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  • The Kool Aid Acid Test for Culture

    The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test was a book written by Tom Wolfe way back in the day. The Acid Tests were parties at which everyone takes LSD (which was often put into the Kool-Aid they served) to “abandon the realities of the mundane world in search of a state of [intersubjectivity]”. Wolfe presents a…

  • An employee experience update – thought leadership from Microsoft

    Microsoft, with its Employee Experience Platform called Viva, is driving some serious thought leadership for the category and since I work there and picked up on this (disclosure), I thought I would share.

  • A review of the new Microsoft Whiteboard

    Naturally I used Microsoft Whiteboard for the review itself. I then exported an image of it and that is what you see above. This is not so much a feature overview since you can find that all here: Welcome to the new Whiteboard! That was the announcement post from a few days ago. This is…

  • Productivity – we have a problem

    There has been a flurry of bad press for productivity recently, especially in relation to remote work, but in general too. This is not entirely a new thing – see this pre-pandemic post from a Global Government Forum on The productivity problem: causes, consequences and cures. Two recent discussions around productivity have spurred on this…

  • Microsoft 365 customer questions – Viva Connections

    I’ve decided, while I work in the business of dealing with customers questions on Microsoft 365 all the time (disclosure), either directly or indirectly, I might as well share them if they can be of help to others. Where I can of course and naturally, not just the questions but the answers too. All questions…

  • The ebb and flow of productivity at work

    I was thinking the other day about the times when I’m most productive at work. So much has been written about the subject and I work at a company and in a role where it’s one of the key functions of my job, i.e. to make people more productive through technology. There are a gazillion…

  • Business Apps are Booming – Catch the Wave

  • Minding the accelerating technology gap

    Even if every company is now a tech company, there is still a massive gap between the early and fast adopters and the laggards. It goes beyond the chasm of initial technology adoption because now the assumption is all companies have to be using technology in some form or other to compete. The question is…

  • We Work Unbound – key concepts for a hybrid world

    Working at Yammer back in the day (2012 onwards), we were at the forefront of some cutting edge work practices that had been brewing a while. The advent of social technologies of which Yammer was a latest iteration and that I had also previously been involved in (more here: birth of enterprise social) were driving…

  • Anatomy of clever marketing – Nespresso gets personal and location based

    I received a newsletter in my inbox from Nespresso a week ago and I was so impressed I thought it worth sharing. Take a look at the screenshot below accompanied by a few brief comments.

  • Beyond onboarding – growth hacking adoption of your product with customers

    NOTE: Enterprise technology and Microsoft 365 (M365) customers are predominantly the context for this post but hopefully it is still useful more broadly. In this context, I define onboarding as the set of activities related to the initial provisioning and orientation of a technology for users. It should ensure that users have seamless access and…

  • Overcoming challenges in an innovation imperative world – 2nd edition

    Just a few weeks ago I highlighted how important innovation was and yet how disinterested everyone was in it: Innovation has never been more problematic or needed – 3 things you can do. I went on to suggest 3 ways in which you could address this challenge. Not more than a week later, this post…

  • The post pandemic organisation’s hierarchy of needs

    This is a long overdue follow-up to a piece I doodled and wrote about way back in 2016: The Modern Organisation’s Hierarchy of Needs. For two main reasons its due an update. The clue to the first is in the original title. Anything that lays claim to being modern needs a revisit at least every…

  • Marketing sales and customer success for 360 degree effectiveness

    In line with some recent work I’ve been doing working with colleagues in sales and marketing, I created a doodle and had some brief additional thoughts around this topic. These thoughts in the form of a DanelDoodle are a little heavier on the sales side. I do work very closely with sales people because I…