Whole Brain Thinking - Smarter Work

I am going through a whole lot of leadership training programs at my work at this time and I thought I should share some of the interesting thinking styles that are proven to make you smarter at work if applied.
Whole Brian Thinking is a balanced approach to developing Creativity and Innovation at work. The tool Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) developed by Hermann International 25 years ago has been  used by more than a million people worldwide.
What is whole brain thinking? 

Researchers have found that creativity requires whole brain thinking; right brain imagination and intuition, plus left brain login and planning. Businesses led by creative leaders have a higher success rate in innovation, employee growth and strategic execution. Whole brain thinking divides into four quadrants as shown in the picture.

• A quadrant style is logical, analytical and often bottom line focused. People whose dominant thinking preference is A quadrant never makes any decision without facts and reality checks. A quad style manager would strongly prefer his employee to be well versed with the facts and figures and use logic to make decisions.
• B quadrant style people are detailed, structured and procedural. They stick to time and budget and values following the plan with a well organized work style.
• C quadrant people considers people as most important asset. For them human values and feelings are paramount and always need to be considered before any decision is made. C style manager's door is always open and he prefers open style communication. 
• D quadrant style is intuitive, holistic, adventurous and risk taking. They do not accept status quo and always try new things and approaches. This style is visually oriented, preferring little structure, imagining possibilities in the future and avoiding short sightedness. 

How do you use the whole brain thinking model?

The tool creates a customized model for you based on 120 HBDI assessment questions. The model evaluates and describes your degree of thinking preferences in each of four quadrant as described in the model above. You will have a dominant thinking preference plus you may have less dominant preferences in all four quadrants. The idea is to teach you how to communicate with others who also think same as you and also with those who think different than you. Once you know your own thinking style then you can improve teamwork, leadership, customer relationship and interpersonal skills.

Those of you who know me, can you guess, what is my dominant quadrant of thinking preferences?

Have a relaxing Sunday afternoon !

Collaborative software development - Samarter Work

I am going to lecture on Service Science to my students on coming Monday as part of the course that I am teaching at San Jose State University. Looking at services creation and delivery as science opens an entire world of opportunity for us. But Can there really be a science of services?

“Wherever there are phenomena, there can be a science to describe and explain those phenomena. Thus, the simplest (and correct) answer to “What is botany?”is, “Botany is the study of plants.”And zoology is the study of animals, astronomy the study of stars, and so on. Phenomena breed sciences.”
-Newell, A., Perlis, A. & Simon, H. A. (1967). Computer Science, Science,157, 1373-1374.

As we all know, services depend heavily on people, technology and co-creation of value. We work collaboratively with the help of technology to create business value for our customers. Growth can only happen when people, technology, value and customers are combined in an innovative way. We hope service science will provide us the process and methodologies to create the innovative way that I am talking. While talking about people and collaboration, software development is one of the most expensive area where the concept is being applied for faster and better value creation. Rational Jazz community is busy creating a whole new breed of collaborative software development tools and techniques. GitHub is a repository for Social Coding and free for Open source and paid for commercial activities. GitHub is an interesting we based source control system written in Ruby on Rails and currently 716,676 people hosting over 2,016,730 git repositories on GitHub. Its popularity has soared with the popularity of Cloud computing and SaaS. Another good place to host code and do collaborative development is Google Code Project Hosting.
The best pat of this smarter software development phenomenon is that you not just get the platform to reach out to million of users with your innovation but get access to thousands of little or big code snippets and projects that  you can use in your research or other money making initiatives. Is that not Smarter Work?

Where does ISBN come from?

I have been trying to publish my own book and considering blurb (see my last post) for their unique publishing service. Then I realized that Blurb does not provide you an ISBN which you would need if you would like your book to be sold in the bookstore or placed on the library shelf. However if you manager to buy the ISBN yourself, blurb book writing platform BookSmart(TM) does provide the way to embed ISBN on the cover along with barcode. So where does an individual get ISBN from? I did some research and found out that a company in New Jersey named Bowker owns the ISBN and has been the sole supplier of the 13 digit unique book number for last 3 decades since the code was adopted by ISO standard organization in 1970.
Bowker provides all the necessary information as PDF on this webpage. Getting an ISBN is not cheap though. It costs roughly $125 for a single but if you are a publisher and buy in bulk it can cost as little as $275 for 10 ISBNs.
What is the benefit? - well other than being able to sell on Amazon or other bookstore, public libraries get access to newly published books list from Bowker. Who knows, libraries might end up deciding to order your books, can make you famous and rich.
When you have ordered and received your ISBN, here is the instructions to add it to your book in the BookSmart. Long live blurb and happy publishing !

Innovative April 1st Product launches

1. Gmail Motion - eliminate typing
2. Most Innovative Google Job Opening
3. Starbucks Mobile Pour
4. Google Cow
5. Pink Elephant spotted in Mountain View
6. World's first 3D Monocle