Tag / network
Creativity, concentration and get shit done
How to be more concentrated, create better products and be a better colleaguePhoto by Rob Bye on UnsplashConcentration was not much of a topic 20 or 30 years ago. Most people could easily focus on page-length articles without pictures or infographics. This is hard for us since we are constantly bombarded with information about all sorts of channels and devices. The new media takes our attention almost uninterruptedly and our impulsive brain is helplessly exposed to the many stimuli.
Attention is the new currencyPhoto by Youssef Sarhan on UnsplashThe digital world is brilliant!(?)The countless positive achievements of the digital age are undisputed. The only problem is that our brain has not yet learned to deal with the modern flood of stimuli. When we’re not in a workflow tunnel, our brain constantly scans the environment for new stimuli and pounces on any interesting information. Nowadays we are constantly receiving new messages over the smartphone and the internet, so our brain absor..
How To Make A Dynamic Website Become Static Through A Content CDN
Smashing Magazine gave us a little surprise recently: Its website has been completely overhauled, switching away from WordPress to Netlify. One of the several reasons for the move is cost: Netlify allows for a static version of a website, which can be hosted directly on a content delivery network (CDN), reducing the number of web servers that are needed. In addition, because CDNs are located near users, accessing the website becomes faster.
Pal Zileri A/W 2018
Mood board: the Pal Zileri ready-to-wear label was founded by businessmen Gianfranco Barizza and Aronne Miola in 1980. The two had spent the previous ten years working together in the textile industry before launching their own line of fine suiting and, to this day, all of its clothes and accessories are made by a network of artisans in Quinto Vicentino. In July last year Rocco Iannone was appointed Creative Director, marking a new move for the house. A graduate of the Marangoni School of Design, Iannone joined the company after a decade at Giorgio Armani – the icon of Italian fashion whose influence still presides over the menswear tailoring we see today. For his debut, Iannone looked to do away with an uptight bourgeois attitude, and took inspiration from the Villa Valmarana ai Nani, an elegant landmark building in Vicenza, Pal Zileri’s homeland. ‘I don’t adhere to a code of dressing...
Marques : il est temps de réinvestir dans votre « Owned media » !
Credits Shutterstock RawPixel
Explosion des plateformes, atomisation des contenus, extinction programmée du reach organique : il n’en fallait pas plus pour que les marques saisissent l’importance de repenser leur stratégie sociale en recentrant les efforts sur leur « owned media » c’est-à-dire ces médias détenus en propre. Décryptage d’un phénomène qui va en s’amplifiant.
Bail précaire et chasse à l’engagement bait
Le phénomène n’est pas nouveau. Cela fait plusieurs années déjà que les marques assistent, impuissantes, à la baisse drastique du reach sur leurs pages sociales. La dernière en date ? La récente mise à jour de l’algorithme de Facebook qui va privilégier les publications des amis et de la famille au détriment de celles publiées par les pages d’entreprises. Les marques prennent ainsi progressivement conscience que non, une page Facebook ne leur appartient pas et que le « contrat » conclu avec les media owners s’apparenterait davantage à un bail précaire qu’un engagement lon..
Case Study: When You’re Successful, Stretched Too Thin, and Indispensable
Marion Barraud for HBR Carla was killing off her leading man. And it felt good—but not perfect.
She drummed her fingers on the editing desk and squinted at the monitors in front of her as she scrolled through footage from the season finale of Dope, her production company’s long-running drama series about DEA agents.
“What’s wrong?” asked Melanie, who had directed the episode.
Editor's NoteThis fictionalized case study will appear in a forthcoming issue of Harvard Business Review, along with commentary from experts and readers. If you’d like your comment to be considered for publication, please be sure to include your full name, company or university affiliation, and email address.
“In that last scene, we need quicker cuts between the fire at the lab and the flashbacks. And the song isn’t right. Viewers should be sad, yes, but mostly shocked. This is their hero dying—without any warning.”
