I just got invited to a creative workshop that is supposed to synchronise ideas about a future product. When this workshop got announced it was announced to far too many people in the room with more than necessary kinds of experience. The idea was to be brainstorming.

With no clear goal..

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Creativity · Workshop

Yesterday a colleague of mine told me a story how he explained the advertising business model to an editorial team with an analogy.

It didn’t go well..

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advertising · Business

In front of the building of the company I work for is a small meadow with a pavement right across. Only weeks after the pavement was built you could see a beaten track starting to appear. It was very foreseeable where people would walk instead of the pavement.

Now replace the term pavement with hierarchical organisation.

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information · structure

Managing is a lot about reporting. Either you need to report to someone or you need to get reports to base your decisions on some facts. Preparing such reports is tedious though and can be automated.

I’ve chosen Google Docs for it.

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automation · Google Analytics · Google Docs · reporting

The company I work for is undergoing some massive re-organisation for quite some time now. Responsibilities shift from one department to another and from one person to the next. This can lead to some confusion sometimes.

And here’s how to deal with it.

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information · team

What is process autism? In a nutshell it’s when people are not only applying processes and following them but obeying them rigorously and dogmatically.

Here are the top 4 signs that help you to spot it.

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processes

I spent the last few days with writing strategy papers for several brands. There isn’t much time and even less data to base my conclusions on and the easiest option would be to write down my own vision from scratch.

However I prefer to get people on board.

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compromise · team

Yesterday I had a long and quite productive meeting. We discussed the future of a product. How it’s going to look, what it’s going to contain and how it’s going to earn money.

And we had to stop people from selling it!

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development · maturity

Last week I was chatting with a friend about my step from development to management. He was interested in this because he’s a developer himself and knows how they usually are and what makes them tick.

Apart from many things we covered we found out that management is about language too.

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language · management

Yesterday we had a little get together. The old online team of the Financial Times Deutschland – the product people and the developers. One of the devs found the right answer to describe what everybody felt when he was asked Why did you leave your old company and started here?

Because this team was great!

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team