John W Lewis

Category: relationships

  • Unified communication, this is not!

    In this world of increasingly diverse communication, our conversations are becoming scattered across channels. A few channels in a few minutes Yesterday, my ex-partner sent me a text (SMS) message which approximated to: “Will you please reply to my email about …?”. A few minutes later, she sent me another: “Actually, it might have been a…

  • We like differently

    It is a very simple idea: we like differently. And a wide range of consequences flow from it. You and I like different things. Also you and I like or dislike the same things for different reasons and to a different extent. A significant hurdle to understanding this is the difficulty we frequently have in…

  • Social++

    The Google+ service is potentially interesting, but is it just Wave all over again? As I begin to use it, it feels like facebook, which is quite limited. And it’s nowhere near as useful as Twitter.

  • Organising for innovation

    Aspects and characteristics It is unlikely that anyone doubts that the ability of an organisation to innovate is strongly dependent on the nature of that organisation. Its nature can be described by various characteristics (including cultural, behavioural and structural characteristics) and by several aspects (including the static and dynamic aspects) of those characteristics. 

  • Welcome, all you Like Minds!

    Welcome to Exeter in Devon, all of you who are attending the Like Minds conference this week (Thursday and Friday, October 28 and 29). The success of the Like Minds conference is a great credit to the organisers, the speakers, the sponsors, the local community and, of course, the participants. With each conference, there has…

  • Sell the opportunity

    Treat every problem as an opportunity, we are told. At first sight it is an attractive idea, but further investigation reveals that it is a little too glib. Problems and opportunities are similar but different things; in a sense they are the opposite of one another. Edward de Bono, I think it was, who captured…

  • Helping other people to get what you want

    “We are not a cruise ship. We are an explorer ship!” This is one of the key messages in the passenger briefing on the ships of the Hurtigruten service which runs daily northbound and southbound along the coast of Norway. For nearly 500 passengers recently boarded at Bergen, almost all of them on a cruise…

  • Meeting Ann Holman

    Innovation was a theme on Friday morning, when I had the pleasure of meeting Ann Holman in person. What an energetic and forward thinker she is! We’d already conversed briefly by electronic means, and so we arranged to meet IRL (In Real Life), as others have termed it. Ann had already tweeted, although at the…

  • Liking LikeMinds 2010

    A global local conference How often does a great conference on an emerging subject attract local, national and global participants to a quiet corner of the UK? Not often, I suspect. Nevertheless last Friday, 2010 February 26, it happened again at LikeMinds 2010! The first time it happened was in 2009 on October 16th. Back…

  • It’s about relationships!

    Shift of emphasis After a long drawn-out build-up, lasting decades, it feels to me that we are finally tipping over into a new era of models for systems. Whether thinking about communities of people, about business processes or about social networks, the shift of emphasis is at last now leaning away from “things” and towards…