Third Culture had published an excellent Meaning at Work Pattern Language. I’d like to thank C. Keith Ray’s MemoRanda for bringing it to my attention.
Category Archives: Employee Relationship
How to Stifle Teamwork – Part 3
The news reports that US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfled had an opportunity to inspire, motivate the US troops during a recent question and answer session in Kuwait. Based on this exchange, I can’t say he succeeded in addressing the troops concerns let alone inspire them to go back into battle. That is unfortunate. “Why do …
The White Collar Revolt, Part 1
Related to my earlier post about saying ‘No’ (Some of the Passengers, Some of the Time) fed up computer programmers at Electronic Arts are suing their employer over “extreme job stress and health problems”. NPR had the story this past weekend on Weekend Edition. Employees are gaining more control over their work conditions with each …
Job Security is the Ability to Get a Job
My sister and I recently shared a phone conversation on the state of work. While she finishes her undergrad, she’s working for a temp agency. She’s continually negotiating with the agency on work; she calls the temp agency with her schedule, they call her with jobs. When there’s a match, there’s a match. If not, …
Six Step Process to Motivate Others
In a highly collaborative working environment, the traditional hierarchical relationship between employees doesn’t exist. The result is peers making requests to one another to move their respective projects forward. More akin to a volunteer organization than a button-down for-profit business. The best volunteer organizations use a 6-step process to motivate peers in assisting. This is …
One Sheet Wonders
I’ve been reading Ricardo Semler’s fantastic book, Maverick on how he turned around SemCo in the 1980’s. Each chapter ends with a nugget of organizational wisdom concisely delivered in a sentence or two. This is exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post, Once More, In Half the Time. In addition to also …
Want Better Collaboration – Improvise
The earlier collaboration techniques post (Stop Asking Questions) was based a key to successful improvisation. This post digs further into the relationship between improv and collaboration. Good improvisational comedy teams believe a group of individuals working together can start with nothing and quickly create something engaging, desireable, useful, and valuable. From this perspective, the keys …
Want Better Collaboration – Stop Asking Questions
The first step to a collaborative environment is to banish questions. Yes, banish the question mark from all conversation. Questions reinforce heirarchial relationships rather than build the peer-to-peer relationships necessary for innovative, effective collaboration. Step #1. Everyone is smart and everyone’s knowledge is of equal value. A question forces someone else to make something for …
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A French Hour Sprint
Your new project is scary – though isolated and contained, the timeline ridiculous, the deadline immediate. The team is understandably nervous. What’s the easiest way to success? Institute French Hours – or what we’ve (until now) called a Sprint. Here are the 4 rules of French Hours: You can’t do it all the time. Every …
Usability Not Usable? – Part 2
“People are usually not receptive to a newcomer waltzing in and telling them they’ve been doing their jobs wrong.” Usability departments exist in a number of our client organizations. Unfortunately, their organizational structural frequently instills an adversarial relationship between the project teams and usability group. The usability group is considered an outside agency – ony …