Perspectives
If you don’t use it you lose it.
I thought that this PeopleSkills.pdf was just on the mark. There is nothing worse than trying to teach somebody something and having them forget it. I remember thinking the same thing while teaching at Schulich. While students typically had to do something up to seven...
RIM Outages
Today's service outages from RIM did not cause me any issues as I've been sitting at my computer all day trying to write. It did bring to mind though, similar issues that customers of ours had at Synamics. We built mass calling platforms for telcos and the expected...
Life Editing
There is a great video on TED that talks about Life Editing. Watch it here and then think about how it can be applied to business. Less stuff in business means only dealing with what is material. Now materiality is a complex issue. Something is material if it makes a...
Does Productivity Lead to Wealth?
Some remarkable statistics in the Globe and Mail last weekend got me wondering about productivity. While the technology revolution has been good for productivity, it may not be true that productivity has been good for the average worker. Right now, about half of the...
Kobo
I gave myself a birthday present of a new Kobo as I have gotten tired of carrying all sorts of books around. My first reaction was quite negative as I turned it on and found that the page was only showing around 50 words. If you read 500 words a minute, a device that...
Technology and the Average Employee
It’s no wonder that the average employee is overwhelmed. If you look at technological advances in the last 30 years alone, we have gone from getting phone calls and letters and a bit of data to getting: Data Voice Mail Email Instant messages Text messages Facebook...
Text Messaging
I was amazed to find out recently, the volume of texting going on. What Instant messaging is to the computer, text messaging or texting is to the phone or mobile device. According to Nielson Co. in 2009, “American teenagers sent and received an average of 2,272 text...
The Change to an Industrial Economy
While it has taken only 30 or so years to move from an industrial economy to the knowledge economy, the change to an industrialized world was not as fast as one might think. It took a long time for James Watt’s steam engine to catch on so that the move from a cottage...
Email Usage
According to statistics from AOL’s Corporate Newsroom in their 45th (?) Annual Email Addiction Survey in 2009, 62% of at-work email users check work email over the weekend, and 19% check it five or more times in a weekend. More than 50% said they check it on vacation,...