Self-organizing community development

A case study of implementing systematic improvements

Bryan Pflug — Mon, 26 May 2008 14:38:20 -0500

The term health care reform has diverse meanings for the many stakeholders involved in the US health care system. The underlying issues associated with implementing such reforms are quite complex, but pressures for reform are high. In 2005 alone, the United States spent more than two trillion dollars on health care, or over $7,100 per person, and are growing at over twice the rate of growth of our overall economy. Government and private insurance fund about 80 percent of those costs, and the rest largely comes directly (rather than indirectly) out of our pockets. About a third of these expenditures occur within hospitals; clinicians get another third, and the rest is spread across nursing homes, prescription drugs, and the costs of administering our insurance system. read more »

Management innovation

Bryan Pflug — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 09:20:09 -0600

In The Future of Management, Gary Hamel challenges traditional thinking on the practice of management. He argues that management innovation is needed since more traditional approaches - centered on control and efficiency - no longer work in a world where adaptability and creativity are increasingly crucial to business success. He argues that current management challenges most frequently are focused around how to accelerate change, get everyone involved in innovation, and engaged to give their best - and none of these goals can be achieved very effectively (or sustainably) in a command and control-oriented environment. I couldn't agree more.

Hamel offers a somewhat traditionalist job description for a manager, which is to: read more »

Spacing out

Bryan Pflug — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 14:17:47 -0600

I had a chance to tour the Kennedy Space Center just before Thanksgiving, and was able to provide input and ideas in pursuit of an updated CAPPS contract for NASA's new Constellation program. The completion of the $130B International Space Station's construction is in sight, and is expected by 2010. Unfortunately, the originally planned life of the station only envisioned operational support through 2016, so the ISS's long-term role and cost-effectiveness for scientific research is uncertain, and has been significantly reduced from original plans. read more »

Pursuing a meaningful definition of competency

Bryan Pflug — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:43:25 -0600

No meaningful progress can be made in the effective use of any competency concept without a clear definition of what it means to be competent, and how to separate the wheat from the chaff. read more »

The young pup and the old dog

Bryan Pflug — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:28:22 -0600

Case study: sharing a common work environment

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 10:41:42 -0600

Need an example (possibly from Gallery) of the richness of the infrastructure provided to open-source new developers to spin them up on participating in new development. Looking for a set of publically available 'getting started' links they send or make available to new participants that help them spin up on the processes, tools, and architecture they need to be aware of, and where they need to go for help.

Catalyzing collaboration

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 17:08:02 -0500

Alistair Cockburn has written extensively on the art of facilitating collaboration.

Open source is now being applied to hardware.

Google lets user community change map locations.

Microsoft is threatened by Linux.

On the path to the Matrix

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 12:09:02 -0500

The synergy value proposition

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 11:18:58 -0500

Collaborative development of processes

Bryan Pflug — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 02:00:16 -0500

A good summary of the growth of Wikipedia is here. A discussion about using similar technology within corporate environments is here.