Kallokain

I have published a new Tempo! supplement on Scribd. This one is about the virtues of using multiple paradigms and strategic patterns when solving business problems and developing business strategies. I hope you enjoy it. Finding Strategic Opportunities

Awhile ago the Economist Intelligence Unit published a report named Organizational agility: How business can survive and thrive in turbulent times . Here is a quote from the preface, just so you know what the report was all about: In December 2008 and January 2009, the Economist Intelligence Unit conducted a survey of 349 executives around the world on the benefits, challenges and risks associated with creating a more agile organisation. The Economist Intelligence Unit wrote and executed the survey, conducted the analysis and produced the report. To supplement the findings of the survey, the Economist Intelligence Unit also conducted in-depth interviews with a number of business executives from leading companies. The results are interesting. For example 40% of the respondents considered agility to be extremely important, a core business differentiator. (And I agree with them.) Another 48% considered agility to be somewhat important, a contributing factor to success. So far, so good...

There are a couple of slides I'd like to share. They are from one of the two presentations I held at the  DokumentInfo  Technical Documentation Conference in Gothenburg (November 10-11). The presentation was mainly about producing technical documentation, but there were a few slides related to strategy. The statistical information is from Stephen Covey's The 8th Habit . According to a poll of 23,000 American workers, only 37% knew the strategic goals of the company they worked for. Only 20% were enthusiastic about them. Only 20% of the people asked knew what their mission was. That is, only one person in five knows what they are supposed to do in order to achieve the company's objectives. Only 13% of the people asked described their environment as highly cooperative. In his book, Covey brought the statistics alive by comparing companies with soccer team. Let's do something similar using a photo from stock.xchng . There are 18 football players in this ph...

There are many ways a relationship can go wrong, in business, and for individuals. The Accidental Adversaries  systems archetype describes a common pattern, where a relationship begins with the best of intentions on both sides, but deteriorates over time. The pattern is quite complex, which makes it insidious and sometimes difficult to recognize. It looks like this: What happens is that two parties, A and B, enter a relationship for mutual benefit. In the beginning, everything looks rosy, but then A takes some action that looks perfectly reasonable from A's perspective, but creates unintended difficulties for B. B then does something to recover from the consequences, and this affects A. Often neither A nor B understands the effects their actions have on the other side. A sees only the undesired effects B's actions have on A. B sees only the undesired effects A's actions have on B. Pretty soon A and B begin to think of each other as stupid or evil. The downward spiral (T...

Dr. Russel Ackoff, one of the greatest Systems Thinkers ever, has passed away recently. http://ackoffcenter.blogs.com/ackoff_center_weblog/2009/10/russell-l-ackoff-management-consultant-systems-thinker-90.html

You may wonder if the logo on my web site and on my articles at Scribd carries some meaning beyond " my sister got all the art genes " or "to cheap to hire a logo designer". It does. The image symbolizes interacting systems. I sometimes label the nodes (the orange balls): We Customers Allies Competitors Environment (Society and resources) Thus, the image can be viewed as a map of the strategic landscape business organizations must deal with. This map reminds me that there is a world full of possibilities. There are often many routes to any given objective. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that the logo resembles part of this diagram: This is John Boyd's decision loop model, the OODA loop . The focus point of the OODA loop is the Orientation phase, where we interpret the data we observe and try to make sense of it. In the OODA loop model, there are five factors that influence how we orient ourselves: Genetic heri...

My web site has been down. Got it up and running again. I took the opportunity to remove a broken Google gadget, fix a link to the best push process demo ever ( http://kallokain.blogspot.com/2007/07/lucy-in-chocolate-factory.html ), and to add links to my articles on Scribd. I have been working too much to even tweet lately. Lots of backlogged material though. Sent from my iPhone

Another note to myself about books to read: Mark Levison's blog post  Learning: the Best Approaches for Your Brain Mark and I follow each other on Twitter. Lot's of cool stuff on his blog.

Sometimes I use this blog as a kind of notepad, when I want to make a note of something I believe my readers might be interested in. This is one of those occasions. There is a nice overview of different branches of Systems thinking here: http://lenscraft.wikispaces.com/systems+thinking Even better, there is a nice list of books too.

Tempo! – From Character to Vision is the second Tempo! supplement. It is a practical guide for creating personal and corporate vision statements. I used a real case as background for the article: How I developed my own vision and mission statements. If you want to create a vision and a mission that really matters, I suggest that you also read Vision, Mission, Principles, And the Human Brain , which delves into the theory behind vision, mission, and human motivation. Tempo! – From Character to Vision

If you are a regular follower of this blog, you may have noticed that Tempo! , my business strategy book, hasn't been published yet. I do have a publisher interested in the Swedish version, but I am still looking for a publisher interested in publishing the English version of the book. More than a year ago, it dawned on me that Tempo! was growing to about twice the length I had originally planned (400 pages instead of 200 pages), and that I would have to cut a lot of material. Some of this material I am saving for another book, but some of it I decided to publish as free supplements. The vision and mission paper below does not contain material written specifically for the book, but it does contain material that is closely related. Tempo! describes in detail a procedure for developing a combined vision and mission statement in diagram format, an Intermediate Objective Map. The paper provides background, perspective, and shows mission and vision statements for several organizations, ...

