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I am delighted that the Strategic Planning Society is offering new members an opportunity to receive a free copy of Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez’ The Focused Organization when they sign up. If you have not heard of the Society before or not heard about them for some years, do take a look. They have been completely reinvigorated and, at a time when many organizations are struggling with strategy, they represent a wonderful source of ideas and expertise for members.
Author, Francesc Aragall will be speaking at a variety of events focusing on the HUMBLES method demonstrated in his book, Universal Design. HUMBLES is a seven phase model enabling you to assess your current business strategy and design practices, and make your product or service appealing to all your potential customers.
May 2012
11/05/2012 – Moscow 4th International Conference – Equal rights, equal opportunities
22/05/2012 – Salamanca University Congress about Ageing
24/05/2012 – Helsinki Cities for All Conference www.ornamo.fi/citiesforallhelsinki
June 2012
01/06/2012 – Saint Etienne Conference at Ville en Partage
08/06/2012 – Madrid Presentation of the book at CEAPAT Ministry for welfare
15/06/2012 – Paris 5émes assises nationales de l’accessibilité
18/06/2012 – Munich ICE 2012: International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation http://www.ice-conference.org/
If you are attending any of these events and would like to contact Francesc Aragall do say so in the comments, we will help you get in touch.
The HUMBLES method is explained and demonstrated in Francesc Aragall and Jordi Montana’s book Universal Design. You can find out more information on the Design for All Foundation.
Having recently been involved in the due diligence phase of an acquisition process Phil Jones discusses his experiences with communication during this uncertain time. Read about it in his April 9th blog post
Phil is the author of Communicating Strategy and Strategy Mapping for Learning Organisations
The Project Management Centre for Excellence at the University of Maryland has recently begun a partnership with PM World Today to launch a new book review program. PM graduate students have been asked to review a number of books from 11 different publishers with 8 books currently underway. In addition, doctoral candidate David Choy, has interviewed the first reviewer; Michael O’Connor, and created a podcast which has kicked off with a candid discussion about Gower author Michael Cavanagh’s new book Second Order Project Management.
This month Dr Lynda Bourne author of Advising Upwards: A Framework for Understanding and Engaging Senior Management Stakeholders talks to Elizabeth Harrin about helping project managers communicate more effectively with executive stakeholders.
Professor Chris Mowles, author of Rethinking Management: Radical insights from the Complexity Sciences has written an opinion piece for Economia on Complexity and Crisis in the Eurozone
Whilst Dr Emanuel Camilleri, author of Project Success: Critical Factors & Behaviours has written in PM World Today about going beyond project management to define project success.
The APM PMO SIG local meeting for London will be held this month at CAFOD, the international aid agency. The main presentation of the evening is by Peter Taylor, author of Leading Successful PMOs, and chaired by Lindsay Scott. This is the final local London meeting for 2011 and will feature two presentations.
Hosted by CAFOD, the international aid agency, the meeting will start with an overview of the PMO within CAFOD by Anke Bysouth, the PMO Manager.
Delegates will then hear from Peter Taylor, author of The Lazy Project Manager, and more recently Leading Successful PMOs. He will talk about how to build the best PMO for your business. The session will explore some of the research carried out by Peter Taylor for this book. The book brings together the experience and views of PMO leaders from around the world and the project managers that work within the PMOs, as well as those who are now seeking leaders for their PMOs. He will identify what it is that successful PMO leaders have and do that allows them to be successful and how the rest of us can learn from those proven experiences.
Registration is at 5.00pm, with the first presentation at 5.30pm. The event is held at the CAFOD Headquarters, Romero House, 55 Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1 7JB
Each local PMO SIG meeting allows time for networking with the opportunity to carry on the discussions at a local pub/bar. Click here to book onto this event.
Gower author, Dr Anna Meroni, will be one of the experts giving a first class presentation at the Service Design: Dialogue on Approaches on 22nd November in Helsinki, Finland. Service Design will bring together researchers and practitioners of design with a wide variety of backgrounds, ontologies and approaches.
Join Anna at the event to hear about the amazing design work she has been carrying out in Italy, along with further information about her new book Design for Services, co-written with Dr Daniela Sangiorgi.
As part of his popular podcast series, Peter Taylor (aka The Lazy Project Manager) talks to fellow Gower author David Cleden about bid writing for project managers:
At what stage in the process do commercial projects go wrong? Some of the worst problems (unrealistic objectives, faulty assumptions, and poorly understood constraints) are ‘programmed in’ at conception when the bid is written, long before the project manager is brought on board. If the bid is misconceived, no amount of clever project management is going to recover the situation. Getting the bid right is the essence of planning for project success, the main theme of David’s book.
Peter Taylor is the author of the forthcoming Gower titles Project Branding and Leading Successful PMOs. David Cleden is author of Bid Writing for Project Managers and Managing Project Uncertainty which is part of Gower’s respected Advances in Project Management Series, edited by Professor Darren Dalcher.
The Portfolio Management Summit 2011 is being held at The Hotel Intercontinental in Sao Conrado, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil on the 4th, 5th and 6th of October. It will be an opportunity to meet decision-makers from companies in search of information, knowledge and solutions for maximising the value of their Projects. A keynote speaker is Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, Professor in Strategic Business Management and Head of Transversal Portfolio Management, and author of the forthcoming Gower book The Focused Organization.
“Innovation is not a process, but an outcome.”
The Forbes Leadership Forum brings renowned speakers and thought leaders who discuss their leadership strategies. As a speaker at the Forum, Gower Author Alexander Manu was interviewed by Shaku Selvakumar for the IBM Impact 2011 Blog. In this interview Manu discusses in-depth the concepts of Imagination and Innovation in business Extract:
The redefinition of innovation as a human behaviour outcome, a dynamic in constant change, requires the shaping of new responses in business and the economy.
The past understanding of what innovation “is”, was generally connected with a breakthrough in technology – some new tool being employed in some new way. This understanding limits the potential of innovation as bound by the tools employed, instead of the imagination employing them. The latent imagination triggered by an innovation outcome is the true goal of innovation. It is not what “I can do with this now”? but “what can I become doing this in the future”? The tool is not a response, but a question. Every innovation is a question. The truly important innovations are a series of questions.
A few definitions: Innovation is an outcome, a new behaviour, a new way of doing things. Disruption is a behavior – an outcome involving a media and a user – changed by invention. Invention is a moment of discovery or creation of something new. Disruptive Business means the sum of new behaviours and their support models. Innovation is a moment of use, a manifest behaviour that engages an innovation object into new uses, and modifies the habitual conditions of the present.
This position challenges the current understanding of innovation, and some of the labels applied to innovation typologies, such as the label “disruptive innovation”. In general, the current discourse around innovation addresses competently the technology side of an invention, at the expense of the motivational side of the user, the human motivation which leads in the behaviour of use.
Alexander Manu is Chief Imaginator and Senior Partner at InnoSpa. He is the author of Distruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-design of Business published by Gower.
