I’m so intrigued by pinterest – one of the hottest things in social media today.  Like Vimeo, it provides a place for high quality, self-monitored (or community monitored) imagery to be shared, discussed, and enjoyed.  Especially if you are obsessed with crafts, food and recipes. No wonder over 80% of the current users are women. For many people, it seems to be a highly visual blog option, where you can put your favorite things and if they catch a discussion thread, so much the better.

Check it out – by invitation only right now:  www.pinterest.com

Denver is buzzing today. I walked into a client meeting that was scheduled to start at 10am, and their front conference room was packed with people milling around, and a TV going up at the front of the room.  As our client came to retreive us from the lobby and walk us to the back, he apologized over his shoulder for the commotion.  “Peyton Manning is coming to Denver. They just announced it on ESPN, and everyone wants to see the press update.”  And it seemed as natural as the blue sky that everyone would drop everything to go and watch.

Peyton as a quarterback does great things, that much is for sure. The level of excitement about Bronco games will escalate quickly if he does indeed end up coming to Denver – but then again, anyone who got caught up in the Tebow mania that struck the city last year will be familiar wtih that ride.  But what happens when the guts of the months long season is upon us and the week to week slugging it out starts to take its toll? That’s when we will really see what a Peyton Manning can do for a city.

Like him or not, Tebow has the personality to move steadily through a sea of craziness – we saw that last year.  And the world knows Manning has demonstrated it season after season – that ability to keep people coming back, to help the city keep the faith…. and to keep spending on the whole economy that is football. Rumor has it the Broncos won’t keep both, but from a succession planning perspective wouldn’t that make some sense?

The internet is alight with the Goldman Sachs resignation letter….  regardless of whether or not you believe the gentleman who wrote it, the fact that he wrote it at all speaks to problems.  The response from Goldman Sachs was so PC it almost proves his point. If the leaders of the organization can’t even bring themselves to say his name in print, they are taking too much coaching from their PR or corporate comms lackeys and not enough from their own common sense. Their rebuttal reads like a vanilla dismissal, lacking any passion or indication of serious care – in other words, arrogant, dismissive, and overly-proud.  At least to my ears… I’m sure to others it is perfectly pitched.

If you haven’t seen the op-ed, here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html

And here’s the response, you have to scroll down a bit to find it – to 12:36 postings:

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/goldman-executive-resigns-via-public-letter

I’m excited to get my new iPad3, so this news report caught me by surprise.  Really, the Android tablets will take over the Apple product(s) by 2015?  What happens then? Will all my iThings become iBsolete? I think not.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/14/idc-android-tablets-will-overtake-ipad-by-2015/

Fun at work can be an oxymoron to many people – I can remember my old school managers back in the day saying “if it were fun, it wouldn’t be work” or something like that.  But these days, many people integrate work and life more than they try to balance it.  Balance implies two distinct things, where integration is about creating a unified experience. A result of  growing integration is that people want (and even expect) to have more fun at work.  But what does that mean?  The occassional ice cream social? Ping pong tables in the rec room?  Free soda?  For most employees, those are nice, but they don’t create a fun work environment. Fun seems to come from being engaged in the work in a meaninful way, not just from having distractions from the work.

Bob Reticker recently had a good post on Employee Engagement that talks about combining fun and functionality in the workplace – check it out:

http://www.insperity.com/blog/article/employee-engagement-balances-fun-and-functionality-in-the-workplace/

A client introduced me to a facinating case study for self-managed teams.  The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (http://www.orpheusnyc.com/) works without a conductor, leaving each member of the orchestra to contribute, guide, influence, and deliver on the final product. Their process is interesting to see, and the results have been Grammy-winning.

Self managed teams are the elusive goal of many post-modern organizations, and I haven’t seen many instances of it playing out this concretely. Makes me wonder what more there is to learn from this example.

The Christian Science Monitor reports on a study from the Journal of Applied Psychology that daylight savings time increases worker cyberloafing by as much as 8.4 minutes as people struggle to adjust to the loss of sleep on Monday.  What I can’t figure out is how it is possible to get that precise in measuring something that is largely invisible.  And even more, why would you want to?  And yet, as a reader I was interested. As a matter of fact, it is a fact I discovered during my own extra 8.4 minutes….

Here’s the article if you are interested:

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0310/Daylight-Saving-Time-2012-Bill-Lumbergh-types-warned-about-cyberloafing

Hard to believe it was a year ago that the tsunami hit Japan, and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility went into meltdown. The power and risks of nuclear energy were brought to the front page of most major news organizations as a result.  What happened then? Japan began rebuilding – as it has done before – and is adjusting to a new definition of normal in the surrouding areas.  And the nuclear energy field continues to look for ways to make the public comfortable with the idea of nuclear power close by. There’s some interesting work being done right up the road in Fort Collins, see the video below for more info.

I’ve been talking with some colleagues about the “discipline of change management” – it concerns me the way that we’ve reduced change to a formula comprised of sponsorship, communication, reinforcement, and so forth. It probably feels good to people with a strong management bent, who want things that are controllable, predictable, and measurable. I do believe change management as a discipline has had a positive impact on the implementation of new technology and new processes, and helping business to adapt to changing environments, even though it can feel a little trite.

But it concerns me that we now easily box in change as an event, rather than an ongoing dimension of business reality. Even more concerning is the promise of predicable results that can be managed to a schedule, based on driving individual behavior changes. Changing how an individual does something is hard enough, changing an organization or a culture and moving deeply held collective beliefs, values, histories, and fabrics takes the idea of change management to a whole new level.

Perhaps it is time to change our approach to change – not because we’ve been doing anything wrong, but because we got a lot of things right at the individual behavior level, and now we need to keep pushing forward. How do we start to be businesses that can continually absorb and adapt to change – technology, process, structure, or other?  How do we make the ability to change an ongoing competency rather than a one time bang?

Had a meeting today on how to have good meetings. Lots of great discussion about how to think about meetings both as the organizer and as a participant, tools to use, ways to generate good group participation. I think some participants were skeptical at first, but they seemed to warm to the topic as we moved through the agenda.  Yes, there was an agenda.  That’s Meetings 101, after all!!

It reminded me of a half day training I went to a few years ago around how to be a good listener. Listening is harder than we think sometimes – it can be exhausting in so many ways because you have to open yourself up mentally and emotionally in ways that are uncomfortable. What if we all committed for one day, or even just one meeting, to being a better listener?  I wonder what we’d get out of an effort like that.  If nothing else, I think I’d get a good night’s sleep – I’d be wiped out.