In the News
Managing your Brain in iPhone Life, January-February 2012
Scenario Thinking now out in Sales and Service Excellence from Leadership Excellence (available to subscribers only).
Study Release: Social Media in Higher Education
Download the press release here.
Notes from the European Facilities Management Conference via the British Institute of Facilities Management
US "strategist" Daniel Rasmus opened the conference with a critique of modern management, including FM. We’re trapped in early 20th century industrial thinking, he argued. This leads to people asking industrial age questions and being overly concerned with the concept of productivity, rather than asking "knowledge economy questions." You can’t measure the ROI of a building, there are just too many variables. Instead you should think about passing on the design intent to future users.
On sustainability, Rasmus suggested we might be making progress when a company’s stock rises because customers are buying less of its product!
APICS AUSTRALIA
"The Next Wave of Innovation in Manufacturing: Insights from the New World of Work" featured in the Journal of Enterprise Resource Management, Volume 45 First Quarter 2011 APICS, Australia. http://www.apics.org.au (note, journal access requires membership)
World of work enters the third dimension
Helen Trinca, April 30, 2011
American management writer and commentator Daniel Rasmus believes we are getting closer to the idea of the "punctuated" workday, where people switch between public and private tasks at work or at home, as the "millennial generation" born between 1981 and 2000 enter the workforce.
"They don't really care when they work," Rasmus says. "It is irrelevant to them to some degree and they don't really question having to answer a text or take a call in the middle of dinner. The millennials have a more fluid sense of time [than baby boomers] so the demands of work don't create the same kind of stress."
Rasmus says that in a lot of communications-based work, there is more opportunity to choose when to work. "There is a sense of saying to the employer, tell me when you want it and I will deliver it."
More here.
The impact of outcomes-based education on workforce preparedness Jill Elaine Hughes, UOPX Writer Network, April 6, 2011
Dan's Quotes:
How might the American education system address this deficiency? Daniel W. Rasmus is a Liberal Arts Fellow at Bellevue College in Bellevue, Wash., and the author of the books "Listening to the Future" (Wiley, 2008) and "Management By Design" (Wiley, 2010). An independent management consultant and a former director of business insights for Microsoft Corporation, Rasmus offers a number of innovative ideas for how the U.S. education system can reshape itself to become more relevant to employers and the 21st-century workplace. Rasmus’ ideas are shaped from a concept called New World of Work, which he created while working at Microsoft and continues to drive his ideas today. “The distribution of American work has changed, and expectations for workers have evolved,” Rasmus says. “As we consider the future of education, we need to design solutions that aren’t about bricks and sidewalks ... but about turning the knowledge economy — through education — into the driver for the next economy.”
Rasmus believes that in order for education to remain relevant, it needs to become more student-centered. “I like the idea that learners need to build their own model of learning,” he says. “My role as an educator is to help guide their development and inform their model.”
That said, Rasmus also believes that one of the best ways to make education relevant to the workplace is to blur the divisions that currently exist between the two. “Think holistically about facilities, and drive toward a breakdown of boundaries between K-12, vocational school and community college,” he says. “Hire the retired or skilled out-of-work professionals to complement teaching, including coaching educators on what is new and different about learning models from the business perspective. Rather than thinking about schools as single-purpose facilities, transform them into cross-generational learning hubs.”
Dan is now a DNA Global Network Advisor
10 Lessons from Angry Birds That Can Make You a Better CIO goes viral with pick up in India, Australia. Reposted at PCWorld, ComputerWorld, Forbes, MacWorld, Network World and many other sites. Already translated into Danish (Sådan kan Angry Birds gøre dig til en bedre CIO) and I think, Korean:
Front page headline from CIO Australia:
New on CIO.com:
10 Lessons from Angry Birds That Can Make You a Better CIO
http://www.cio.com/article/678656
What's worse than an angry bird? An angry IT staffer. Consider these lessons from Angry Birds that could make you a better IT leader.
by Daniel W. Rasmus
Review of Dell Inspiron Duo up at Tablet PC Magazine.
After spending some time with the Dell Inspiration Duo, what some call a netvertible, I have to start by asking: for which audience did Dell targeted this device? The Duo is an oversized netbook that converts to a tablet, but it is good at neither. As a netbook, it is a bit bulky and over-engineered, and it also lacks some basic mobile needs like video-out and a media reader. 
