Small talk on my day-to-day life
Saturday 14 January 2006
- Happy New Year - This picture from our family house in Normandy was taken just after Christmas. The wall in the front was built in 1697, the one in the back some time during the hundred years war in the 14th century. The gate... (19:25 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Sunday 6 November 2005
- Free from spam trackbacks! - I've been spending some time in the past few days upgrading to MovableType 3.2, and it wasn't easy. But the customer support people at SixApart (Thanks Sarah) as well as OpenSourceHost (Thanks Zach) were both outstanding. Finally I could manually... (16:57 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Sunday 2 October 2005
- It's the relationship, stupid - Richard Collin's "KM et Efficacité Collective" was a great seminar. Not only did I learn a lot from the presenters (especially the folks or Devoteam, who run a truly superb KM program), but I was very honored to host a... (00:35 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 16 August 2005
- I'll be back first week of September - The reason why I haven't been blogging for the past month or so: I am currently relocating in another apartment in Paris, and I have to deal with plumbers, painters, carpenters and moving companies. Though access to the internet is... (13:47 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 3 August 2005
- Sorry Folks! - As you can see, I am being under severe trackback spam attack, and I cannot fight back from where I am. And so far I could not succeed in installing Jay Allen's Blacklist... The way I feel about those spammers... (17:03 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 5 July 2005
- Corporate seminars are the cornerstone of knowledge management - At last I am back to my blog, and I see hundreds of spam trackbacks there. I really hate spammers. They are really evil people. Anyway, I was really tied up for the past three months organizing the Sales Managers'... (11:36 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Monday 30 May 2005
- La poupée qui dit Non - So France finally voted against the European constitution, which is a sad day for our country. We are entering a period of deep political crisis, which will not make our country stronger. Political commentators will put the blame on Chirac,... (18:41 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 2 March 2005
- Bloggers at Schneider Electric - Hey! I'm no longer the only blogger at Schneider! A quick search through Teknorati gave me a couple of others: Adrine, Dada Choux (whatever his real name is), and Santhosh Kumar. Ryan Dempsey, in Cincinnati, OH, was a Schneider blogger... (12:10 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Thursday 20 January 2005
- Here I am! Happy New Year - Sorry folks. I was gone for the holidays in the Alps, and I left my blog behind me in Paris. We had a wonderful time: glorious weather as you can see from the picture taken from my window, two... (22:08 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 5 October 2004
- Corporate life blunder - I made a big mistake this morning. I was asked by my boss to present the progress of knowledge networking initiatives to senior VPs of my company (some of which I am involved in as a project member or advisor),... (14:21 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Sunday 3 October 2004
- The first two chapters of my book are on line - Wew! I just published the first two chapters of the book I am writing. They're on a new dedicated site bearing the title of the book "Le prix de la confiance", which could be translated by "In search of trust"... (22:05 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 22 September 2004
- My French Weblog - Just posted my first article on my weblog in French. Still having problems with the stylesheet though...... (18:12 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Monday 2 August 2004
- Weblogs in the French Press - At last weblogs make the headlines of the Figaro, a major French daily newspaper. A very good article indeed, that we owe, at least partly to Loïc Lemeur. On the other hand, unfortunately, an online survey on the Journal... (18:31 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Thursday 8 July 2004
Wednesday 23 June 2004
- Students gave me hope - I just came back from a full day event at ENSAM in Paris where students presented their project reports before going on holiday. This was organized by Marc de Fouchecour, a KM pundit in France, and professor at ENSAM. Event/Course... (22:20 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Thursday 17 June 2004
- KM in French - I just thought of a translation for "Knowledge Management" in French that would sound better than the horrible "gestion des connaissances". I would use the two words "Enseignement & Renseignement". Enseignement means education in the teaching sense, and renseignement means... (22:20 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
