The concept of Darkworkers and Lightworkers is buzzing on a couple of blogs I favor at the moment. In essence, Darkworkers align themselves to the needs of themselves, i.e. they are selfish individuals who live only for personal gain. On the flipside, Lightworkers align themselves to the needs of humanity. It’s important at this time […]
Are there Darkworkers in your department? Read More »
Information is the basis of the modern world. It’s the Information Age (wasn’t that Oracle who had that in their strapline in the 90s?) Information is power, so they say. But how do you get your information? This article covers how we get information from external sources, i.e. it isn’t about the coffee-machine chat. I’m
Build an Information Catalog Read More »
Career development isn’t just about doing a great job (although mastering your craft is a solid way to build a career to the greatest of heights), it’s also about building, maintaining and developing your profile inside and external to an organization. You can build your profile as I’ve just mentioned, by doing a great job
Finding niche causes to raise your profile Read More »
Developing and improving your public speaking skills is a sure fire way of improving your personal confidence. On a similar vein, research and experience tells me that people who can demonstrate a grasp of language succeed better in the workplace. It’s similar to the psychological phenomenon that overweight people are perceived as less intelligent (with
How to Articulate Better Read More »
I frequently see and hear about how organizations struggle with the planning of programmes or large scale projects, as is often the case nowadays, they involve the integration of many partners, business units, mavericks, doubters and in summary complexity. The complexity, at first, creates chaos which manifests itself as overwhelming dependencies and uncertain delivery dates.
Using Chaos to Organize large scale programs and projects Read More »
‘Governance’ is a term that is becoming more and more popular in today’s business. Governance, in essence, is the process of policing an organization internally, making sure standards and policies are adhered to, budgets are kept and that decisions are rational and appropriately transparent. Governance is there to ensure your organization complies with Sarbanes-Oxley, should
Is Governance a pain in the ass? Read More »
A number of emails led me to write this article on communicating ‘Bad News’. This is a common issue in business, particularly in the western world where short-term results are king. Passing on information that is considered to be unwelcome fills a lot of people with angst and dread, so I want to address this
Communicating ‘Bad News’ Read More »
I’m constantly reminded how a dynamic of argument and debate is in the wrong place. A recent issue cropped up where a colleague was pushing back to a technical supplier because insufficient information had been provided against a change request. The problem though was that the phrasing of the pushback was principle-based, i.e. he argued
Principle vs Specific arguments Read More »
This might resonate with you if you’re a technical professional: how many times have you been asked to do a piece of work (often portrayed as a ‘small’ job) which disrupts planned activities and means one of both slip or are done with compromise? A study in 2002 found that IT departments can be spending
The impact of Unplanned Work Read More »
