6.11.2007

Creativity, Self-recording, presentations, Blogging, & PWLE

At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency And Creativity - Business Week
While Six Sigma was invented as a way to improve quality, its main value to corporations now clearly is its ability to save time and money. 3M was systematized in ways that were unheard of and downright heretical, even though the guidelines would have looked familiar at many other conglomerates. Early during the Six Sigma effort, after a meeting at which technical employees were briefed on the new process, they all came to the conclusion that there was no way in the world that anything like a Post-it note would ever emerge from this new system. Innovation shall be allowed be little chaotic because that's how great ideas born.

The self-recording craze is nothing new - but now we do it digitally - Guardian Unlimited
What exactly is behind our rage to document the minutiae of our daily existence? That's hard to say. Maybe it's just another manifestation of modern-day narcissism. Maybe it's a byproduct of our media-saturated culture, with its sense that nothing's real until it's been recorded and broadcast. Or maybe it goes deeper than that.

Useful Commute: Designing a Powerful Presentation - BNET
Michael Moon, a designer at Duarte, the firm behind Al Gore's Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," gives some great advice for creating a presentation that supports your message and keeps your audience engaged. Audio - about 10 minutes.

The Workplace: Can blogs become a big source of jobs? - Herald Tribune
Search "blog," "blogger" or "blogging" on the Indeed.com job board and more than 13,000 jobs come up. But narrow the search to job titles containing those words and the opportunities dwindle to just over 50.

More Discussion on Personal Work Learning Environments - DARnet
Tony Karrer tracks the blog posts on PLEs and work. Then he wonders. . . if people will adopt these tools and approaches over time, then as a corporation, if you want to be able to keep the content after an employee leaves, especially blog content. . . then shouldn't you make sure you provide these tools now rather than having tools adopted that are outside the firewall and personally owned where you will lose the content if the employee leaves? Which kind of confirms the point being contradicted in Jay Cross's comments: Pitting individuals against corporations is not productive. Nor is the implication that businesses are out to steal workers' intellectual property.

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