- From René Girard - In "The origins of Culture", his latest book:The origin of knowledge is also the origin of order, i.e. of symbolic classification and also Imitation and learning cannot be separated... (20:45 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Saturday 15 May 2004
- Managing attention on blogs - apophenia: what i want in an RSS tool through Seb If anyone wants to know why the early players get all of the attention, it's because RSS feeds focus on people, not ideas, and the early players are too overloaded... (18:56 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 28 April 2004
- Selling in the knowledge age - I just came back from Istanbul, and I bought a carpet there. After many suffering many assaults in Istanbul's Grand Bazaar from usual carpet sellers who try to crimp you and won't let you go ("Where are you from? Come... (16:32 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 14 April 2004
- Conventional Wisdom on Change Management - From Prof. Albert Anghern of Insead: The Russians rioted in the 1840s when the government tried to persuade them to grow potatoes. Why? Because being used to living mainly on rye bread, they suspected a plot to turn them into... (15:07 | 1 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Sunday 28 March 2004
- Mediation and spamming - From apophenia: an aversion to mailAs i get older, i learn to despise all forms of mediated communication. The problem is that context is lost. When i look focused, my roommates know not to interrupt. With mediation, i can usually... (21:31 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
- Carlos Gohsn on KM? - From Carlos Ghosn, in Les Echos of yesterdayMany [business] alliances finally end up destroying value. For us [Renault and Nissan] the alliance is a tool for optimizing the performance of each one of the two companies. Such flexibility is not... (11:35 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 9 March 2004
- Collaboration is not easy - A quote from David Perkins As a generalization, pooling physical effort is easy, but pooling mental effort is hard. It's a lot easier for 10 people to collaborate on mowing a large lawn than for 10 people to collaborate on... (15:28 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Monday 9 February 2004
- The two sides of technology - Again from Sebastien, a very interesting post about the collective delusion of the Dean campaign, and the role played by technology.Their fundamental mistake was to think that the exalted atmosphere they were breathing resulted from a generalized enthusiasm rather than... (15:18 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Sunday 25 January 2004
- A good day for CoP-1... - Last thursday was a milestone for our CoP-1 community. For the first time, our monthly meeting meeting was not organized around one KM project of one of the members, but around a common presentation of three of them. Topic was... (21:40 | 0 Trackbacks | 3 Comments)
Monday 5 January 2004
- Smart people driving out action - Why Can't We Get Anything Done?: "Companies often confuse talking with doing. They think that talking about doing something is the same thing as doing it! That planning is the same as doing. That giving presentations is the same as... (18:05 | 3 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Sunday 4 January 2004
- Happy New Year - On April 18. 2003, at 4:00 PM, our little daughter Rose, aged 2, fell into a pond and drowned. This sudden death left us heartbroken, and it changed my life. I think I now understand a little more what... (16:23 | 0 Trackbacks | 1 Comments)
Tuesday 16 December 2003
- Caramba! Powerpointed again! - Gary Lawrence Murphy at Teledyn made me laugh by proposing "a new item in the cultural lexicon, the active verb "to powerpoint" with the meaning: 1. to obscure and distract away from following a logical presentation; 2. dumbing down... (18:17 | 0 Trackbacks | 1 Comments)
Wednesday 10 December 2003
- "Smart Mobs" as seen by a jesuit - "...all around us and right under our eyes, a process of great importance is going on. It is favoured by the sudden multiplication of ultra-rapid means of travel and transmission of thought, and consists in the formation of more and... (23:31 | 0 Trackbacks | 1 Comments)
Thursday 27 November 2003
- CoPs vs. "online communities" - How many forum members does it takes to change a light bulb? This is fun. And so true... That's why I moved to blogging. It's only part of the solution though.... (14:48 | 0 Trackbacks | 1 Comments)
Saturday 22 November 2003
Tuesday 18 November 2003
- A quick report on KM Europe in Amsterdam - The KM Europe event took place in Amsterdam between November 10. And 12. I attended the two first days. This is a quick report on what I found to be of interest, even though I saw maybe only 30% of... (09:31 | 3 Trackbacks | 4 Comments)
Thursday 13 November 2003
- Gold nuggets from Carla O'Dell - Carla O'Dell, president of APQC, gave a speech at the KM Europe Conference in Amsterdam on November 11. These are a few quotes I took from her speech: “Technology is non sufficient, but it is necessary. You can’t imagine a... (12:23 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Monday 6 October 2003
