Idée lancée à TED par le designer Stefan Sagmeister: au lieu de vivre sa vie dans un ordre typique - 25 ans à apprendre, 40 ans à travailler, 25 ans à la retraite - pourquoi ne pas déplacer 5 années retraitées et prendre une année sabbatique à tous les 7 ans ?
Pourquoi pas ?
Dans son cas, il prétend que ces années sabbatiques sont mêmes rentables à long terme.
2009/12/11
Power of time
2009/12/05
Last Train Home - Un film à voir
Il y a de ces thèmes qui sont universels. La migration des ouvriers chinois, au-delà de la pauvreté et des conditions de travail, en est un et c'est ce que j'avais évoqué ici.
Le réalisateur Lixin Fan a filmé pendant trois ans les membres de cette famille du Sichuan qui sont déchirés par cette migration. Le résultat est un film poignant, Last Train Home, qui, si on oublie l'environnement, aurait bien pu se dérouler n'importe où en occident.
Un film à voir.
2009/12/03
Ingénierie Vs. Marketing
Tiré de ce blog dont j'ai déjà parlé ici, l'exemple de compagnies menées par des ingénieurs (HP, Dell) qui s'immiscent dans les décisions marketing.
Lost in the Laptop Labyrinth
In Search of the Lost E
2009/12/02
La médecine et les TI
Alors que dans ce post, il est question d'innover le modèle de la médecine en se servant des technologies, une autre proposition est de mettre en place des systèmes informatiques pour améliorer les opérations dans le réseau. Malheureusement, dans le deuxième cas, une étude vient de démontrer que le succès n'est pas au rendez-vous.
The recently released study evaluated data on 4,000 hospitals in the U.S over a four-year period and found that the immense cost of installing and running hospital IT systems is greater than any expected cost savings. [...]
The problem "is mainly that computer systems are built for the accountants and managers and not built to help doctors, nurses and patients," [...]
"For 45 years or so, people have been claiming computers are going to save vast amounts of money and that the payoff was just around the corner," he said. "So the first thing we need to do is stop claiming things there's no evidence for. It's based on vaporware and [hasn't been] shown to exist or shown to be true."
2009/11/26
Motivation, créativité et passion
Dans cette présentation, Daniel Pink introduit l'idée que les systèmes en place dans le monde des affaires pour stimuler la productivité sont inefficaces.
Dans le premier exemple qu'il donne, le candle problem, la mise en place d'incitatifs financiers fonctionne seulement dans le cas où le travail à effectuer ne requiert pas de créativité. Pour un type de travail routinier et manuel. Pour un type de travail qui est appelé à disparaître de plus en plus. En plus, dans le cas où il faut faire appel à la créativité, plus les incitatifs financiers sont grands, plus la productivité est basse.
Dans un deuxième exemple, il compare le développement de l'encyclopédie Encarta par Microsoft - avec incitatifs financiers en place - et l'avènement de Wikipedia - sans aucun incitatif financier. Résultat : Microsoft a annoncé la fermeture de ce service cette année et Wikipedia est plus populaire que jamais. (Bon, ok, beaucoup d'autres facteurs peuvent influencer ce résultat).
À mon avis, tout cela s'applique aux tâches demandant de la créativité ET aux autres tâches. Dès qu'on démontre de l'intérêt envers des gens ou un projet, les résultats sont là. En fait, c'est ce que présente l'effet Hawthorne.
Enfin, la solution réside selon lui dans la motivation intrinsèque :
1. Autonomy - "If you want engagement, self-direction works better."
2. Mastery - People's skills, interests and talents have to match the work.
3. Purpose - The work has to be meaningful.
2009/11/25
De la musique classique et des yeux brillants
Ça donne le goût d'écouter Chopin et de jouer du piano.
Google ChromeOS
Une phrase qui résume bien l'avenir possible du dernier joujou de Google: ChromeOS.
And in 2009, it's a much bigger deal for a PC company to fail at the Internet than it is for an Internet company to fail at the PC.
À 200$, j'achète.
(via Arstechnica)
2009/11/20
Carol Bartz sur le leadership
Après Carol Bartz sur le management, voici ce qu'elle a à dire sur le leadership. Tiré du numéro 'The World in 2010' de The Economist.
