Simply because I can :)
A man in slovakia cam of the road and was burried under 3 meters of snow. All he had to save himself were 60 bottles of beer. He drank and peed himself to freedom. Not sure if I have to believe this but it’s a fun story 
Source: The Sun Newspaper Online.
Update: It was a joke. See here.
My knowledge management tutor gave us a great article from changeX, a site about the change in economy and society that is currently going on. The article looks at the problem that current MBA schools don’t teach managers what they need to learn in our new economy. Tom Peters would be proud 
Are we building up a management elite that does:
- focus on excellent leadership instead middle of the read success?
- work by living cooperation instead of simple control?
- rely on inspiration instead of administrative instruction?
- work on knowledge creation instead of fixing routines?
- focus on understanding and looking at the context instead of simple requirements?
- are fixed on sense and meaning instead of money?
New leaders need to find the people to do something, look reality in the eye, make the focus of the company clear, create a culture of discipline and leverage technology as acceleration. This is just a list they mention and there are likely lots of different things to look at it, but the really important thing is, that you need to be different. We are moving into a knowledge economy, and from there into a values economy if a friend of mine is right. You don’t get the most knowledge or the best values through control. You need understand the values bottom up and find out how to nurture them in the right way. You need to let people free under make sure they are motivated and know the rough direction to get most of their knowledge. And you need to interlink them and let them share based on the SECI Model for example. We know more than we can tell, as Polanyi said. This is important, first because specifications don’t tell everything, and second because that means that all the outsourcing might be wrong or we need a different kind of outsourcing.
The thing is that you need to build a base of common understanding, shared beliefs, and you need to be able to move them beyond your corporate boundaries. Talk to the world. Our mental models aren’t really equipped for it at the moment but we need to adapt. We need to learn, unlearn, relearn. Use teams small enough to have amazing cohesion and give them a guiding light, then let them run free. Suddenly we need less managers and more doers, thinkers, players, motivators. Tom Peters idea of a manager as a barrier removal consultant is a very good term. Break mental barriers, get people to understand. Don’t just sell. Sell the right stuff.
Where will the good people work in the future? Where they belong. Now go make people belong and boy can you have some power.
Good day everyone. I finally managed to move the URL of the blog and update all my feeds. Please update your links and subscriptions:
The Blog is now at blog.thylmann.net
The Feed for that blog is at feeds.feedburner.com/owt
The Moblog is now at moblog.thylmann.net
The Feed for the MoBlog is at feeds.feedburner.com/owtMoBlog
If you want to subscribe to my blog and furl posts you can do that via feeds.feedburner.com/owtnfurl
The Homepage has moved from oliver.thylmann.com to thylmann.net and now just includes some links.
He held a speech in front of lots of CEOs which he called idiots it seems. He compiled a list why or when the are idiots which he put in a powerpoint slide at a presentation:
[...]
1. Fail to spend Hyper-aggressively on IS/IT; fail to follow “Gamechanger” IS/IT Strategies; fail to put their CIO on the Board; fail to exploit fully [Revolution Now!] the Web.
2. Believe in [BIG] mergers as The Key to Offense & Defense.
3. Hire MBAs in large #s.
4. Recruit mostly from conventional sources; have a low tolerance for risktakers-freaks.
5. Are less than 24/7 “Talent Fanatics.”
6. Do too much Imitation/Benchmarking/ConstantImprovement, not enough “Breathtaking”/Disruptive Innovation; favor “marketshare” over MarketCreation.
7. Believe that “process” beats “passion,” “analysis” beats “action.”
8. Spend too much time in the Office, not enough time in the Field; fail to ColdCall at least One Customer per Week; are surrounded by sycophants; have low Tolerance for Contention.
9. ARE NOT LOVED BY FRONTLINE STAFF!
10. Do too much MicroSegmentation I: Grotesquely underestimate the Women’s Market—and if they do more or less “get it,” fail to understand the Strategic Transformation required to master it.
11. Do too much MicroSegmentation II: Grotesquely underestimate the Boomer-Geezer Market.
12. Have too few Women on the Executive Team, too few Women on the Board.
13. Who’s … Board = OWMs.
14. Balk at Technicolor actions and language—e.g., WOW!, Lovemarks, DreamMarketing, InsanelyGreat.
15. Think Design is a frill, nicety—not the Fundamental Basis for Value Added.
16. Tolerate less than Excellence, do not insist upon “Experiences that make me ‘Gasp.’”
17. Deliver more on Short-term Earnings rather than Long-term Yearnings.
18. FAIL TO INSPIRE ME BY THE AUDACITY OF THEIR DREAMS. (Too much: “Dream” = “Buy MarketShare, Get BIGGER, Cut Costs.”)
The full post is here.