Melanie looked upset, and Carla felt a pang of guilt. Dope was supposed to be Melanie’s n..
Friendly, Frictionless Work: Best Practices For Enterprise Messaging UX, From Slack
Creating good user experiences for apps inside messaging platforms poses a relatively new design challenge. When moving from desktop web to mobile interfaces, developers have had to rethink interaction design to work around a constrained screen size, a new set of input gestures and unreliable network connections.
Like our tiny touchscreens, messaging platforms also shake up the types of input that apps can accept, change designers’ canvas size, and demand a different set of assumptions about how users communicate.
The post Friendly, Frictionless Work: Best Practices For Enterprise Messaging UX, From Slack appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Success with the Internet of Things Requires More Than Chasing the Cool Factor
Many companies begin an internet of things (IoT) journey with great expectations, only to end up with disappointing business results. Gartner recently estimated that through 2018 “80% of IoT implementations will squander transformational opportunities” and fail to monetize IoT data. And a new survey by Cisco found that one-third of all completed IoT projects were not considered a success. In my experience with dozens of organizations implementing IoT solutions, those that achieved their expected ROI changed their traditional business approaches in one or more of the following ways:
They Developed a Partner Ecosystem The essence of IoT is interconnectivity. Interconnectivity is about more than the connections between devices — it is about the connections between customers, partners, and suppliers.
Accordingly, IoT is driving a shift in business structures from a one-company-does-it-all model to a let’s-work-together approach. This means that companies must leave behind traditional mod..
What to Do When You’re Returning to a Company You Used to Work For
The idea of boomerang employees — workers who voluntarily leave a job at an organization and then rejoin that same organization at a later date — is gaining more and more acceptance from hiring managers and in the labor force. If you’re one of these employees, how should you handle your comeback? What’s the best way to get back into the fold? Do you try to pick up where you left off? And what do you say to people about why you quit in the first place and why you’re back?
What the Experts Say
The increasing acceptance of boomerang employees is partly due to the “tight job market,” according to Michael Watkins, chair of Genesis Advisers, professor at IMD, and author of The First 90 Days. “It’s natural for companies to look for employees who have a track record,” he says. “Former employees are known quantities.” For both workers and employers, the boomerang represents “a positive development,” says Karen Dillon, coauthor of several best-selling titles, including How Will You Measure Your..
Deloitte’s Radical Attempt to Reframe Diversity
Deloitte has started a major debate in diversity circles by turning its approach upside down. The firm is ending its women’s network and other affinity groups and starting to focus on…men. The central idea: It’ll offer all managers — including the white guys who still dominate leadership — the skills to become more inclusive, then hold them accountable for building more-balanced businesses.
“A lot of our leaders are still older white men, and they need to be part of the conversation and advocate for women,” is how Deepa Purushothaman, national director of Deloitte’s soon-to-be-disbanded women’s employee resource group (ERG), puts it.
This is a reversal from the strategy large companies have been trying for decades: focusing on empowering “out groups” through dedicated networks, known as affinity groups or ERGs. This approach was pioneered in 1970 when Xerox launched the first one, now called the National Black Employees Association. Today many large companies have ERGs for employees ..
Leading Digital Transformation Is Like Urban Planning
Most companies want their businesses to keep pace with digital startups, but end up bogged down by the need to fix the daily challenges that their decades-old IT systems create. How do you redesign and rebuild major infrastructure while keeping the day-to-day work going? This kind of challenge is often referred to as “repairing the airplane while you’re flying it.” But a more instructive analogy might be the redesign of a major city’s infrastructure.
Specifically, there are three urban planning strategies, commonly followed by major metropolises, that leaders can use for inspiration in the race to keep up with digital competition. They include building glistening landmarks that anchor their digital strategy (as Dubai has done), removing roadblocks and bottlenecks to improve their underlying speed and agility (Boston), or changing course altogether to construct an entirely new city (Shanghai).
Dubai: Erecting Modern Landmarks Targeted investments in striking new sights, like Dubai’s E..