Archive for the 'Analysis and Opinion' Category

Driving like a millennial

Posted on July 26th, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

An uncanny driving experience I’ve been driving in California for decades. As an Intel engineer I spent two years on relocation in Silicon Valley, and then flew in a few times a year for over 20 years. But last month I was in Santa Clara and decided to visit a friend who had moved to the central valley, an area I’ve never visited before, some 4 hours’ drive south-east of the San Jose. And unlike all my previous visits to the golden state, this time I used Waze. It worked beautifully, as always, without any need to adjust anything to.. Read more

How to Respond to a Ringing Phone in a Meeting

Posted on May 31st, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I once talked to a manager who shared this story: she’d been interviewing a young hiring candidate when his phone went off. He answered it, and it was his wife who wanted to wish him success at the interview. She told me she’d felt it was immature of him to pick up the call, though luckily for him she did not hold this against him when she made her decision. But this story made me think: did the young man do anything wrong? Or was it the right thing to do? Pros: By answering the call, he was showing respect.. Read more

A License to Mail?

Posted on February 27th, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

A glaring omission Consider: there are many potentially harmful activities that require a special license or permit. For example: Incompetent driving can harm people, so you need a license to drive. Incompetent medical practice can harm people, so you need a license to practice it. Incompetent lawyers can harm their clients, so you need a license to practice law. And so on. Heck, even James Bond had a license to kill, implying that other secret agents did not. SO: Writing email can harm people, so you need… No, you don’t. In fact, anyone can send email in an organization, no.. Read more

How Smartphones are Harming our Children – and What to Do About It

Posted on January 31st, 2019 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

When will they ever learn? Observation: people and organizations are much more eager to adopt new technology than they are to think about its potential damage. This gap gave me the basis for a 25 year career as a computing productivity expert: I realized that Intel, my employer at the time, was happily rushing towards a major mess by giving employees every new computing and communication capability without doing the required advance analysis of how they should use it. We gave users email, and were soon hit by email overload; we gave them modems, and the work/life barrier was toppled.. Read more

Artificial Intelligence: Where We are and Where We’re Headed

Posted on September 24th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Off-topic

These days we hear a lot about Artificial Intelligence (AI), but many folks I speak to seem to have little appreciation for what it’s all about – and why it’s so important. If you’re curious, here is my take on the past, present and future of this discipline. Where we’re coming from Artificial Intelligence has gone through a number of phases in the past seven decades. In the fifties there was the vision, articulated by Alan Turing, that the newly invented electronic computer will attain the capabilities of human-like thought. Then, in the sixties and seventies, computers became powerful enough.. Read more

New Insight Article: How to Make Meetings Effective

Posted on June 27th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

The data is clear: meetings are one of the two worst productivity killers in the knowledge workplace (the other, of course, is email overload). If you work in a corporate environment (or in a large organization in the public sector) you know this problem very well. Which is a damned shame, because meetings are supposed to be the place where brains come together to share knowledge, create insight, solve problems… they are supposed to be a focus of exuberant creativity that generates value and bottom line profit. They can be all that… but we’ve subverted them to be the very.. Read more

The Arrival of The Silence

Posted on April 29th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

Dinnertime – 60 years ago The drawing below was made by Giuseppe Novello (1897–1988), a noted Italian cartoonist of times past that you most likely aren’t acquainted with. In his long career he used the medium of the newspaper cartoon to dissect the daily life realities of middle class society, with all its little joys and sorrows, its hypocrisies and hardships. Novello did this with a piercing perception, which one could call ruthless if it weren’t for its deep underlying humanity. I am fortunate to own the set of his works, and you can read about them at http://www.nzeldes.com/Miscellany/Novello.htm. THE SILENCE.. Read more

The Black Hole of Email

Posted on March 15th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Organizational Solutions

I heard the phrase for the first time back in the nineties, when I was an Intel representative in a multi-company exploration of the then-new practice of Knowledge Management: “If only Siemens knew what Siemens knows”, a manager from that company shared a saying that was often used there. And indeed, a major issue with knowledge in large companies is the difficulty of sharing it across the organization. Research shows that employees spend about a fifth of their time trying to track down information they need – that’s one day a week – and they often fail to find it.. Read more

24 Hours: Thoughts on Email, Meetings, and Life Priorities

Posted on February 5th, 2018 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions

Image: Paolo Uccello’s 15th century 24 hour clock at the Florence cathedral. If you are a knowledge worker, you are most likely used to working fifty, sixty, even seventy hours a week. The higher numbers are standard in hi-tech culture, as seen for example in Silicon Valley. This fact has important ramifications that I explore in this post. The cold equations The basic equation governing our lifetime allocation is the following: Daily hours = Work hours + Life hours + Maintenance hours Where Life = family time, leisure, hobbies, reading, rest, etc. Maintenance = eating, sleeping, personal care, etc. And.. Read more

What Can We Do About our Teens’ Smartphone Addiction?

Posted on December 30th, 2017 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Impact and Symptoms

An interesting audience question I had just finished delivering my lecture on Information Overload at a hi-tech company and was taking comments from the usual group of attendees that approach me after everyone else has left – these are usually the best comments, since they come from people interested enough to stay and wait their turn. And this time I had a surprise. A man asked me whether I give such lectures in schools, targeting kids in their mid to late teens. These are the members of Generation Z (what will we do next, one wonders, now that we’ve run.. Read more