Ok, so P&G bought Gillette, probably for similar reasons that Gillette bought Duracel. Dave Taylor has a great post looking at how much the $57 Billion really is. I can add one thing here, which is something a consultant from Accenture asked me once when thinking about big numbers. How many homes could you buy from that? Let’s presume that you can buy a small house for $250.000. That’s 4 houses for a million, meaning that it would buy you 228.000 houses! Even if you want a bit nicer houses it would still be a nice little town. The thing is that this number is a lot easier to understand than the money value.
Wow, my last posts were on the 19th, over a week ago. Very scary indeed. I apologize and am not dead
The last few days were very busy though. I needed to get a presentation ready which involved some very long but productive meetings on the road to success, but success it was indeed and went very well. I am also in the process of writing, or trying to write rather, an assignement on intellectual capital accounting. Also in relation to the MBA, I found out that the residential school I booked, was at the one weekend where a lot was, suddenly, going on, so I tried to re-book and am now going to the UK on the 18th of February. I also had a great tutorial in frankfurt on knowledge management last weekend, having some very interesting discussions there indeed. I also “got” something else though. The flu! Hence I am posting this from bed but hope to be more or less ok again tomorrow. I am already feeling better today, having been down and out yesterday afternoon after getting myself through the first part of the day with some hard core medication. I slept a lot though and can only say again and again how wonderfully healing good sleep is! Now off to make myself a hot milk with honey to get this damn cough down a bit. This damn thing feels like the air is not moving out of my mouth when I cough but right into the back of my head trying to get out of my skull that way! Now if you are getting sick you know what will hit you
Update: Cool, they are talking about me in TV. Well, ok, they are talking about the flu but still… seems like I am not the only one.
I called A9 the ReSearch Engine when I first started using it. Strangly enough I still go to Google a lot more … I do wonder why. But back to the subject at hand. A9 has introduced something very cool now, the A9 Yellow Pages. They drove through lots of cities in special trucks and took pictures of the shop storefronts. If you now search for shoes in New York in a special district you can look at the shop and also the other shops close by. Very nice indeed. Check out how they did it A9.com >here.
Update: Russell points out that this is not really “never done before” type of stuff. Still very cool though
Mena started it all with her post about Great Customer Service from Lufthansa, asking to post your own experiences. The one I thought about sharing some time ago already was in regard to a domain move to Domain Factory. Due to the fact that they give you full control of the DNS entries, I decided to move some domains to them from another domain registrar. The entire process happened very smoothly indeed and they answered every question swiftly and correctly. Even on a sunday, I had a password problem with a new domain registration but was able to get the correct answer to my question via eMail within minutes. So much for my little story for today.
That’s the idea you get from reading the idea that we are in the times of "Wiki wars". Oh…. my … god … . We will all die horrible angry deaths because a sub set of a behemoth switched Wikis. So what is this all about? There was an article on Mercury News telling all that JotSpot stole away a customer, Disney, from SocialText. Now Ross commented and Graham commented twice.
The undertone of the posts seem to be very definsive and offensive at the same time, especially Ross seems to be going out of his way to make clear that JotSpot does not have as many customers yet, isn’t open source, isn’t into the new area of doing business the social way, and so on. From Ross: Jot may think they have won a skirmish against their leading
competitor. But really, its at the cost of their customer, and the only
harm to us is taking my time to write this post.
Emmm… what? How come this is at the cost of the customer? Why is it so important to have Disney onboard damn it? Last I tried JotSpot is a very fine Wiki indeed and I am looking forward to seeing it get out of beta. In relation to why JotSpot only has one customer, I presume that’s just because they are still in beta!
As Graham mentioned in his entry, SocialText and JotSpot have different value propositions. I highly doubt that JotSpot is really in this for a zero-sum game. The market for Wikis is huge, and I mean huge. There are an amazing number of applications out there and I myself run MediaWiki internall at the moment, just for the sake of showing that there are other options.
All in all I hope both teams will get along and not get into public fights via their blogs and this is what it seems like at the moment. It’s hard to loose a customer but that’s what its about. That’s business. Listen to your customer. Why did Disney switch? Are you missing a feature they need and does it fit your strategy? If it doesn’t then you shouldn’t go after Disney! In any case, as Ross says, this is about the cable network engineering department at Disney!!! That just shows how small the market still is and how big it can become! Now get going developing your applications in the light of what your customers want and stop fighting.
