Processes vs. Innovation

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: The End of Process

Organizations are trapped in a spiral of declining innovation led by the false promise of efficiency.

Managers have the false belief engineered process and hoarding information is a substitute for good leadership. Processes fail and silos persist despite dysfunctional matrices. Executives are so far removed from exceptions and objections that all they get are carefully packaged reports of good news and numbers that reveal the bad when it’s too late.

Hmmm…sounds like some systems we have at Agilent…

Here’s another interesting approach

Zimbra – Blog:

Like many other power users I have commiserated with, email became the most frustrating application I had to deal with, and it was the one that I was spending the most time on by at least an order of magnitude. How can it be that Yahoo! and Google are offering innovative, Web 2.0 email solutions with a gigabyte  of storage for free, while my corporate messaging is still stuck in the mid 90’s?

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint

I’m reading Edward Tufte’s The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint and found this quote to be a provocative summary of his observations. If you’re not familiar with Edward Tufte, he has written a number of fabulous and beautiful books on information visualization.