The best software developers I have met are a pretty diverse bunch of people, but they have some traits in common. For example, they have all been voracious readers, and they read a lot of stuff not directly related to software development. There is good reason for this: Creativity is the process of solving problems by taking different bodies of knowledge, breaking them down into components, selecting some of the components and connecting them into a new body of knowledge. The creative engine needs fuel. Good software developers, like good managers, leaders, and any good knowledge worker, continuously feeds that engine. The following books are books I have read and found useful when I was a software developer. Today, as a business strategist and advisor, I still find them useful. Please note that I have not ranked them according to usefulness, it would be like ranking the usefulness of the wheels of your car. You need a full set. Here are the books: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Gold...

I am working on a message sequencing diagram for fast strategy deployment. Here is an initial version: There are five hierarchical levels. Assuming that one leader can lead a team of 7-8 people, this message diagram would be good for an organization with 16,000 to 32,000 people. An important assumption here is that the organization uses a Boyd style decentralized management model. This allows teams at each level to decide how to solve the problems within their spheres of control and influence before sending information upwards in the organization. Another important assumption is IOHAI (Insight, Orientation, Harmony, Agility, Initiative) training for all leaders. This does of course include working knowledge of Crawford Slip, The Logical Thinking Process, and other Strategic Navigation tools. Note that with this messaging model, information about the external environment reaches top management first. Information from inside the organization takes about five days to travel up. By the ti...

Sinan Si Alhir has written a very interesting blog post on The Purposeful Enterprise . The post integrates ideas from many different sources. As Si puts it: The Purposeful Enterprise integrates Communities, Collaboration, Kanban, and Tribes. When you read Si's post, which I hope you do, click on the illustrations to see the enlarged versions. They are worth studying.

The Logical Thinking Process stencil for OmniGraffle described in this post can be downloaded here . I have been playing with OmniGraffle , a diagram editor for the Mac. I am usually using OpenOffice Draw to create The Logical thinking Process (TLTP) diagrams. TLTP is a method for complex problem solving. It is useful for things like creating a kick ass business strategy, solving the world's climate problems, or figuring out whether to go to a new action movie (her preference) or a new art exhibition (his preference). OpenOffice Draw is easy to work with, but using a more specialized diagram editing program has some advantages. ( Michael Nygard recommended Flying Logic's TLTP diagram editor, so I'll try it out too, once I have played a bit more with OmniGraffle.) A nice thing about OmniGraffle is that you can create your own symbol sets, called stencils. OmniGraffle has a fair set of stencils by default, but there is also a web site, Graffletopia , where people can upload...

I have begun using Scribd for whitepapers and other material. Here is the first paper published there. You can download the paper in PDF format at the Scribd site. I hope you find it useful. Business Battle Mapping

Drar Apple, and Mr. Jobs, I like nu iPhone, I really do, but there is à problem. I spell fairly well, but the spell checker jeeps changing what I write into gibberish. IT is à chore giving all the mistakes I have to correctly. There seems to be no way to turné the misspelling program off. Since the iPhone is à network device, maybe the off switch is at your end. If IT is, could you please TURN THE DAMNED THING OFF, BECAUSE I AM GOING CRAZY! Sorry for the outburst. Kind Regards, Henrik Mårtensson Sent from my iPhone

I like my MacBook and my iPhone a lot, but there is no such thing as a perfect system. I have been experimenting a bit with network mapping lately, and it occurred to me to map how my Mac and my iPhone manage notes. The following diagram is the result: As you can see, I have ignored MobileMe. Despite this, the map is more than a little bit messy. For example, iPhone notes sync to the mail program on my MacBook. This seems more than a little bit bizarre. There is more: The Mac comes with a Note widget and a Notes application. Both of these are entirely separate from other notes. Notes in other programs, like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, are also separate from everything else. Notes and ToDo items are separate things, but it could be argued that a ToDo item is a note with a due date. If so, ToDo items should be better integrated with other notes. Of course, a voice memo is also a kind of note, and could also be treated as a note. Wouldn't it be nice if notes: could be shared between...

Bill Reichert guest blogged at Guy Kawasaki's blog about an interesting visit to the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. The title of the post was Top Ten Lessons from the US Navy: Management Lessons on an Aircraft Carrier at Sea , but I could not resist using a quote from the captain of the ship as the title of this post. Well worth reading. When I began studying military organizational and leadership models some years ago, I was astounded by what I found: focus on people, flexible organizational structures, and leadership models compatible with Agile software development. I have written a couple of articles about the IOHAI leadership model, Deconstructing IOHAI and One More Loop Through the IOHAI Hoop . Those articles are a bit technical, but they enabled me to write a much simpler description of IOHAI in my book Tempo. I wish these ideas could take hold in the business community, I mean really take hold. Once you get used to them, they are simple, natural, and very powerful. (They a...

Yep, I opened Twitter account: http://twitter.com/Kallokain Took about an hour to get a follower. I am going to ramp up my social networking presence over the next few months. Sent from my iPhone