In the business world, it’s that time of year again: time to update our personal business goals, our individual development plans, or whatever our workplaces call it. It’s also time to meet with managers to discuss our “strengths” and “areas for improvement.” I’ve always thought we’ve handled this process in an odd way. When we discuss things we’d like to improve, we’re supposed to follow them with suggestions for actions—ways
When to Push and Pull Relevant* information (*Note that the information should be “relevant” in some way. If information outside the pressing issues then we might want to ask why we want to share it in the first place!) Red Hat employees often get a lot of information sent to their Inboxes, and managing and organizing the messages can be difficult. Many organizations, especially in the software industry, face the
How Networks Aid Creativity One of the inspirations for my PhD research was seeing how certain colleagues were able to have their creative ideas heard and used while other co-workers seemed to struggle. I found that even though I worked with a lot of intelligent people, only some really succeeded. It was my curiosity around the point that led me to my initial doctoral research agenda and led me complete
Hi fans! Before the first week of the new year ends, I thought I would announce my involvement in The Open Organization Workbook, published in early December 2017. I wrote two of the section introductions “What is Collaboration?”(Unit 4) and “What is Community?” (Unit 5). The book focuses on how the values of Open Organizations (transparency, inclusivity, adaptability, collaboration and community) can be used to create a culture of innovation
One of problems teams often have is working with other teams whether they are within the same organization, or the same business. Why? Because teams use different tools in their work, and they record and use different information, and follow different processes. When the tool, information, and processes are taken out of the original context they can be difficult to understand and use. For instance, when I told my manager
My manager called, he is encouraging me to write up a blog post about my new role at Red Hat. So I open a browser and surf to my intranet profile to write it and, of course, realize I really need to start an internal blog and not just a one-off post. And I need to start at the beginning, just as I do here. I started work life as
Some time ago, I came across a post about improving creativity called “9 simple ways to be more creative”. It has a nice graphic so I found it attractive. I got a laugh looking at how many adults think they are living up to their creative potential = 25%. So… there are 23% of adults who think they are creative but actually aren’t. Now that’s funny!! Even knowing what I
I’ve talked in another post how creativity is fear. If that’s true, and I’ve certainly been experiencing my share of creative fear lately, then practice (performance) is one of the best ways to overcome that fear. I noticed I’m better at doing scary things at work than I am at doing scary things in my paintings. I hypothesize that when I’m working I do things I don’t want to do
Brainbidextrous is a site dedicated to explaining how creativity uses both sides of the brain. The left and right sides of the brain are both used in creative work — how much, the degree to which they are used depends on the person. Sometimes we use the term “creative” to describe only the arts (e.g. the creative arts) and people who work in those fields as creative (e.g. a Creative
Adam Grant author of Give and Take (*) says success is a combination of hard work (motivation), talent (ability), and luck (opportunity)… but there is a fourth element — how we style our interactions with others. In other words, how relate to others and collaborate with our co-workers matters: Takers – want more than they give Matchers – equally give what they get Givers – give more than they get. When takers
