If you have two sets of researchers who are telling you contradictory things,

and they have their own data sets to support it; how do you tell which one is

believable and which one is junk. In Numbersense,

what I try to do is to give people, as you say, a framework to start thinking

about how you would interpret all these things out there.

…says Kaiser Fung, author of a new book, Numbersense a

previous book, Numbers

Rule Your World: The Hidden Influence of Probabilities and Statistics on

Everything You Do and the popular blog, Junk Charts. Kaiser Fung is a

professional statistician with over a decade of experience applying statistical

methods to marketing and advertising businesses. He holds an MBA from Harvard

Business School, in addition to degrees from Princeton and Cambridge

Universities. He is Vice President of Business Intelligence and Analytics at

Vimeo, a high-quality video hosting platform for creative people. He previously

worked at Sirius XM Radio, American Express, [X+1], Exodus Communications, and

Sonus Networks. He is also an adjunct professor at New York University teaching

practical statistics.

This is the first of two podcasts with Kaiser. The second one will post next

week.

Everyone is talking about conversations but are we really having them? Are 90% of conversations incorporated in 140

characters or thinking of the latest sound bite to get our message across? In

Russ Unger’s new book, Designing

the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation (Voices That

Matter) he discusses the ability to communicate and the practice of setting

up the conversation to make it productive. Stephen Anderson sums up the

book:

A book on facilitation? I wouldn't have thought this was needed, but after

reading Designing the Conversation, I'm reminded of all the valuable skills we

learn—with some difficulty, mind you—on our own. Fortunately, all that stuff is

covered here, from preparing for a session to handling the difficult

personalities. And it's all delivered in a way that's short, to the point, and

packed with plenty of pop culture references, making this a fun, lively read!

You'll grin at uncomfortably familiar situations and nod in agreement as bits of

invaluable advice are served in style through every

chapter.

I enjoyed the book as much Stephen did and almost as much as Russ’s first

book, A

Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the

making (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter). 

Russ Unger is a user experience consultant and is on the

Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington

College of Design. His workshops have been attended by a variety of

companies, from lean startups to large corporations. Since 1993 he has helped

many companies incorporate user experience strategies and tactics into their

designs. You can find Russ at http://userglue.com.

Steve Portigal. author of Interviewing

Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, is the founder of  Portigal Consulting. He has interviewed

hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance

staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default

swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile

devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial

services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA,

Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His

articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been

published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at

www.portigal.com/blog and tweets at

@steveportigal.

Steve was gracious enough to secure a discount code for the book,

IUBUSINESS901 for 20% off,  if purchased through Rosenfeld media, Interviewing Users:

How to Uncover Compelling Insights.

Michael Dobson (@sidewisethinker), author of Project: Impossible – How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible – and How You Can Too! said in the podcast:

Well, to be honest one of the things, if it hasn't happened in your career yet, I'm saying this to the audience. I'm sure you've been there. If you haven't been given a project that is sort of absurdly impossible on the face of it, well, you haven't been around for a very long time. Impossible projects in any field in any discipline, well, this is just one of those little situations in life that sooner or later we are all confronted with for better or worse. Win, lose or draw, we all have to face it.

MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON is a marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker. He has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career. My favorite book of Michael’s, out of twenty or so he wrote, is Creative Project Management. You can find Michael on Twitter @sidewisethinker or his main website sidewiseinsights.com

.Listen to the rest of the conversation on impossible projects.

Irene Etzkorn, my guest on the Business901 podcast, is a worldwide authority on simplicity. As executive director of Simplification, she built the Simplification practice of Siegel+Gale. Her clients include the nation’s top banks, brokerage firms, insurance companies, utilities, and health care providers. Irene and Alan Siegel have recently authored Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity describing these practices.

From the book: In Simple, the culmination of their work together, Etzkorn and Siegel show how having empathy, striving for clarity, and distilling the message can reduce the distance between company and customer, hospital and patient, government and citizen—and in so doing increase a company’s bottom line. Examining the best and worst practices of an array of organizations big and small, they recast simplicity as a mindset, a design aesthetic, and a writing technique.

A written excerpt from the podcast is available at The Competitive Advantage of Simplification.  About Siegel+Gale: (www.siegelgale.com) Simplicity is the centerpiece of the strategies they develop that reveal the unique truths of an organization, the engaging stories they create that connect brands with their audiences and the meaningful experiences they deliver that are both unexpectedly fresh and remarkably clear. Since 1969, Siegel+Gale has championed simplicity for leading corporations, nonprofits and government organizations worldwide.

That philosophy is found in the phrase the Walt Disney started and everybody in the Disney Organization knows and it is called “Plusing the Show.” Walt would say: “We have to keep plusing our show, if we ever lose them, meaning the guests, it will take us 10 years to get them back.

This is an excerpt from the podcast with Doug Lipp. Doug is a world-renowned speaker and acclaimed expert on customer service, leadership, change management and global competitiveness. Doug recently published a book, Disney U: How Disney University Develops the World’s Most Engaged, Loyal, and Customer-Centric Employees.