Leadership in the information age
In this environment, traditional management is impossible, or at least ill-advised. The hierarchical, layered corporate structures in which company information was carefully managed and then selectively passed down the line have crumbled. The online era has made command-and-control management as dead as dial-up internet.
That’s why the greatest mandate for leadership in business is the ability to cut through the information clutter and make clear decisions without apology. More than at any time, employees need—in fact, desperately want—unequivocal direction.
The central role of information in business life has made two other much neglected leadership tasks more urgent.
The first is listening. It is a hoary cliché of management schools that a good boss knows how to listen. But this shouldn’t be merely an exercise in empathy. Listening to your employees at every level is one of the best paths to new insights.
The second obligation that information creates for executives is to identify and mentor thought leaders. In the past, seeking out “high potential” employees typically meant looking for those who could climb the next rung of the management ladder. That remains important. But equally pressing is finding those employees who, though perhaps not the best managers, have the ability to digest and interpret information for others. Grooming these in-house ideas people helps foster a culture of openness to fresh thinking—the greatest energy an organisation can have.
2009/11/19
Comment être pro-actif
Le fameux iTablet d'Apple n'est même pas annoncé qu'il est déjà reporté.
Pourtant, Adobe et Condé Nast développent déjà des projets liés à cet appareil. L'art de dicter sa façon de faire plutôt que de se faire imposer les règles.
2009/11/11
Médecine 2.0
Dans la lignée des deux émissions spéciales sur le système de la santé américain diffusées dans le cadre de This American Life, une piste de solution proposée par Jay Parkinson, docteur du futur et dans le top 10 des personnalités les plus innovantes dans le domaine des soins de santé selon FastCompany.
Sa présentation à Poptech:
Service civil
Au lieu du service militaire, je crois que c'est en Allemagne qu'il existe la possibilité de s'impliquer socialement à l'étranger pendant un an. L'idée mériterait de s'y arrêter.
Un projet dans la même veine, le Global Citizen Year.
2009/11/06
2009/11/05
Apple vs. Microsoft
Entrevue avec un directeur de l'agence de marketing qui a créé la campagne 'Think Different' et qui a nommé le iMac.
Ici, un commentaire à propos d'un autre homme - qui a la tête de l'emploi - derrière la campagne.
It would be folly to suggest that Lee didn’t see this as a great business opportunity. But if ever there was a moment of pure passion in the ad biz, this was it. Lee was driven by his love of Apple, his respect for Steve and the opportunity to re-create the magic of the birth of the Mac.
Enfin, une comparaison avec la campagne de Microsoft pour la sortie de Windows 7.
[...] as a fan of advertising I can’t help feeling that this effort is just an opportunity wasted. A huge, unmistakable, perfect-storm opportunity served up on a silver platter.
2009/11/04
Carol Bartz (Yahoo) sur le management
À propos des évaluations :
If I had my way I wouldn’t do annual reviews, if I felt that everybody would be more honest about positive and negative feedback along the way. I think the annual review process is so antiquated. I almost would rather ask each employee to tell us if they’ve had a meaningful conversation with their manager this quarter. Yes or no. And if they say no, they ought to have one. I don’t even need to know what it is. But if you viewed it as meaningful, then that’s all that counts.
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À propos du management et de l'apprentissage :
I also think people should understand that they will learn more from a bad manager than a good manager. They tend to get into a cycle where they’re so frustrated that they aren’t paying attention actually to what’s happening to them. When you have a good manager things go so well that you don’t even know why it’s going well because it just feels fine.
When you have a bad manager you have to look at what’s irritating you and say: “Would I do that? Would I make those choices? Would I talk to me that way? How would I do this?”
When people come to me and say, “I can’t work for so-and-so anymore,” I say, “Well, what have you learned from so-and-so?” People want to take a bad situation and say, “Oh, it’s bad.” No, no. You have to deal with what you’re dealt. Otherwise you’re going to run from something and not to something. And you should never run from something.
Tiré de la série Corner Office du NewYork Times.
2009/11/02
Gmail
Après salesforce.com qui a été le premier exemple majeur d'une application dans le 'nuage' (insérer le buzzword ici - SaaS, Cloud Computing, the Collective, ...), est-ce que Gmail sera le prochain succès ?
