The Next Organization

Develop and Follow up Creative Ideas More Effectively (When Internet is All Around)

My main achievement this week is a discovery of a new plan for my creative idea development. Working with computer and Internet access for most of the day, having DSL at home and being alone made my laptop the center of my life for a quite some time. Meanwhile, from November last year, I stopped using my paper idea notebook and Lotus Organizer to switch over to MindManager. While the software seemed to be faster, it’s not a very natural way to note down idea very quickly. In stead, it made me focus more on the mechanics and structure than the idea itself. After testing a few personal note tools, I ended up using EverNote. I found EverNote quite fast to quickly capture and classify the information and notes.

However, all of a sudden, I spent most of my day on the computer. I kept reading new things and switching from one task to another. I lost my concentration and my productivity seriously dropped. I had no time to think more the ideas I had. Even worse, I wasn’t able to note down many ideas and they kept vanishing shortly after. I felt frustrated and stressful.

Inspired by a recent discussion in Connek forum and my conversation with a friend, I decided to take a look at the ERP hype in Vietnam and point out the problems as well as solutions for those.

In my opinion, Vietnamese ERP market is definitely in the "Slope of hype" (which I will explain later in this series). All the IT papers and Web site dedicate a large part for ERP, CRM, or the like. Companies bring to market a new product every month. IT companies are talking about ERP, students are talking about ERP, even some blue-screen business managers are doing so, too. In Mao's words, it's a "hundred flowers blooming". Is this a huge market? I would argue it is NOT YET a market. It's just the beginning of a hype cycle. The reasons why it can go wrong at the same time explain why it's a hype. Some of them come from IT vendors, some from customers and the rest is the communication problem between these groups.

How to manage (and lead) mavericks

One of my mentors, Dr. Viet Nguyen, once said: "People are born different. One may be like a hammer, another like a scissors. Don't use a hammer to cut paper then blame it's bad. Similarly, don't use a scissors to hit a nail then blame it's bad, too." Managers, however often have problem with mavericks, by definition "nonconformists". Very often, managers blame that mavericks don't fit with any "normal" plan. I somehow attribute this frustration to the managers' lack of diversity management skills. Like in my quote before, they try to use the hammer to cut paper.

Managing mavericks is quite an experience. Leading them without power is much more challenging. In my early management career, I once had a maverick in my team, so decided to check Mary K. Pratt's tips in her "Managing Mavericks" article immediately.