IdeasAndWork

Ideas and Work -- ThinkingOutLoud DonaldNoyes.20070930.20110922

Often ideas and work are separated either by position, power or competence.

There are those who

• have ideas, but do not know how to make them work
• have ideas, seek others with complimentary competencies, and begin work on implementations, either individually, jointly or severally
• decide upon which ideas others will work.
• oppose ideas NotInventedHere
• propose and seek to implement bad ideas
• have ideas but do not record them or seek their implementation
• work without having an idea of what it is they are to accomplish
• work, always improving, but never finishing a stage, being satisfied with partial functionality with partial dys-functionality.
• work, the same way, over and over, never seeking a better or easier way.

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Related:

• Smart Strategies
  • http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/81/smartstrategies.html
  • "There have been several great eras in strategy," says one consultant. "This is not one of them."
    • Still, there are signs of a renewed appetite for new thoughts.
• Innovation as a team sport -- TheTenFacesOfInnovation By TomKelley with JonathanLittman
  • http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_43/b3956151.htm
    • The 1921 birth of masking tape. It involves one CharlesRichardDrew, a banjo-playing college dropout and lowly lab technician for 3M (MMM), which was then an unprepossessing maker of sandpaper. While delivering sandpaper to an auto-body shop, Drew observed a worker struggling with glue and butcher paper as he attempted a two-tone paint job. Eureka! Drew envisioned masking tape.
  • Unfortunately, 3M would have none of it. But, working in secret, Drew found a way to make the tape.
  • The lesson? Observation and imagination - plus insubordination - can be great for innovation.
• Ideas, Collaboration on a Hillside begin a revolution
  • http://hillside.net/history.html
    • In August of 1993, KentBeck and GradyBooch sponsored a mountain retreat in Colorado where a group converged on foundations for software patterns. WardCunningham, RalphJohnson, KenAuer, HalHildebrand, GradyBooch, KentBeck and JimCoplien struggled with Alexander's ideas and our own experiences to forge a marriage of objects and patterns. The Group agreed that we were ready to build on ErichGamma's foundation work studying object-oriented patterns, to use patterns in a generative way in the sense that ChristopherAlexander uses patterns for urban planning and building architecture. We then used the term generative to mean creational to distinguish them from Gamma patterns that captured observations. The Group was meeting on the side of a hill when all this occurred, hence the name.
• DontLimitYourSources
• DontLoseGoodIdeas
• RecordOfNotions

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CategoryIdeaForm