Possible, surtout qu'après l'annonce récente de Motorola qui a fait le saut et qui a réduit ses emails de 47% grâce au threading, c'est maintenant au tour de L.A..
Clause intéressante dans le contrat :
The contract was approved pending an amendment that would require Google to compensate the city in the event that the Google system was breached and city data exposed or stolen. No such clause existed in the contract.
2009/10/30
Malcolm Gladwell @ PopTech en 2006
Conférence de Malcolm Gladwell dans le cadre de PopTech 2006 qui résume son livre Blink. Exemples traités, tous liés à l'intuition : l'histoire de la commercialisation de la chaise Aeron d'Herman Miller, l'introduction du nouveau Coke pour contrer Pepsi et l'expérience faite auprès du groupe de personnes qui doivent choisir un poster et justifier leur choix.
Conversations intéressantes
Pourquoi autant de gens aiment les TED Talks et autres conférences du genre (PopTech, GEL, BIF, BIL, BigThink, ideaCity, Fora.tv, Cusp, Sandbox Network, Palomar 5) ?
Parce que, peu importe le sujet, les orateurs discutent de leur passion actuelle. Comment ils en sont arrivés là, comment ils voient le futur et qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire pour les aider si ça nous intéresse.
C'est aussi en abordant ces thèmes qu'il est possible d'avoir une conversation intéressante avec quelqu'un qu'on rencontre pour la première fois. En allant au-delà des commentaires sur la météo.
Trois questions possibles :
1. What’s your current passion project – the thing you’re pursuing that you’re most excited about? It could be a result you’re working on, a big problem you want to solve, a breakthrough in your field. Note: this is not the same as your job title.
2. Talk about the specific help that would make the biggest difference for you right now? What are the skills, connections, or expertise that others might be able to help you with?
3. What kind of help do you love to give? What skills or connections do you most love using to help others with their passion projects?
(via ce blog)
Rail en Afghanistan
Un nouveau projet de construction d'une ligne ferroviaire de 75km entre Mazar-e-Sharif en Afghanistan et la frontière de l'Ouzbékistan.
La bureaucratie chez GM
If you want to understand how the old General Motors stumbled for 30 years until it collapsed into bankruptcy, consider the story of GoFast.
GoFast was a program started in 2000 by Rick Wagoner, then the company's president (and later CEO), to untangle bureaucracy. The idea was simple: When negotiations over an issue reached an impasse, all the interested parties would be put together in one room until they agreed on a decision.
Human resources was assigned to spread GoFast through the company. It trained GoFast coaches, arranged thousands of GoFast workshops, staged GoFast feedback sessions, and distributed GoFast coffee mugs. At one point, GM claimed savings of more than $500 million from GoFast.
But the program took on a life of its own. GoFast workshops were held to eliminate other meetings; eventually the number of workshops reached more than 7,000. In other words, GM held more than 7,000 meetings to discuss how it could hold fewer meetings. Managers might see their performance evaluations downgraded because they weren't holding enough GoFast meetings. "The whole premise of GoFast became going slow," complained one executive.
(via Fortune)
2009/09/16
Régulation ferroviaire
Do railroads have a free ride?, tiré de Fortune.
In 2008, the biggest rail companies, like CSX and Norfolk Southern, posted record revenues. Yet their success, especially at raising prices, has made some customers unhappy -- including companies that ship chemicals, coal, and ethanol, all of which have their own political muscle in Washington.
[...]
In the U.S., the industry is dominated by a pair of duopolies: CSX and Norfolk Southern dominate the East Coast, while Union Pacific and Burlington Santa Fe rule the West. Proponents say this structure is inevitable given how expensive it is to run a railroad business.
But politicians who support some of the shippers say the setup has led to price gouging.
Gouvernement américain - App Store + Cloud Computing
Vivek Kundra, le CIO du gouvernement américain, continue de brasser la cage en proposant un app store et l'arrivée du cloud computing (via le nytimes).
2009/09/15
2009/09/14
Régime des Rentes
Article super intéressant concernant le programme de Social Security aux USA. Nous vivrons la même situation avec le RRQ ici.
