Phil Simon's Blog, page 24

Reimagining Collaboration Wins International Book Award

I’m pleased to announce that Reimagining Collaboration has won a 2021 International Book Award in the Business category (Communications / Public Relations sub-genre). In addition, the committee selected the book as one of seven finalists in the Business: General category. So there’s that.

Reimagining Collaboration is my third book to win an award. The Age of the Platform and Message Not Received also took home hardware.

Boom.

I’m pleased to announce that Reimagining Collaboration has won a 2021 International Book Award in the Business category (Communications / Public Relations sub-genre). In addition, the committee selected the book as one of seven finalists in the Business: General category. So there’s that.

Reimagining Collaboration is my third book to win an award. The Age of the Platform and Message Not Received also took home hardware.

Boom.

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Episode 34: Lattes, Trust, and Benefits With Fringe CEO Jordan Peace

Jordan Peace is my guest today. He is a co-founder and the CEO of Fringe. We talk about how to personalize employee benefits, the challenges of recognizing remote employees, and his company’s interesting plans for the future of work.

  

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On Collaboration, E-Mail, and the Discman

If you’re of a certain age, then you remember the Sony Discman. (Yes, showing my students a picture of one never ceased to bewilder them.) I’ll assume that you don’t. It looked like this:

I could explain what it did (or still does if you own one), but I’ll cede my time to the inimitable Gary Gulman.

Oddly, I’ve been thinking more and more about these technological relics as I do press, speaking, and consulting around the new book.

Let me explain.

It’s been two decades since you’d regularly see people exercising with Discmen. The launch of the iPod in 2001 caught Sony off guard—the company has never really recovered. For some reason, however, far many of us “collaborate” via e-mail when affordable, user-friendly, and powerful internal collaboration hubs exist.

It makes no sense.

Simon Says

In 2021, you wouldn’t rely upon a Discman while getting your sweat on. Far better alternatives are available. The same holds true with e-mail for collaboration. 

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A Better Way to Work

Many if not most people think of their workplace applications and systems in a disjointed way.

With Reimagining Collaboration, I hope to change all that.

In the explainer video below, I provide a new lens for viewing how we work. 

Click here to watch more videos on Reimagining Collaboration.

BUY REIMAGINING COLLABORATION

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Episode 33: Presence and Productivity With David Burkus

Bestselling author David Burkus and I discuss his new book Leading from Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams. Other topics include overcoming the challenges of hybrid work, the difference between presence and productivity, Van Halen, bad Instagram ideas, and the classic flick Office Space.

  

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On the Parallels Between Collaboration Hubs and Smartphones

Introduction

Odds are that you own a smartphone. Odds are also that you spend very little time actually talking on it. (Best way to show your age: Leave a voicemail.)

Rather, you use all sorts of apps to take and share pictures, read books and news articles, make restaurant reservations, find directions and potential mates, and oodles of other things. For a long time you have known that the term smartphone is a misnomer: It lets you do more than just make and take calls.

Still with me?

Now apply that same model to a different context: internal collaboration hubs. I’m talking about Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, Google Workspace, and others. What if that hub could do much more than just replace e-mail?

Much, much more.

It turns out that the hub can is up to the bill and, even better, doesn’t require users to write any code. Installing a third-party app in a hub is every bit as easy as downloading Instagram for your iPhone or TikTok for your Galaxy F52 5G.

What if a collaboration hub could do much more than just replace e-mail?

Case in point: Want to access Asana via Slack? No problem. In this way, the hub allows you to bring together a bunch of different tools into a single gestalt. And that is the Hub-Spoke Model of Collaboration.

Simon Says

The sooner that your organizations, departments, and groups start thinking about hubs and spokes, the more prepared they’ll be for the future of work. 

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Episode 32: Telepresence Robots With Aaron Campbell of OhmniLabs

Aaron Campbell of OhmniLabs joins me to talk about telepresence robots, AI, ethics, and Jurassic Park.

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On Collaboration, Seinfeld, and Chinese Food

I spend way too much time thinking about Seinfeld, collaboration, and how the two collide. 

To this end, it dawned upon me today that getting people to use Slack, Zoom, Teams, or another internal collaboration hub in lieu of email reminds me of this classic Seinfeld.

Simon Says: Use the fork.

We stick to our ways, even when far superior methods exist. Yeah, change is hard.

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Episode 31: Remote Work, Diversity, and Politics in the Workplace With Rohit Bhargava

Bestselling author Rohit Bhargava joins me to talk about the spectrum of work, diversity and inclusion, what happened and Basecamp, and the role of political discussions in the workplace.

  

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How Not to Start a Book

Introduction

Let’s say that you’re at a bookstore or downloading a Kindle sample. You start reading a book with this Introduction:

Building on the arguments of our previous foray into this topic, this book envisions the emergence of the Fifth Wave in American higher education—a league of colleges and universities, spearheaded initially by a subset of large-scale public research universities, unified in their re­solve to accelerate positive social outcomes through the seamless integration of world-class knowledge production with cutting-edge technological innovation and institutional cultures dedicated to the advancement of accessibility to the broadest possible demographic representative of the socioeconomic and intellectual diversity of our nation. The Fifth Wave primarily augments and complements the set of American research universities, which, for reasons that will readily become apparent, we term the Fourth Wave, but will also comprise networks of heterogeneous colleges and universities whose frameworks are underpinned by discov­ery and knowledge production, and institutional actors from business and industry, government agencies and laborator­ies, and organizations in civil society.

I. Am. Not. Making. This. Up.

The first sentence clocks in at 85 words. The second is only a smidge shorter at 61. Try to read either sentence in one breath. I couldn’t do it.

The words stilted and impenetrable come to mind, but what does the data say?

Copy the text above and paste it in one popular readability tool. The results confirm that the text doesn’t exactly scream readable.

I’m not going to name the book from which this excerpt comes but it’s easy enough to figure out.

Simon Says

If you want to demonstrate to the world that you know plenty of 50-cent words, then write like this. If, however, you want others to actually understand your prose and, you know, read on, then use the text above as an example of what not to do.

Your sentences never need to be this long. If however, one is anywhere near this long, then for God’s sake follow it up with a shorter one.

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