April 26th, 2005 by Matt
I was talking with my friend and associate Steve a few days ago about opportunities we have in our company to make some significant culture changes. We, in our company, are in the midst of a turnaround of sorts, as we reinvent ourselves following the burst of the telecom bubble and our recovery from some leadership failures. A core group of our new leadership team is working hard to not only improve our business model, but truly change the way our people interact with each other and trust each other. Naturally, they are meeting some resistance, but Steve and I admire, agree with and support their efforts. In fact, I’m very excited about the future prospects for our company if we can truly change.
Some of the issues that we have to deal with in our cultural transformation include:
- Passive-aggressive communication, e.g. saying “yes” just to end the discussion when we really mean “no”
- Entitlement culture – expecting work and results to come to you, rather than seeking them out with initiative and drive
- Lack of realization about the changing business needs and changing roles – expecting current jobs and roles to exist in the future as they are today
Of course all of the above issues are not ubiquitous to all parts of the company, but there are definitely pockets of these behaviors and attitudes. As Steve and I talked about some specific areas of change in our organizations, Steve came up with the term for those that we thought “didn’t get it”: the Legacy Thinkers.
Continue reading ‘Legacy Thinkers’
April 16th, 2005 by Matt
EverNote has become an essential part of my daily workflow and information tracking. Its simplicity and straightforward approach to capturing and organizing information just simply work for me.
Here are a couple of screenshots of the elements I mentioned in my previous post:
On the left, the TimeBand for all my notes. On the right, an example of the TimeBand when only a subset of notes are selected (when I select notes in one of my categories). Note the automatic adjusting of the scale, and the “>” to indicate the presence of notes on specific days.
Continue reading ‘Some EverNote Screenshots’
April 14th, 2005 by Matt
I’ve been living in the dark ages when it comes to note-taking and organizing software. Since the experience I describe below, which started in early February of this year, I’ve come to learn of several different software options in this genre. Before this, I was unaware of any.
The first I saw was Microsoft OneNote – I saw an on-line add for it and immediately went to check it out. After seeing the screen shots and an overview of its capabilities, I thought Microsoft had read my mind about what I wanted. I attend a lot of meetings and take a lot of notes, so I consume notebooks fairly rapidly. Organizing and finding past information in notes is always an issue, but sometimes just the act of writing things down helps me retain the information better.
With OneNote, I saw a way to capture notes on my computer, search through them, and index them in a virtual notebook. I had tried to accomplish the same on-line note taking capability by using Word and some fancy paragraph and character formatting styles, but it just wasn’t functional enough. There were too many manual formatting commands I had to use to organize my notes, and even then I couldn’t easily group into categories. I tried it for about 2 weeks and then gave it up.
So after being inspired by what OneNote could do, I quickly downloaded the free trial starting using it. I was impressed: I was quickly able to organize notes into categories and sub-categories. I could import appointment descriptions from Outlook into OneNote, I could type anywhere on the note “canvas”. I could even “ink” free form notes and mix them with typed text – if I actually had a tablet PC, that is. I was off and running with my on-line note taking.
Continue reading ‘EverNote vs. OneNote’