No, it's not a Ponzi scheme as some folks claim. A Ponzi uses money from today's investors to pay yesterday's investors and -- the key element -- lies about it. Social Security, in contrast, doesn't lie about what it is: an intergenerational social-insurance plan, with today's workers supporting their parents (and disabled and survivors) in the hope that their children will support them. It's not a pension fund. It's not an insurance company.
La Chine ferroviaire
Tiré de l'article de Fortune, China's Amazing New Bullet Train.
The result is that when plans are made, they also get executed. In America, jokes Sean Maloney, the No. 3 executive at Intel, "NIMBY-ism [Not in My Backyard] is still an issue. In China, it's more like IMBY-ism. They plan, they build things, and they move fast."
[...] Consider that the Northeast Corridor, between Boston and Washington, D.C., is served by Amtrak's Acela train, which clips along at a stately average speed of 79 miles an hour. There's a lot of talk now, as part of President Obama's stimulus plan, about upgrading the system and building new, faster lines all across the nation. In his stimulus bill Obama has allocated $8 billion over three years for high-speed rail, and 40 states are now bidding for the funds, with results to be released in September. Among the possibilities, California wants to link San Francisco with L.A. via a high-speed link. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) wants the private sector to get into the act, proposing a high-speed spur to connect Las Vegas with L.A.
Maybe, after environmental reviews are finished and eminent domain issues settled, those lines will be built. Meanwhile, IBM opened its new global high-speed-rail innovation center last month.
In Beijing.
L'importance du CA
Dans le cadre d'une bataille d'actionnaires ayant aussi d'autres enjeux, 4 membres du conseil d'administration de Target étaient menacés de perdre leur poste récemment. La raison évoquée ? Manque d'expérience et de compétence. Finalement, ils ont conservé leur poste, mais serait-ce le début d'une nouvelle tendance où le conseil d'administration aurait finalement un rôle à jouer ?
On March 17, Ackman launched a proxy battle for five of Target's board seats. He claims that the company's directors lack expertise in retailing, credit cards, and real estate -- all skill sets that would have helped it navigate the difficult economic climate.
Stung, Ackman announced he wanted to replace four directors up for reelection, plus Ulrich. The real issue, he now says, is governance and experience. "This proxy context is not about a deal," says Ackman. "It's about making sure the board is comprised of executives with relevant expertise to help guide and shape strategy going forward."
To convince investors that his slate is superior to Target's, Ackman has issued comparisons of each of his directors with one of theirs. Solomon Trujillo, CEO of Australian telecom company Telstra, for example, is faulted for not having any experience specific to Target's businesses, as compared with Michael Ashner, who runs Winthrop Realty Trust.
Ackman's biggest "get" is undoubtedly Jim Donald, who, prior to being axed from the CEO spot at Starbucks last year, turned around Pathmark and was the architect of Wal-Mart's move into food. Even Deutsche Bank Securities senior analyst Bill Dreher, who calls the fight "a waste of time and money," says that "where I sort of pricked up my ears was potentially being able to get Donald."
Target retorts that its directors are extremely well qualified, that Trujillo's technology experience is helpful, and that Ackman has attacked the board in "an effort to divert attention from Pershing's risky real estate agenda."
Libre choix informatique
Cisco a mis en place un programme qui permet aux employés de choisir eux-mêmes leur ordinateur.
Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco's (CSCO, Fortune 500) top information technology officer, says the initiative, launched last year, should actually save the company money. The fact that employees involved in the pilot program are deliriously happy with it - Jacoby and her peers even get love notes from satisfied road warriors - is a bonus.
Jim Collins: Not risk, ambiguity
Jim Collins: How to Thrive in 2009, tiré de Inc.com.
I see entrepreneurship as more of a life concept. We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can take a paint-by-numbers approach, or you can start with a blank canvas. When you paint by numbers, the end result is guaranteed. You know what it's going to be, and it might be good, but it will never be a masterpiece. Starting with a blank canvas is the only way to get a masterpiece, but you could also blow up. So, are you going to pick the paint-by-numbers kit or the blank canvas? That's a life question, not a business question.
