Archive for the 'Analysis and Opinion' Category

Eliminating PowerPoint altogether: a brave experiment

Posted on April 20th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

I’ve discussed the shortcomings of thoughtless reliance on PowerPoint before. I was recently made aware of an audacious experiment tried out at Ashridge business school in the UK. As reported by Phil Anderson here, the purpose was “to see what the effect would be on us as learning and development professionals and more importantly how participants would find the experience, if PowerPoint was done away with all together and not a single slide was used”. The effect, it turns out, was largely beneficial, and in ways beyond my immediate expectation. Not having PowerPoint forced the teachers to think more carefully.. Read more

The shifting perception of the acceptable

Posted on April 14th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was discussing the effect of email overload on work/life balance with a manager, when he pointed out that emailing late at night was acceptable in his eyes because if he receives an email from a subordinate at 10 PM the sender may well be watching a game on TV and “doing email”. I found this interesting because of the underlying assumption that if the poor chap was sending the email while watching the game then it was not a problem for his work/life balance, since he was, after all, watching the game – in other words, he had no.. Read more

WiFi in the classroom: enabler or distraction?

Posted on April 9th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

My friend Prof. Sheizaf Rafaeli of Haifa U writes a fascinating column in Calcalist where he examines our new digital world (if you’re one of my readers to whom Hebrew isn’t Greek, take a look!)   His last post examines the dilemma of WiFi use in university classrooms: some universities are turning the net off, to ensure students will listen to the lectures instead of mucking around in Facebook; others prefer to keep access available, claiming freedom of speech and the fact that with cellular web access the battle is lost in any case. Sheizaf personally advocates the second position, which.. Read more

Altruism and Email Overload solutions

Posted on April 4th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

While checking online for tidbits on Email Overload, I bumped into an article in The Advocate titled Managing E-mail Overload: Reducing Volume by Being Mindful of Others, written by Stephen M. Nipper. It shares a variety of useful tips, but its main emphasis, as the name implies, is on considering the impact of the mail one sends on others, and practicing restraint by avoiding Reply to All, writing concise messages, etc. Which makes perfect sense: if we send less mail, and it is easier to read, surely that will reduce email overload to everyone’s benefit. But it isn’t so simple… Read more

He doesn’t DO PowerPoint!

Posted on April 1st, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

We should all learn from a senior corporate executive I know. This guy once participated in a meeting where half the attendees were in another geographic location, and were hearing our location via teleconference. At some point one of the people in the remote location asked “Are you showing any PowerPoint slides? Because we aren’t seeing them on our screen here”. And the exec said, emphatically: “I don’t DO PowerPoint!” I was overjoyed when I heard that. He didn’t do PowerPoint; instead, he talked to his audiences, explaining, instructing, directing, managing, leading, role modeling… all the things a manager ought.. Read more

Work anywhere: is it good or bad for balancing our lives?

Posted on March 28th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

In the late nineties I found myself involved in a variety of Work/Life Balance initiatives at Intel. I had led Intel to adopt Telecommuting practices and although I’d proven that [one day per week] work from home had significant productivity benefits, the benefit for employees’ life was pretty obvious too. The ability to work remotely was clearly helping people balance their lives. Then came a new decade, and with it the ubiquity of mobile devices and wireless connectivity, and it became apparent that the same ability was being overused and abused by knowledge workers to the point that 24×7 work.. Read more

In the wrong hands, IT tools can reduce productivity!

Posted on March 11th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

The argument about Information Technology’s benefit to the enterprise seems silly: of course having computers, both in isolation and on a network, has added huge value to industry and business; indeed, they are as pivotal a game changer as the steam engine, the printing press, or (dare I say it?) the wheel. And yet, the discussion is legitimate if you frame it correctly: yes, computers are good in general, but is any specific, given additional IT tool of benefit? In many cases this depends on who the organization assigns it to. You’ve probably noticed this when visiting a doctor at.. Read more

Does anyone notice the red “Importance” icon in Outlook?

Posted on March 7th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Much of Email is about attention. The sender of an email wants to secure the attention of the recipient long enough for them to read and understand the message; the recipient, usually inundated with mail, may be unwilling or unable to react to every message in their Inbox. Thus, it is up to the sender to grab a chunk of the recipient’s limited stock of attention. In particular, if a message is truly important, the sender wants the recipient to realize this. Outlook offers a way to mark the importance of a message, by setting its importance to High. This.. Read more

Email and the two aspects of the Paper Trail

Posted on February 17th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

One of the well known reasons why people create lots of unnecessary email in an organization is that they want to create a paper trail – written proof that they did something, or said something, or objected to something, so that at a later time they can assert that they did so when someone tries to shift some blame to them. Of course this is a symptom of a dysfunction in the organizational culture they work in; in a properly run operation there would be no unfair finger pointing, one’s word would be proof enough, and people could focus on.. Read more

How info-starved were our ancestors?

Posted on February 14th, 2010 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

“A weekday issue of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in an entire lifetime in the seventeenth century.” Variants of this statement (give or take a couple of centuries) are commonly seen when reading about Information Overload. Of course I agree that there’s more information available today than back in centuries past, but this particular statement always seemed suspicious to me. Is it true? And what if it is? First, it probably depends on what we mean by “information”. Is it printed information? In past centuries a sizable fraction of.. Read more