“I learned that everything that was going on…had happened before, and that logical cause-effect relationships made those developments inevitable. My failure to anticipate this, I realized, was due to my being surprised by something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before. The message that reality was conveying to me was […]
Tags: pattern matching, Ray Dalio
Here’s another great lessons-learned story from the late NFL coach Bill Walsh’s book “The Score Takes Care of Itself…” When it comes to drafting players, NFL coaches and scouts can be pretty obsessed with numbers. For prospects at the wide receiver position, a favorite metric is the player’s time in the 40-yard dash. It makes […]
Tags: Bill Walsh, conventional wisdom, innovation
Billionaire Richard Branson is known for his “Screw it, let’s do it” attitude. Notable successes include Virgin Records and Virgin Atlantic. Notable flops using the same approach include Virgin Cola and Virgin Bride. In his book The Virgin Way, Branson relates how he’s learned to temper his snap judgment with what he calls “orchestrated procrastination.” […]
Tags: Goldman Sachs, procrastination, Richard Branson, subprime lending
Did you know that the West Coast Offense began as a mistake? Same goes for the cutter fastball in baseball. Pro sports has lots of great examples of how to turn lemons into lemonade. In his book, “The Score Takes Care of Itself,” late NFL Hall of Fame Coach Bill Walsh recalled how a botched […]
Tags: Bill Walsh, innovation
In the process of keeping Xerox’s large fleet of copiers and printers working in customer’s environments, the service representatives would occasionally be faced with a new problem that they had not been trained for or had not seen before. Sometimes the problem, due to a new machine bug or a replacement part not working quite […]
Tags: Eureka, knowledge sharing, storytelling, Xerox PARC
In 2010 Art Murray and I were asked to do a presentation at the Special Libraries Association’s annual conference in New Orleans. It was based on our article published in KMWorld magazine titled “Rise of the Knowledge Librarian” about my experiences spearheading the transformation of a traditional corporate library into a center of knowledge and […]
Tags: public speaking, technology
The owner of a local cafe where I get coffee and breakfast on the weekend decided to have different themes in the cafe every weekend. Last weekend it was the 50’s, this weekend the 60’s, next will be the 70’s and etc. Staff were required to dress for the theme and music of the time […]
Tags: knowledge sharing, storytelling
I was leading a workshop on knowledge management for a group of medical doctors from the public health sector. I told them the story of Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, an eye surgeon who was frustrated over the high cost of manufacturing and surgically implanting intraocular lenses (IOLs) in India. Tens of thousands of people were needlessly […]
Before we had blogs, or the printing press, or even written languages, we used storytelling to impart wisdom and knowledge to others. In an world in which we’re drowning in data and information and starved for knowledge, we look to storytelling as a tried and proven means of making sense of it all. Our challenge here is […]