For road warriors charged with delivering endless PowerPoint presentations, the omission of video-out makes the device nearly useless. As a tablet, the cool tilt-and-swirl display makes for an intriguing hardware demo, but adds little value, especially after experiencing the real Achilles heel of the Duo: Windows 7. Windows 7 may be touch capable, but that is only because it sits under a multi-touch display. For anyone who has used a SmartPhone of any design, including Microsoft's, Windows 7 is an embarrassing touch environment on a 10.1 inch display.
Read More...
Dan's NASA article was picked up at KM4DEV:
Dan's Article, Scenario-Based Learning, in the November/December 2010 issue of Government Elearning!
Dan's KMWorld 2010 presentation covered at Darwin Discovery Engine Blog here.
"Dan’s vision for the future: our computer will be smarter when we wake up because it considers stuff while we sleep. This is a nice idea. He closed with idea that we should not let our search vendors keep our expectations low. Good session. It gave us a state of the art and it seems that there is a lot of room for improvement. I would agree and this represents opportunities, especially in the social space. Social media gives us such rich contextual data that should be used to mask search more social and more relevant to the searcher. "
Management by Design Kindle version released:
Dan is now on the Futurist Board at lifeboat foundation.
http://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.daniel.w.rasmus
Dan's blog post on the Grand Engineering Challenges picked up on Kurzweilai.net. Click the image to read or react.
Dan mentioned in excellent article, Thriving in Ambiquity, by Lauren Pollak and Katerine Wakid from Jump Associates.
Coverage from Microsoft Switzerland's Executive Circle
TechFlash, by Todd Bishop - Tuesday, June 15, 2010, 10:17am PDT
Six years later, a report from Microsoft's 'Board of the Future'
Dan Rasmus, who organized the Board of the Future initiative as Microsoft's director of information work vision, also stays in touch with many of the board members. Now an independent strategy consultant and author, he has been strongly influenced by the Board of the Future experience, which helped to shape his current work in corporate strategy and long-term scenario planning.
What lessons should be taken from the Board of the Future? "The biggest thing for me was that companies like Microsoft need to be continuously learning organizations," he says. "That’s something that needs to be part of their DNA. That means not just listening to people that they normally listen to, but listening to a wide range of voices. That was one of the things that we did with this."
Read how Dan's SharePoint talk inspired Sadalit Van Buren's thinking on non-linear process. Click here!
Dan quoted in Business redefined whitepaper from Ernst & Young that was released at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Africa this week. Tanzania, May 5 to 7
Here is a quote:
“One possible scenario could be the emergence of ‘citizen
regulators.’ Bloggers are already exposing more of companies’
internal workings, and their voices have been amplified by the
ability of social media to communicate to audiences with an
interest in the organization. You may start to see employees
using these media to lobby for change in a way that they have
not done before.”
Daniel W. Rasmus, Strategy Consultant and Author, Listening to the Future
Gilbane Conference San Francisco 2010 Coverage:
Take some time to Listen to the Future in HD 215 at Bellevue College this Spring. http://bit.ly/avGUzf.
SharePoint 2009 Conference coverage:
October, 2009
"To be clear, Dodge and Rasmus are putting out lots of interesting content, and they're definitely worth following. (I was already following Dodge on Twitter, and I've read his informative blog for years. I also just signed up to follow Rasmus.) But on a site created for the specific purpose of tracking the tweets of top business executives, some people might be expecting more."
Listening to the Future is now an Amazon Kindle book.
'But it's the cultural consequences of shunning the corporeal moment in favor of the virtual one that are murkier. Dan Rasmus, director of business insights at Microsoft and co-author of Listening to the Future: Why It's Everybody's Business, calls one effect digital autism: When you're engrossed in the digital world, you're more disconnected from the social and physical world. In particular, it's the so-called virtuals, those born after 1999, who need watching. "They have parents and elder siblings behaving in a different way, so what are they learning about what's the right way to behave?"'
Visiting Fellow at Bellevue Collect
Next year I will be working with Bellevue College as a Visiting Liberal Arts Fellow Read more here.
Times of London Interview