It has to do with your ability to handle risk, no? Not risk. Ambiguity. People confuse the two. My students used to come to me at Stanford and say, "I'd really like to do something on my own, but I'm just not ready to take that much risk. So I took the job with IBM." And I would say, "You're not ready for risk? What's the first thing you learn about investing? Never put all your eggs in one basket. You've just put all your eggs in one basket that is held by somebody else." As an entrepreneur, you know what the risks are. You see them. You understand them. You manage them. If you join someone else's company, you may not know those risks, and not because they don't exist. You just can't see them, and so you can't manage them. That's a much more exposed position than the entrepreneur faces. But there's lower ambiguity on the paint-by-numbers path: very clear but more risky. The entrepreneurial path: very ambiguous but less risk.
[...] [Successful entrepreneurs] defined success on a very big scale. For Steve Jobs, it was about much more than selling computers. For Yvon Chouinard, more than clothing. For Anita Roddick, more than cosmetics. For Howard Schultz, more than coffee. For Jeff Bezos, more than online retailing.
Bob: leçons d'un échec
Billet titré Innovation - The Lessons from Bob, qui parle du lancement du maintenant célèbre produit Bob de Microsoft qui était supposé révolutionner le monde des logiciels.
1) Never underdeliver against expectations.
2) Consumers don't care about strategy.
3) A small marketing budget can work wonders.
4) If you start to get feedback from customers that your product is anything but great, don't forget that you only get one chance to make a first impression.
5) Don't be afraid to take risks.
6) Place bets on smart people who push the envelope.
7) Never forget the crucial role influentials play.
8) If it doesn't work the first time, be open to the idea that it might work down the line.
9) Don't be afraid to poke fun at yourself.
Innovation et nouvelles technologies
The New, Faster Face of Innovation, tiré du WSJ.
Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago.
[...] Five years ago, for instance, a leadership team might have reviewed two or three “big” innovation proposals from consulting gurus; executive teams today might compare the outcomes of 50 or 60 real-world experiments to decide which ones to act upon.
[...] All of which guarantees huge changes for corporate cultures. Challenging conventional wisdom, for one thing, becomes immeasurably faster, cheaper and easier.
[...] As more people get involved in experimentation, companies will also need to change their focus in education and training efforts for innovation. Instead of just getting workers to creatively interpret large volumes of data, companies will need to help them develop the skills to rapidly design provocative experiments. Passive analysis will be subordinate to active experimentation.
Cours en ligne
Like so many other industries, early attempts at delivering online education have generally consisted of making available the same content that’s found offline. While this is a good start, the key to online education is amplifying the way in which we learn when we’re at school — from our peers.(via bizDeansTalk)
Une belle opportunité pour les systèmes de collaboration.
Le management dans le sport
Discussion intéressante sur le réel apport du management dans le monde du sport.
Une étude de cas pourrait être faite entre autres avec le nouvel entraîneur du club école des Canadiens, Guy Boucher.
Culture d'entreprise
Une présentation de Netflix sur le sujet.
Culture
View more presentations from Reed Hastings.
Stats
For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics, un article tiré du NY Times.
I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.
[...] the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.
[..] I.B.M., seeing an opportunity in data-hunting services, created a Business Analytics and Optimization Services group in April. The unit will tap the expertise of the more than 200 mathematicians, statisticians and other data analysts in its research labs — but that number is not enough. I.B.M. plans to retrain or hire 4,000 more analysts across the company.
2009/07/24
La classe du futur
The seating arrangements are compared to airport traffic patterns. The student schedules are called playlists. And lesson plans are generated by a complicated computer algorithm for the 80 students in the class.
Intrapreneurship et innovation
Deux concepts qui vont de pair.
Comment les favoriser est une grande question.
2009/07/17
IBM
Tel que discuté ici, IBM se lance dans des projets globaux : les infrastructures et les systèmes d'information.
Cette vision s'applique aussi au transport ferroviaire, avec entre autres, l'inauguration d'un Global Rail Innovation Center à Beijing. L'Université du Michigan est un partenaire dans ce centre et donc, le CN aussi indirectement.
Leadership
Setting the right tone.
Getting organized.
Building relationships.
Getting or keeping things moving in the right direction.