About Disney U: The Disney University, founded by Van France, trains the supporting cast that helps create the world-famous Disney Magic. Now, for the first time, the secrets of this exemplary institution are revealed. In Disney U, Doug Lipp examines how Van perpetuated Walt Disney's timeless company values and leadership lessons, creating a training and development dynasty. It contains never-before-told stories from numerous Disney legends. These pioneers share behind-the-scenes success stories of how they helped bring Walt Disney's dream to life.

Disney U reveals the heart of the Disney culture and describes the company's values and operational philosophies that support the iconic brand. Doug Lipp lays out 13 timeless lessons Disney has used to drive profits and growth worldwide for more than half a century.

Doug Lipp helped create the first international version of the Disney University, in Japan at Tokyo Disneyland, and then led the training team of the Disney University at the corporate headquarters of The Walt Disney Company, The Walt Disney Studios. He mentored under a number of Disney University visionaries, including the Disney University founder, Van France. Lipp consults with numerous Fortune 100 corporations and travels the world speaking about the lessons he learned at the Disney University.

Business Process Management is more than an IT function. It is how we go about our work as an organization. Theodore Panagacos, a former Management Consultant with Booz & Company explains this and how BPM works with Lean and Six Sigma in his book The Ultimate Guide to Business Process Management: Everything you need to know and how to apply it to your organization. His book has become an Amazon top seller in its category, Business Process Management.

About: Theodore Panagacos is an industry recognized change management practitioner and has 10 years experience helping organizations design and implement business models that improve its service to customers. He has a strong background in the banking, financial services and government sectors, and has worked across a range of functional areas relating to business strategy, ICT transformation, project management, corporate governance reform, and organizational re-design.

In the past few months, I have submersed myself into several different areas. One of them being Scenario Planning or Thinking. I was honored to have George Wright, co-author of Scenario Thinking: Practical Approaches to the Future. The book is an innovative guide to new methods in scenario thinking. The book focuses on the demonstration and illustration of practical steps in scenario development processes.

Scenario Planning in the past has been used for fairly large subjects that are discussed in the podcast. Topics, such as where will healthcare be in thirty years. However, scenario planning can be simply described as a methodology based on handling uncertainty. If we had to pick one buzzword for the last few years outside of innovation, it would be uncertainty. I feel that scenario planning can make an impact in today’s uncertain world.

Enough of my talk let’s hear what George Wright has to say.

About George Wright: George is currently Professor of Management at Durham Business School, University of Durham, UK. He has consulted and provided management development programmes on scenario thinking and decision making with organizations such as Bayer, EADS, Petronas, Scottish Power, Thales, United Utilities, and national and local government in the UK. He has published on scenario thinking in international journals, including Futures, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Management Studies, and Organization Studies.

An excellent post by John Hagel (as always), Pivots and Portfolios: A Contrarian View, discusses the role of scenarios to assess uncertainty. John says,

Scenario planning can help to systematically assess the likely impact of variables that are more uncertain and frame a likely set of alternative futures. This provides a useful context to assess the potential robustness of major options in strategic direction – how well would these options fare in each of the scenarios that have been defined? In assessing the likelihood of potential scenarios, it is important to ask what initiatives we might be able to pursue that would materially alter the probability of outcomes that our more favorable to us.  One of the biggest errors in scenario planning is to treat probabilities as a given rather than something that can be shaped by our own action.

I am a big fan of John’s work and especially the book he co-authored The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. His remarks about scenario planning offers me a little validation in my thinking and encourages me to take step further. Thanks John!

Craig is the founder of The Weber Consulting Group, an alliance of experts committed to helping organizations and teams build their capacity for engaging tough, wicked, adaptive challenges. He’s consulted to an expansive roster of world-class clients, helping them improve their performance by treating dialogue as a discipline. His unique work is outlined in his ground-breaking new book, Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On.

Craig offers excellent advice and material on the most basic way of creating success, our conversations.  I thought there were several gems in the book, and one chapter offers one of the most practical descriptions, and as a result, understanding of double loop learning that I have read.

Craig has worked with leaders and teams from such diverse organizations as Boeing; Boeing Defence Australia; The Royal Bank of Canada; NASA; Clif Bar; Los Alamos National Labs; NASA; Novo Nordisk; The CDC (The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention); Pfizer; Vistage: An International Organization of CEOs; legislators from the states of Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Colorado; Suncorp Insurance & Finance (Australia); and The Upper Valley Waldorf School.

I first came across Dean Meyer several years ago reading two other books,The Building Blocks Approach to Organization Charts and Decentralization: Fantasies, Failings, and Fundamentals. I had re-read them due to my recent foray into those two subjects and sought out Dean about his thoughts and he responded by sending me his latest book. I started out the podcast asking about that book, Internal Market Economics and never did get around to the other subjects for 30 minutes. As a result, I posted the first podcast, Show me the Money – The Truth about Performance last week. This podcast discusses Decentralization and Organization Structure.

Dean Meyer is one of the original proponents of running shared-services organizations within companies as businesses within a business, where every managerial group is an entrepreneurship funded to produce products and services for customers. Dean is the author of seven books. He invented FullCost, a business and budget planning process based on an internal product/service costing solution. He researched the science of organizational structure, captured in his Structural Cybernetics framework and reorganization process.