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For those who use facebook at work but worried about what the boss will say if he sees you, then this might be the solution.

It’s just pretty cool.

This is a good article in Entrepreneur magazine. It gives Richard Branson’s thoughts on how a small business should develop their organisational culture. He makes two good points I think;

• focus on the customer,
• involve everyone with a good idea in the decision-making process, no matter what level they are in the business.

The following extract really stands out to me and is a theme that resonates again and again, from my research on high performing teams; the bit about being empowered to make decisions and tolerant of mistakes is what Formula 1 teams do so well.

If I think back to what we did right, it was in our planning process, when we made sure we were having fun working together and that everyone who had a good idea was included in our decision-making process.

We had accidentally stumbled on the core elements of a culture dedicated to delivering great customer service! It turned out that people who work in a friendly environment that is tolerant of mistakes, and who are empowered to make decisions about how they do their jobs, arrive at the best possible solutions for serving customers.

Camvine are a business that develop digital signage solutions for a wide range of customers. The secret to their success is a simple to use online management system. Its worth checking out if you need an easy way to manage a network of digital signage.

Having a bit of a push to get more fans on the Prat Perch facebook page.

Please take a minute to like our page.

Many thanks.

UPDATE: Thanks to your support we now have the address https://www.facebook.com/pratperch

Is a superstar more valuable than 100-non superstars? If you had the choice of either or, which would you go for?

Here is an article on the Harvard Business Review website that’s creating quite a stir on this subject. So much so that the author, Bill Taylor, felt compelled to publish a “part two” here.

With all discussions of talent and superstar behaviour, I feel people tend to miss the importance of context.

In different contexts (i.e. environments/cultures, plus general states of mind) individuals can excel or not. People need a opportunity and the platform / project / problem on which to demonstrate performance; either individually or within a team.

Individuals facing similar opportunities in difference contexts may not perform to the same level as before.

What I find particularly interesting is that someone who doesn’t perform exceptionally well at a lower level, can then surprise everyone by blossoming at a higher, in theory more challenging, level. One example I instantly think of from current Formula 1 motor racing is Kamui Kobayashi.

Environmental conditions are therefore significant in terms of empowering people to perform well; the talent, if there is any, is in recognising that argument and then having the guts to create an organisational structure where people can do what they are best at, appropriate to the task at hand.

This goes for every organisation you’re part of; business and social.

Well, that’s my view based on the research I did studing Talent development in some detail for my MBA dissertation. In the context of developing Formula 1 drivers, I found that there are distinctions to be made between “high-achievers” and others, however, invariably this was down them having massive opportunity to perform / practise their art (i.e. Gladwell’s 10,000 hours) and doing that within a cultural organisational structure that allowed them to fail.

Great topic … comments welcome.

The great racing driver Fangio would have celebrated his 100th birthday last week. Mercedes Grand Prix team released this video celebrating his life. Enjoy.

Here is an article I posted on the Prat Perch blog about how to drive a racing car fast(er).

Here is a link to my latest blog post on Prat Perch. It’s been an exciting few weeks so just sharing an update.

Nice article on the 100 year history of IBM. Particularly it focuses on an importance of strong relationships to sustaining market disruption; If people are happy you solved their problem with one technology, then if you have a good relationship with them and they feel you understand the problems their trying to solve, then they will be more willing to accept you providing them with new disruptive technology too.

Interesting perspective.

Team Lotus Formula 1 and GE get together

It looks like GE has decided to sponsor Team Lotus.

The nice thing appears to be that they are aiming to use F1 as a kind of technology showcase for the GE products.

It will be interesting to see what comes of this relationship as there is a lot of potential for both sides to gain much.

Being that it is GE, my anticipation would be this does have the potential to extend further than typical “partner” agreements, where one or either side sometimes pay lip-service to the agreement, people don’t really learn much from each other at all.

This relationship strikes me as potentially being something better, with my guess that in the future GE might even take a stake in Team Lotus if things work out well.

You read it here first folks! …