Have you ever noticed that in business, every manager, director, VP, and C-level person honestly believes that strong teamwork makes for a strong work environment and business? However, have you also noticed that this type of teamwork rarely happens? Why is this? I think it's by design. We are still products of the Industrial Revolution, like it or not, and as such have not figured out how to actually run businesses as an organization of true teams. Do NFL, NBA, or my favorite, soccer teams, operate by forming a huge organization with lots of individual players all playing different games? Not if you are talking about the TEAMS that play the games, but even in these organizations there are a lot of individuals playing their own games against no direct competitors - physical therapists, marketers, managers, etc. And yet, this structure is perpetuated throughout modern businesses.

 If you have read this blog before you would likely notice that I tend to be interested in photography a good deal even if I'm not a very good photographer yet.  Art Wolfe recommended an e-book by a photographer friend, William Neill, and I have to say that I'm impressed, not just with Mr. Neill's photography, but with his e-book publishing style. Not only do you get a cleanly formatted PDF of his photographs, but each photography is a high-resolution file that can be "zoomed in on" for further detail review of the photographs he made.  This is what e-books should be, not merely regurgitations of the print versions with all of their limitations of size, print quality, and weight.  Hopefully McGraw-Hill and other textbook publishers will catch the cluetrain soon and awake to the possibilities of the Internet.  Stop protecting your dwindling print revenue streams traditional publishers!

April 1st is an increasingly annoying day for one reason, and that is that the signal-to-noise ratio of that day goes WAY up (or down, depending on how you wish to measure it) with each passing year. In the past, and I mean before the Internet, the April 1 noise ratio was pretty well contained. But with the rise of the interconnected communications of the Internet age, now EVERYONE can pull a prank with a few tappy taps on the keyboard or touchscreen. This isn't funny. It isn't funny because with all of the additional communication options these days, my available time to pour through all of these communications is very short. So I simply don't have time to waste an entire day sifting through what's true and what's not. It's not that I'm a curmudgeon, a gullible idiot, or just a cranky guy - I just can't stand the importance this non-holiday is taking on due to the ease of communications these days. It's not even a flipping holiday, for goodness sake!

A not-so-recent Forbes article (March 2009) highlighted which American states were the best to live in based on a national survey conducted by Gallup. Do the results live up to some other measurements? Let's see...

An article titled "The New Population Bomb: The Four Megatrends That Will Change the World" by Jack A. Goldstone in the magazine, Foreign Affairs, is primarily about how different factors will impact one megatrend: world population; or perhaps its about how the megatrend of population will affect other world concerns. Either way, this is an interesting article with a positive, albeit politically unpopular, outlook on how to manage changes in the coming decades. So how can Western businesses, non-profit organizations, and government institutions adjust their strategies to cope with these impending changes and their impacts?