Blog. Insight, issues, opinions and productivity solutions

All Right! Email is Finally Adapting to the New Millennium!

Posted on August 14, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion, Individual Solutions, Organizational Solutions

Email solutions for the era of Information Overload These days I’m hard at work on a major effort: I’m writing a white paper I call “Solutions to Information Overload: a Catalogue Raisonné”. It will be an encyclopedic compilation of every solution I know to Information Overload, from software to training tools, from behavior change drives to personal strategies, from commercial products to innovative ideas. And the more solutions I include, the more I find – there will likely be over 150 of them! While many of the solutions I include have been around for a decade or more, I am.. Read more

New Insight Article: How to Lead Effective Global Virtual Teams

Posted on August 7, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Global, distributed teams are the norm in many industries,  and most of their interactions are virtual and asynchronous. This does add potentially destructive complications, but since it is a given part of our reality, the question isn’t whether we like it, but rather how do we make virtual teams work well – just as well as local teams, or perhaps even better? This is a subject to which I devoted some years of my career at Intel, where I co-founded and led a team we called the Virtual Collaboration Research Team (VCRT), whose charter was to develop future collaboration tools.. Read more

The Thousand Faces of Email – 2. Launch, Forget, and CYA!

Posted on July 24, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Continuing the series about the numerous unplanned uses to which email has been put since its humble origins in the sixties, let’s take a look at a shady pair of practices: using email to pass the buck, while covering one’s back end in case of trouble. The wrong kind of delegation That people use email to delegate tasks is hardly surprising;  many tasks need to be delegated by their nature, after all. Things become interesting when the delegation is unwarranted, but is pursued notwithstanding. It turns out that email is especially handy for this situation. Before email, you’d have to.. Read more

New Insight Article: How a Hi-Tech Company Can Engage in K-12 Education

Posted on July 10, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

One of the most praiseworthy things a company can do is help nurture the next generation of the communities in which it operates, by engaging in K-12 – especially school age – educational activity. There are numerous ways to do this, starting with simple money donations and ending with sophisticated, lively joint activities that apply the company’s people to do good in the local or national education system. Over the years I’ve been involved in K-12 programs in numerous ways, from when I took charge of creating Intel’s college relations activity in Israel in the early 90’s, through personal action.. Read more

The Thousand Faces of Email – 1. Email as a Documentation System

Posted on July 4, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Email: the beast with a thousand faces Believe it or not, when email was invented back in the sixties it was with a clear goal in mind: to allow people to mail “letters” – written communications – electronically. It was a one to one messaging system. Those were the days… Since then, email has assumed so many roles that its original purpose is almost secondary. Like a mythical shape-shifting beast, it has morphed into countless usage models, some useful and desirable, others harmful and even criminal. Even the basic paradigm of email – that of asynchronous, persistent message exchange –.. Read more

Startup Innovation: an Automatic Presentation Skills Coach!

Posted on June 26, 2013 · Posted in Startups

Startup innovation knows no bounds Living here in Startup Nation, and having worked with and been around startups for much of my life, you’d think I’d grow used to these little powerhouses of innovation. And yet they always manage to surprise me, with an endless stream of innovative ideas and applications. Perhaps my favorite kind of startup is one that takes existing technology and applies it to make something completely different. Recently I went to the Innovation Day fair of StarTau, Tel Aviv University’s entrepreneurship center, where they teach students to become Entrepreneurs (and Intrapreneurs – I actually lecture there.. Read more

Dissent and Acceptable Cost for an Information Overload Solution

Posted on June 21, 2013 · Posted in Organizational Solutions

A different cost concept When I say “acceptable cost”, you might think I mean how many dollars and dimes you should be willing to invest in an Information Overload Solution, whether it’s a software tool or a training intervention. That is not our subject, however; besides, any attempt to do an ROI calculation is bound to show that practically any cost is worth investing – the damage of Information Overload to both individuals and companies is so huge, that any solution that will solve even 10% of the problem is worth its weight in gold. See this detailed calculation for.. Read more

New Insight Article: Fostering Company Soul Through Internal Company Exhibits

Posted on June 12, 2013 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Creating educational exhibitions has always been a fascination of mine (in fact, since I left the cube farm and became free to choose my consulting work, I’ve been engaged in creating three exhibitions, and counting). So it was only natural that throughout my career, wherever I worked I ended up driving the creation of the local exhibit showcasing our technology and our company to visitors and employees alike. I firmly believe that the internal type of exhibition can play an important role in maintaining and fostering the organizational culture, and in this new insight article I share my reasoning –.. Read more

BrainYno: the Ultimate Solution to Information Overload?

Posted on June 5, 2013 · Posted in Individual Solutions

The holy grail of Information Overload solutions Interruptions are a major component of Information Overload (indeed, they cause more harm than the rightly reviled second component, email overload, as I’d shown here). However, we’ve known for years that not all interruptions are created equal: the damage depends on the context. An unrelated phone call while you’re taking an exam certainly does more harm than one when you’re slouching in front of the TV. Microsoft Research had developed a wonderful application some years ago called Priorities, which looks at every aspect of a knowledge worker’s attentional context to determine whether to.. Read more

Better Place is gone, leaving our world a sadder place

Posted on May 27, 2013 · Posted in Off-topic

Two years ago I made a hopeful off-topic post here upon sighting a parking lot with charging posts for Better Place’s novel electric vehicle system. I titled in “The future is here!”. Today I made another sighting – I went into a gas station I haven’t been to before, and there was the wondrous structure you see in the photo – a robotic battery swap station for Better Place’s cars. A few dozen of these stations are said to exist around Israel, but this was the first time I saw one. Alas, I was a day too late to rejoice. .. Read more