Knowledge Work

How? Talk technical-sounding rubbish. If it works for new-age airheads spouting ignorant garbage about quantum physics, it can work for you, too:
I’ve been to quite a few consultancy presentations where all kinds of jargon and graphs are flashed up on the screen. The consultants will drop terms like “inverted blade-center uptime matrix” into the presentation […]

Most of management theory is inane, writes our correspondent, the founder of a consulting firm. If you want to succeed in business, don’t get an M.B.A. Study philosophy instead.
The Management Myth (Atlantic magazine, June 2006; subscription required)

…for the reduced volume of blogging over here.
I’ve been working hard, but also taking a lot of training lately.

Last month, I sat for (and passed) the ITIL Foundation certification exam.
I’ve made a couple of quick (and very pleasant) trips to the Bay Area of California for administrative classes conducted by BMC Software, who produce the […]

Dan Geer is an extremely well respected security expert. When he worries about something, people listen.
One of the things he has worried - and warned - about is the danger represented by IT ‘monocultures’ - the situation that arises when everyone uses the same software, for example, and therefore everyone shares the same vulnerability […]

Recent e-mail thread, names redacted and text lightly edited to protect the innocent and/or guilty:
from: [email protected]
to: Barry
Hi Barry,
I am looking for an information architect for [gigantic investment bank] in NYC. Please e-mail me your resume and hrly rate and I will get back to you. XML and investment banking are a must.
****
from: Barry
to: [email protected]
bcc: friendandcolleague
Hi […]

The fact of the matter is that making a significant change in a product that is in use in your organization can be more difficult to extricate yourself from than a tar pit—particularly if it means a big loss of revenue to a vendor. A perfect example is the state of Massachusetts’ attempt to go […]

Successes or failures of employees in the workplace can be traced to what kind of father they had, a psychologist argues in a new book.
In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and […]

From the latest issue of New Scientist magazine (subscription required) comes an article entitled “Change the way you see the world” (and it will):
We love our maps. At first glance, people are shocked by them: the shapes look familiar, yet everything is absurdly distorted. Without even thinking, they have learned something about the world they […]

The Freaknomics boys are at it again, with an article in the Sunday New York Times about “expert performance.”

Simply put, research shows that people who are very good at what they do — star ballet dancers, soccer players, neurosurgeons — are not born with “natural talent,” but acquire their skills through ruthless discipline and practice.
Ericsson […]

The OpenDocument format has become an ISO standard.
OpenOffice 2.0 fully supports this standard.
Go download it now.
Related:

Free/Open Source Software Toolbox for Knowledge Workers (at Campbell-Online.com) 

Solveig Haugland has just posted a brief primer on how to use your word processor, and it should be required reading for anyone who writes as part of their job.
It’s cleverly masked as a article about how to format your documents so that they will be easier to share between word-processsing platforms, but it […]

Copyblogger is all about “how to sell with blogs, e-mail and RSS.” It looks like an excellent resource for small businessses and consultancies looking to leverage the power of the Web to market themselves.
Copywriting 101 is a set of articles about persuasive writing for the Web:
Copywriting skills are an essential element to the new conversational […]