Figuring out ways to become and stay appropriately informed.
What makes a great leader ?
Skilled or gifted (The Guild CIO)
L'avenir de la presse écrite
En vrac, quelques idées sur le sujet.
Le micro-paiement, solution pour la presse ? (Nicolas Langelier)
Le journalisme survivra (Nicolas Langelier)
Ensemble, c'est tout (Nicolas Langelier)
Why micropayments won't work for the NYT
Dear NYT, please charge me more than $5 for your website
2009/07/10
Nuages représentatifs
Les nuages de mots des discours inauguraux des présidents américains.
Ça en dit beaucoup.
Analyse vs. synthèse
The 18th century German philosopher Hegel introduced this idea in a very easy to understand way. The current situation of anything is called the ‘thesis’. The current situation has its advantages and its disadvantages. But it will always lead to a reaction, towards the opposite, the ‘antithesis’. It solves the disadvantages of the old situation, but also introduces new disadvantages (probably the opposite of the previous advantages, if you still follow me). It takes time to combine best of both world, which is called the synthesis. The thesis and antithesis fused into a higher level.(tiré de ce blog)
An example: organizations often centralize, because they were too decentralized. Then they decentralize, because they were too centralized. If you keep on doing this, you’ll never really solve the problem. It is when you realize that ‘standardization’ is the synthesis of both centralization and decentralization, you have progressed. When processes, systems, ways of working etc are standardized, it doesn’t matter anymore if you are centralized or decentralized.
Where analysis focuses on working within the boundaries of a certain domain (taking one big thing into smaller pieces), synthesis connects various domains. Why is everyone so obsessed about analysis?
Être et demeurer CIO
Une fois en poste, comment demeurer CIO ? Facile si on suit ces étapes.
Succession Planning
Legacy Technology Transformation
Enterprise Software
Data Integration
Empowering the Business
Consultant Power
Rigueur
If a curriculum lacks intellectual rigour, students never realise how little they really know. The arrogance propagated in business school may well have contributed to the financial crisis. I agree this presents an opportunity for business schools—students should get more rigour, and more humility.(à propos des programmes MBA, tiré de The Economist)
À trop vouloir bien faire
Les checks and balances qui peuvent tuer l'innovation.
For good programmers, one of the best things about working for a startup is that there are few checks on releases. In true startups, there are no external checks at all. If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production servers before lunch. And when you can do that, you have more ideas.
At big companies, software has to go through various approvals before it can be launched. And the cost of doing this can be enormous—in fact, discontinuous. I was talking recently to a group of three programmers whose startup had been acquired a few years before by a big company. When they’d been independent, they could release changes instantly. Now, they said, the absolute fastest they could get code released on the production servers was two weeks.
This didn’t merely make them less productive. It made them hate working for the acquirer.
Le père du Knowledge Management
“Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don’t understand how human beings learn and create,” he says. Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology — the conventional “inputs” into business practice — knowledge is innately self-renewing. “It is produced and consumed simultaneously. Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities. Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationship with one another.”
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Un article de McKinsey dans la même lignée.
Strategy / Execution
Dans leur article The Office of Strategy Management, Kaplan et Norton discutent du disconnect existant entre la stratégie corporative et l'exécution de cette stratégie.
Two-thirds of HR and IT organizations develop strategic plans that are not linked to the organization's strategy. This is extraordinary.
Seventy percent of middle managers and more than 90 percent of front-line employees have compensation that is not linked to the strategy.
Most devastating, 95 percent of employees in most organizations do not understand their [organization's] strategy.
MBA + IT
Point de vue de SAS
There is a trend toward staffing IT departments with non-technical employees or “hybrids” (e.g., MBAs with some tech background). More and more, the pervasive thought of CIOs seems to be “I can teach the technology. But getting staff who understand business drivers and speak the same language as the business side of the house is harder to come by.”
[...]
The exec pulled the IT guys from those projects and has actively sought to staff his team with that rare, but highly-sought-after creature – MBAs with some background in technology.
[...]
So if you’re replacing the technologists with those hybrid business types, isn’t it logical to expect an IT backlash? I mean someone has to get down and dirty with the technology to make it all work. At some point more than a cursory knowledge is required, and no amount of business savvy can replace that.
