Fast Company excerpted my new book Visual Leaders (out January 7) in their recent on-line edition. They liked some observations I wrote about how to deal with social media by thinking about messages as being buoys in a foggy sea of possibilities. I shared a set of principles that are elaborated on in the article. To see more click here.
I’m all stirred up from reading Walter Isaacson’s richly reported biography of Steve Jobs— half in the large, 650-page book and half in my iPod, downloaded to the Kindle app. (I’m VERY curious about the rise of e-books and learn by doing).
Steve Jobs is the first biography of this caliber where I have some ground truth. I’ve lived the Apple revolution. I consulted to the company all during the Scully years. I count Alan Kay, the original conceiver of the “Dynabook” when he was at Xerox as a friend and colleague. I worked closely with Gil Amelio at National Semiconductor. I think I’ve owned, used, and depended on just about every product they’ve made since the Mac SE. In fact I created my own book, Visual Meetings, on the Mac and opened with a chapter about how we used visualization to guide the Leadership Expedition we conducted for all of Apple’s top management during the 1980s. Apple’s example has shaped our visual practice at The Grove. The idea of doing for group process what Apple did for computing—i.e. provide a graphical user interface—has been a guiding vision. So I’ve had a VERY interesting time following this story.
I no sooner finished than I came across a link to an article in Forbes magazine called "For a Preview of the iPad3-Watch this 23 Year-oldApple Video" about a classic video created at Apple during the 1980’s by John Scully and his higher education marketing team called “The Knowledge Navigator.” It was created for a presentation he gave at EduCom about Apple’s product vision in 1987, a couple of years after Steve was fired and left to start NeXT. Here’s a screen grab of the beginning.
Continue reading "Knowledge Navigation: Apple's Preview of the Future" »
My second Wiley book, Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance, arrived in a box at the precise moment we finished a review of our Team Performance System at The Grove’s Quarterly meeting! Needless to say I and our team was pretty exited. Everyone wanted to know what was new in this book that they could talk about.
Here is my answer.
1. New Success Stories: It tells the stories of many high performance teams that used visualization extensively to achieve results. These stories from HP, Otis Spunkmeyer, RE-AMP, Agilent Technologies, the DLR Group, and Gary Hamel’s MLab demonstrate how visual meeting methods can be used over the whole arc of team’s life.
Continue reading "Visual Teams Has Arrived—What's New About It?" »
Wiley & Sons has contracted for a second book in the Visual series that began with Visual Meetings: How Graphics, Sticky Notes & Idea Mapping Can Transform Group Productivity. It is due to be published in the fall of 2011 and is titled Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation & High Performance. The cover and table of contents are shown here for those of you who are helping with stories, references, and other support. It's due out in the Fall. Any comments or feedback at this point would be welcome.
In the midst of a fall that has turned out to be chock full of work (thank goodness), I took some time out to hear Stewart Brand talk about his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An EcoPragmatist Manifesto, at the Long Now lecture series at Fort Mason. It hit home. Kevin Kelly, who fielded the audience questions at the end of the lecture, called it Brand’s best book yet.If Stewart's talk is an indication, it is loaded with ideas worth spending some serious time thinking about.
I won’t attempt to mount Stewart’s arguments here, except to say that he opens the book with a twist on the first line of the Whole Earth Catalog. "We are as Gods, and we HAVE to get good at it." He presents a case for re-thinking Green. He concludes, after a LOT of research in his inimitable style that 1. Cities are green; 2. Nuclear is green; 3. GMOs are green; and 4. Geo-engineering is green. Needless to say this waves a red flag under the nose
of ideological environmentalists – but Brand is serious, and makes a good case. When Kevin asked Stewart if this book had lots of tools like his earlier Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart stopped and thought. "There are some," he said "but it's mostly about thinking. Thinking is a tool."
To support people understanding what he is seeing, he has complemented his book with a web site that contains links with all his source material, so you can tunnel into his arguments to your heart’s content. This is a new style of publishing, and one that promises to reshape book making into a truly co-creative act. Leave it to Stewart to be on the cutting edge once again.
Whole Earth Discipline will be available on Amazon this month we were told.
Tom Atlee, the creative energy behind the Co-Intelligence Institute, recently wrote Something Bigger Than Life is Trying To Work Through Us His analysis of our current predicament is crystal clear. We are experiencing the shadow results of our own "enlighted" technologies and practices. The crises will be transformational, (or not) and Tom explores how it might be. He moves into very poetic language talking about what it means to wake up to conscious evolution and see ourselves as mirrors of the larger evolutionary pattern. Bill Veltrop of the Monterey Institute for Social Architecture (MISA)
spotted it and sent it along and I'm posting a link here because he is
giving voice to my own orientation for these times. As with any paradigm shifts, the emerging expressions are still being crafted. Tom is one of the shapers I respect.
Franz Dill, a Procter & Gamble colleague from the Groupware Users Project that The Grove and the Institute for the Future Conducted all during the 1990s, has been freed to write about P&G innovation center that he helped create in Cincinnati by the publication of AG Lafley's new book: 'The Game Changer: How You can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation ...' 
Franz describes a 24 projector wall that allowed P&G to simulate any shelving scheme for review by customers. You can be assured I can imagine all kinds of other applications for this kind of visualization!!! Enjoy Franz's post. He's also tracking a lot of other interesting things.
Click here to read Dill's "P&Gs Beckett Ridge Innovation Center"
I’m happy to report that the recent VizThink conference, an ambitious attempt to take the visualization field to a new level by inviting practitioners from across the visualization spectrum, succeeded wildly! Over 380 people traveled from all over the globe to the Westin in San Francisco, following the siren song of VizThink Tom Crawford’s web 2.0 marketing and XPlane’s sponsorship and promotion. We all showed up and had a complete blast. Here is The Grove’s little booth, organized and manned by Callie Bloom, our marketing assistant. She’s sitting in front of Tiffany Forner’s wonderful graphic showing how The Grove’s Graphic Guides® create a panoramic effect in a meeting room. We were surrounded by digital tool makers--Brain, Mindjet, Autodesk, Wacom and others and totally held our own. Of course having Second Life up on our display, and our cool new Visual Planning System Agenda Planning Cards didn’t hurt. The deep excitement for me was seeing how our Grove team pulled together in the two sessions we ran.
Continue reading "VizThink Was An Inspiring Experience for The Grove" »
