement methods and examples.
But Matt’s paper makes the difference between measuring and persuading. Do you know any other convincing contributions?
Support developing-world communities
Written by Felix on October 30th, 2008
Sponsoring a child is another nice way of connecting people with people. The following points have convinced us to take part in the activities of Plan International:
- our daughters establish a relationship with a child in a totally different part of the world (Assitan lives in Mali – a fantastic country that I got to know back in 1997)
- the funds benefit the whole community in which the child lives
- Plan is a transparent organization
Support developing-world enterpreneurs
Written by Felix on October 27th, 2008
Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva connects enterpreneurs who would like to fund investments with lenders like you and me. Kiva’s loans are managed by microfinance institutions on the ground who have a lot of experience doing this. Kiva makes not an extensive use of social networks features up to now.