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Article de Fortune, abordant le même thème avec l'angle du CIO.
There was a time when the geeks who keep a company's tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. You called the chief information officer when you needed a server upgrade, not a strategic plan.
2009/07/08
NYC et Google
Un autre exemple de transparence du processus gouvernemental, venant de NYC avec la maire Bloomberg en tête cette fois. Définitivement, ça bouge du côté gouvernemental aux États-Unis. Peut-on en dire la même chose de ce côté de la frontière ?
According to the Mayor, “the more accessible we make it [city government], the more accountable we make it.”
2009/07/07
eGovernment
Déjà discuté ici, le gouvernement britannique continue sa démarche vers l'ouverture des données.
De plus, W3C's own eGovernment Interest Group has also been actively building an international network of support to work with governments on issues of transparency, accountability, and efficiency through open data.
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Dans le même ordre d'idées, un extrait d'un article de HBR intitulé 'Put Your Data to Work in the Marketplace' qui liste 9 stratégies afin de ce faire.
Plein d'idées
50 syllabus de cours d'administration, de sciences, d'art et de technologies. Curieux de savoir s'il existe du open-source semblable en français.
2009/07/06
Le dashboard de Vivek Kundra
Superbe IT dashboard que vient de lancer le gouvernement américain pour permettre au public de suivre les dépenses dans les projets TI (l'article du NY Times). Un autre exemple d'ouverture des données.
Mise à jour 14 sept 2009 : le site semble avoir quelques détracteurs et quelques problèmes.
Vivek Kundra, CIO du gouvernement, 34 ans, est à la tête de ce projet. Cet homme semble avoir une très bonne tête et une perspective fort intéressante selon cette entrevue.
I usually point to three areas in terms of what we are doing here. It starts with a shift in philosophical thinking, but there are three pillars. First, there is the question of how you lower the cost of government operations by moving toward consumer technologies rather than technologies focused within the enterprise. What I mean by that is, for too long the public sector has thought for some reason that it's so special that it must have custom applications, it must have radios for the public safety unit that cost $6,000 a piece, it must have applications targeted for the enterprise. And the government chooses to pay for things that it can get for free.
Second, there is the question of how you drive radical transparency in the public sector. We are doing that by democratizing data and opening up the warehouse of government information to the public so people can innovate; they can slice, dice and cube that data to create amazing and creative applications for citizens and government.
And the third big pillar has to do with how you fundamentally rethink IT governance. What I'm doing with IT governance essentially is simplifying it, getting away from complicated methodologies, and getting more focused on process rather than outcome. Here we've moved to a simple "stock market" model where every technology project is treated as a publicly traded stock.
Creating Shared Responsibility
Ce n'est pas révolutionnaire, mais les points listés dans cet article du BI Network s'appliquent autant au domaine de l'intelligence d'affaires qu'à n'importe quelle gestion d'équipe.
Le far-west de l'Asie
Malgré les incidents des derniers jours, je maintiens que j'irai un jour visiter le far-west de l'Asie, Urumqi en tête de liste.
Du management
Article du Harvard Business Review qui date d'octobre dernier, traitant de la profession de manager. Drucker en a parlé abondamment, mais il est encore temps de considérer ce travail comme une avenue en soi.
Les Chinois veulent nos ressources
Rien de nouveau, mais la Chine est toujours en mode acquisition en ce qui a trait aux ressources naturelles canadiennes et australiennes. Le dernier investissement en liste : la minière canadienne Teck.
Avoir un PLAN
Intéressante entrevue avec l'ancien CEO de Continental. Alan Mulally, CEO de Ford, semble suivre la même stratégie.
Q. What do you consider the keys to effective leadership?
A. The most important thing is that you treat everybody incredibly well and lead with a bit of humility. I’ve found that when I go into a company to lead it’s important to have a plan and to make that plan a simple one that everybody can understand. So even before I go into a company, or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, “What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?” Then what I do is take that and put it into a one-page plan.
I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company — and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies — that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, “What are the two or three things that really matter?” And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back.
