CategoryTechnology

When Technology Meets Community

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A co-op grocery chain in Seattle began dismantling their self-checkout kiosks this month. After considerable investment in the technology over the past few years, the PCC Community Market, made the decision to remove the automated stations.  Here is how the store describes the reasoning behind the decision: “A kiosk doesn’t create community or connections. So we wanted to take those out so that when someone comes into our stores, they have a human connection with someone and an interaction...

What the Amish can Teach Us about Technology

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I had always understood the Amish to be a community that chose to live permanently in the technological past. That is, at a certain point in time, the community said “no more” to new technology.  From that point forward new technology was rejected out of hand. However, the Amish relationship to technology is more complicated. The author Kevin Kelly has written about this.  The Amish are constantly evolving with respect to technology. Thus, the Amish don’t use cars or bicycles for...

10 Lessons from the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

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 1. “All you had to do was figure that America was going to do well overtime.” – Buffett Buffett kicked off the meeting by providing the audience with “a perspective on how you might think about investing.” The entire audience leaned in. Isn’t this why we all traveled to Omaha? On March 11, 1942, young Warren Buffett made his first stock purchase. He was eleven years old. Warren held up a copy of the front page of the New York Times that day.  It was filled with bad news...

Slow Down to Speed Up

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Your cell phone rings. Your laptop alerts you that you have a new email just as you login to participate in an online meeting, while eating a sandwich you purchased from the shop down the street about three hours ago. Does this sound like a typical day during your week? If so, you’re not alone. According to Tony Schwartz, 25 to 50% of people report that they feel burned out at work. Read this post, The Magic of Doing One Thing, to learn more about the consequences of splitting your attention...

The 8 Most Important Qualities of Leadership at Google

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For most of Google’s history, and especially in the early years, it took a laissez-faire policy toward leadership. The company hired smart engineers, promoted the most brilliant into leadership positions and then pretty much left them alone. The assumption was that they were smart and would figure it out or ask questions if they needed help. As Google evolved, it became apparent that some managers thrived in this environment more than others.  In a recent article, Laszlo Bock, Google’s...

How Effective Leaders Deal with Information Overload

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Information overload is not only a productivity killer; it can also lead to low morale, anxiety and mistakes.  The U.S. Military has identified “information overload” as the underlying cause of several major mistakes in the war in Afghanistan, and is taking steps to address the issue.  A recent article in the New York Times explains that modern warfare generates unprecedented amounts of data to help soldiers make better decisions, but: Research shows that the kind of intense multitasking...

How Technology is Impacting Leadership

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The wonders of technology are all around us.  Smart phones, ipads, kindles, email, apps, GPS, blogs and twitter to name just a few examples.  But step back for a moment and consider the impact of this technology on leadership. There is a famous essay in the the Atlantic titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid“.  The author, Nicholas Carr, reflects on how his daily Internet use, searching for information and skipping from topic to topic, seemed to change how his brain thinks.  Gone were the days when...

Web 2.0 is the Future of Corporate Learning

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A much discussed article by Tony Bingham, the President of ASTD, appeared in the August 2009 T+D Magazine under the title “Learning Gets Social.”  In the piece, Tony delivers a shot across the bow for many learning and development departments, saying basically, if we all don’t get on board and start leveraging and supporting Web 2.0 technologies for learning, we’re simply going to be deemed irrelevant by the businesses we support.   The article quotes Karie Willeyard, CLO of Sun Microsystems...

Leadership and Time Management

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Earlier this month, while catching a flight home to Seattle from New York City after a long week on the road meeting with clients, I made it to my seat, sat down and breathed a huge sigh of relief.  For a moment, it was bliss.  I knew in a few hours I would be home to see my family.  But then the slow, creeping realization set in that my email in-box was overloaded with hundreds of emails I was unable to get to while on the road.  Furthermore, I had five voicemails on my cell phone and probably...

The Downside of Multitasking

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One of the long-standing assumptions about leadership in today’s wired and global economy is the critical importance of multitasking.  With information coming at us through email, RSS, Twitter, smart phones and the like, the ability to perform multiple actions at once, quickly prioritizing tasks and making decisions, would seem to be an important contributor to leadership success.  However, the more this vaunted “skill” comes under scrutiny, the more doubts there are about the correlation...

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