Posts Tagged ‘Challenges’

To VC or Not to VC, That is the Question

Icon Written by Alora on April 15, 2009 – 10:45 am

Last night I was reading a very interesting Harvard Business Review article by Umair Haque called Five Problems Venture Capitalists Should Have Solved (But Didn’t). Admittedly, I know very little about the world of venture capital (hence the reading), but this made me think of a panel I attended at SXSWi and he raised a [...]

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Organizational Design 2.0 – Technology, Change & Organizational Structure

Icon Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 4:16 pm

Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [...]

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Social Design for a Virtual Organization

Icon Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 1:49 pm

At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [...]

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Strength, Courage and Wisdom

Icon Written by Alora on March 30, 2009 – 9:27 pm

It’s probably a weird thing for a vocal atheist to quote, but there is something about the famous prayer that has been resonating with me more and more lately. Well, maybe not the “God” part of it, but the recognition part. Grant me strength to accept the things that I can’t change, the courage to [...]

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Highlights from SXSW 2009

Icon Written by Alora on March 17, 2009 – 11:24 pm

Highlights and lessons from my first time at SXSW Interactive.

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Sneaking Web 2.0 in the Back Door

Icon Written by Alora on February 6, 2009 – 1:32 am

This post was originally written for and published on Social Computing Magazine. Those of us in the Web 2.0 space who come from a technology background are often a little stunned when we discover that it is frequently our IT cohorts who pose some of the biggest obstacles to prospective enterprise implementations. After all, wouldn’t [...]

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Why I Love Project Management

Icon Written by Alora on January 9, 2009 – 5:49 pm

Throughout my career I have held roles with all kinds of titles, but in the end, at my core, I am a project manager. That is how I see myself and how I tend to identify, no matter what my formal title. And it’s for a very, very simple reason: there is one constant in [...]

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We Don't Need No Stinkin' Project Managers!

Icon Written by Alora on January 6, 2009 – 7:01 pm

As I look at job postings on Dice and Monster, I have been noticing a disturbing, yet unsurprising, trend emerge: an increase in the number of employers seeking candidates who can function as both project managers and development leads on projects. Naturally, difficult economic conditions demand a re-evaluation of spending habits. And, in cases where [...]

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BlessingWhite Study: Managers Lack Enough Time to Coach

Icon Written by Alora on October 15, 2008 – 7:17 pm

A recent study conducted by BlessingWhite shows that a full one-third of over 2,000 supervisors interviewed “don’t have time to coach” their direct reports. While I find nothing inherently surprising in that statistic, I do find the reasoning behind it fundamentally flawed: the reason that supervisors “don’t have time” is because they have not made [...]

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Three Types of Professionals

Icon Written by Alora on July 22, 2008 – 1:10 pm

Long ago I observed something very interesting about the types of organizations that different people are attracted to and why. And then, even more interestingly, about how those people behave — what types of projects they tackle, what types of changes they promote and how much bitching they do — once they get there. This [...]

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