Quart-arrière vs. Professeur
Qu'ont en commun le recrutement d'un quart-arrière au football et l'embauche d'un professeur ? Malcolm Gladwell prétend que dans les deux cas, il est très difficile de faire une bonne évaluation permettant de savoir si on est en présence d'un cancre ou d'une vedette. De plus, le choix aura de grandes conséquences directes. Un championnat ou des années de misère dans le cas du football. Et un système d'éducation pour ce qui est du professeur :
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Les Chinois et les trains
Sans contraintes régulatoires comme en Amérique du Nord et sans limites de budget, la Chine construit dans le domaine ferroviaire.
Construction on the 29.68-billion-yuan (US$4.34 billion) Shanghai-Hangzhou high-speed railway started yesterday at Fengjing area in Shanghai.
Construction started in July last year on the 300km Shanghai-Nanjing rail line at a cost of 39.46 billion yuan. A 251km rail link between Nangjing and Hangzhou is also under construction at a cost of 31.3 billion yuan.
BD voyage
Lu et même relu dernièrement, deux excellentes bandes dessinées à conseiller à tout amateur de voyage. Tout d'abord, Shenzhen de Guy Delisle qui dresse un portrait de la Chine. Puis, Le Photographe de Didier Lefevre, une histoire tout à fait invraisemblable qui se déroule en Afghanistan.
2009/03/04
IBM et les infrastructures
IBM, comme plusieurs autres compagnies, s'intéresse aux infrastructures globales.
Palmisano knows IBM isn't alone in drooling over big infrastructure projects. In tech, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500), Oracle (ORCL, Fortune 500), and SAP (SAP) all stand to benefit too. The same goes for the likes of GE (GE, Fortune 500).
"These are global issues and huge opportunities," Palmisano says. "Someone has to step out and take the lead. But we'll never do it by ourselves."
Optimisation
La façon dont General Mills a réagi à la hausse du prix des céréales et à la récession : en optimisant les approvisionnements et les processus. Et ça fonctionne.
Margin management soon grew into a structured process at General Mills. Each division has a three-year savings goal, and virtually everyone meets once a week to focus on cuts. Ditching multicolored Yoplait lids, for example, saved $2 million a year. Factory-floor workers will point out when box sizes are inefficient for putting in trucks. And consumer researchers identify flavors that aren't selling.
2009/02/12
Too big to manage ?
Jamie Dimon, de J.P. Morgan:
But the success of Dimon and his crew seems to refute the "too big to manage" hypothesis, and in any case, Dimon doesn't buy the whole concept. "In every business, some huge companies are successful and others aren't," he says. To Dimon the rich flow of information from different corners of the bank, like the signal from servicing that warned him about subprime, is a major advantage. "We have a gold mine of knowledge, but you have to manage it well," he says, "so every one of our businesses benefits from it." Other successful models will emerge, but for now Dimon has the best game plan - and don't forget, the best team to go with it.
2009/02/11
Sexy sustainability
TED Talks, encore.
Présentation très touchante de Majora Carter sur le développement urbain durable.
Mondialisation
Présentation d'un professeur lors d'un TED Talks. Inspiration pour une présentation reçue lors du MBA.
CN dans The Economist
L'acquisition du EJ&E mise en contexte dans The Economist.
A new bill would make it harder for the STB to approve a merger that does any local damage. Some call it nimbyism; others, democracy. [...] The quest for the common good is imperfect, but at least it is noisy.
2009/02/09
The secret coach
Quelques conseils du guru de management (Google, Apple), ex-coach de football, Bill Campbell:
Think big with talent.
Be honest - and accountable.
Skip the chief operating officer, it's part of the CEO's job.
Invest in the future.
Empower the engineer.
2009/02/08
Yes You Can
Les leçons à tirer de l'élection d'Obama.
Being different makes all the difference.
Just because you're different doesn't mean you can't be disciplined.
"The competitor to be feared is the one who doesn't bother about you at all, but goes about making his own business better all the time." (Henry Ford)
This, I Believe
This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives. These short statements of belief, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here and featured on public radio in the United States and Canada, as well as in regular broadcasts on NPR. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow.
(from BizDeansTalk)
Note : Edward Murrow est celui dont George Clooney a fait le portrait dans l'excellent Good Night, And Good Luck.
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