Simplifying complex work

Yves Morieux gives a really interesting TED talk here on how to reduce the complexity of modern day work.

He has six rules to help make this happen:

1. Understand what your colleagues actually do.
2. Remove rules: Reinforce the “integrators” Integrators are managers. Give them more power and interest to make others cooperate. Remove the layers so they can be closer to the action. Stop making more rules that reduce the discretionary power to managers.
3. Increase the quantity of power so you can empower everybody to use their judgment and their intelligence. Move away from insulation and give more people the opportunity to take risks.
4. Create feedback loops that expose people to the consequences of their actions
5. Increase reciprocity by removing buffers that make individual employees self-sufficient.
6. Reward those who cooperate and blame those who don’t cooperate. The CEO of The Lego Group, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, has a great way to use it. He says, blame is not for failure; it is for failing to help or ask for help.

Bookmarks for April 30th through May 14th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

• Should the Public Sector pay for Content Management Systems? « Carl’s Notepad – [with open source] "You will still need to consider the integration aspects but open source products are far more likely to integrate (openness is key) then the big supplier products (no motivation to integrate)."
• Office 2010: the SharePoint factor – "The simple conclusion then is that to make sense of Office 2010 you need SharePoint 2010. The snag is that SharePoint is not something to roll out casually. Although it has a huge number of interesting features, it is also complex and easy to break. "
• No Overall Control – a Future State of ICT – "To really address the gap between people in ICT and people who work in the Business (people outside of ICT) you actually need to start moving the competencies that IT Professionals have into the Business."
• The Fate of the Semantic Web – "While many survey participants noted that current and emerging technologies are being leveraged toward positive web evolution in regard to linking data, there was no consensus on the technical mechanisms and human actions that might lead to the next wave of improvements – nor how extensive the changes might be."
• tecosystems » I Love WordPress But… – "the reasons we self-host our WordPress instances are being eliminated at an accelerating rate"
• Meatball Wiki – "Meatball is a community of active practitioners striving to teach each other how to organize people using online tools."
• Amazon Pursues The Feds and the Potential Billions in Cloud Computing Services – ReadWriteCloud – "Amazon is quietly pursuing the multi-billion dollar federal cloud computing market, intensifying an already fast accelerating sales and marketing effort by Google, Microsoft and a host of others."
• What’s Wrong With CSS – "Most of all, what I've learned from this exercise in site theming is that CSS is kind of painful. I fully support CSS as a (mostly) functional user interface Model-View-Controller. But even if you have extreme HTML hygiene and Austrian levels of discipline, CSS has some serious limitations in practice."
• WordPress-to-lead for Salesforce CRM – "People can enter a contact form on your site, and the lead goes straight into Salesforce CRM: no more copy pasting lead info, no more missing leads: each and every one of them is in Salesforce.com for you to follow up."
• A Collection of 50+ Enterprise 2.0 Case Studies and Examples – Nice resource. Some great examples in here.
• Headshift Projects: Projects by Sector – Nice collection of social software case studies.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.