- Technology does not reduce bureaucracy - I read somewhere yesterday (can't remember where) that "the purpose of IT is to eliminate bureaucracy". Wrong. IT merely increases the productivity of bureaucracy. The only thing that eliminates bureaucracy is trust. A real paperless organization is not one that... (23:05 | 0 Trackbacks | 1 Comments)
Tuesday 9 September 2003
- Religious orders as benchmarks for web collaboration - I bumped into the web site Abbaye du Mont des Cats - L'Abbaye Sainte Marie du Mont des Cats, a monastery in Northern France. I found it truly interesting from a community/KM perspective. It is lively (music and video),... (11:09 | 0 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Friday 29 August 2003
- Is there a practical use to SNA? - Reviewing KM and the social network by Patti Anklam, I was wondering about the statement made that it creates new credibility for KM by providing executives with concrete data to illustrate the dynamics of informal networks. "SNA cracked the code... (17:04 | 1 Trackbacks | 7 Comments)
Thursday 28 August 2003
- We are the problem... - In Napsterize Your Knowledge: Give To Receive the primary lesson is "The more that a company shares its knowledge, the more valuable it becomes". It seems so obvious now than more and more top management speeches emphasize the value of... (14:30 | 1 Trackbacks | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 29 July 2003
- Business networking - Martin Dugage's Ryze Business Networking Page Interesting approach to business networking.... (12:08 | 0 Comments)
Monday 28 July 2003
- The company of the future - I just read an article in the latest July 26. 2003 issue of the Economist, the title of which is "A Little Learning", about Larry Summers, president of Harvard University and former Treasury secretary, who suggests that the american research... (11:48 | 0 Comments)
Friday 18 July 2003
- Lessons from general von Moltke - A quote from Dany Jacobs from the Netherlands, from an old issue of the FT, and which makes me wonder: "This principle [of empowerment and delegation] is, however, much older and can be traced back to the Prussian General von... (20:23 | 0 Comments)
Thursday 10 July 2003
- A new baby is born... - Our cross-company Paris-based community of practice on KM issues has chosen itself a name yesterday: CoP-1. We also have a web site at www.cop-1.net. (Interestingly enough, CoP1.net is a site on Communities of Practice by Volkswagen, and very close to... (16:08 | 0 Comments)
- On Sebastien's thesis - I just finished reading Sebastien's thesis "A Socio-Technical Approach To Sharing Knowledge Across Disciplines". I think this is outstanding work. However, I have mixed feelings concerning chapter 5 about ontologies as a "unique possibility for connecting knowledge across discipline". It... (15:59 | 0 Comments)
Wednesday 2 July 2003
- CoPs becoming popular in my company - Yesterday, our small KM team presented conclusions on one year of active support of emerging communities of practice in my company to senior execs of the company. The stakes were relatively high. Either they "got it" and we had a... (21:18 | 0 Comments)
Tuesday 24 June 2003
- Former Newsletter Editorial - It's been quite along time since I published anything on my weblog, because I've been busy working on a KM pilot project, which hopefully is going to become a major change program in my company. We will know this on... (22:24 | 0 Comments)
Thursday 5 June 2003
- Reinventing KM as social network enabler - This log entry of Dave Pollard is really excellent. Following up on the questions raised by Dave, I like to think that the core incentive to share knowledge is "access to" a group of people you could not approach... (11:58 | 2 Comments)
- Communities of practice as a social movement - I just went though Erik van Bekkums blog which, by the way, is a very lively report of Wenger's CPWeek in Santa Cruz two weeks ago. Erik writes: "Communities of Practice as a social movement is about trust, not friendship,... (11:34 | 0 Comments)
Thursday 15 May 2003
- Quote from Napoleon - "Dans le monde, il n'y a que deux forces, le glaive et l'esprit. A la longue, l'esprit a toujours vaincu le glaive" -Napoléon ("In this world, there are only two forces, the sword and the spirit. In the end, the... (21:37 | 0 Comments)
Monday 12 May 2003
- Hard time for communities - I had lunch today with Christophe Binot from Total and Elisabeth Bila from Eurodoc. Reflecting upon our experience at organizing and running our community of KM practioners in the Paris area for the last six months now, it appeared that... (18:07 | 0 Comments)
Sunday 11 May 2003
- First posting - I finally made it. With the exquisite help of Scott Goodwin, who runs the OpenSourceHost service, my blog is up and running. I had a hard time with the file path strings, which can be quite challenging for a newbie.... (18:13 | 0 Comments)