Phil Simon

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About Phil Simon
Phil Simon is a frequent keynote speaker, recognized collaboration and technology authority, and college professor for hire. He is the award-winning author of a dozen books, most recently Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace. He helps organizations communicate, collaborate, and use technology better. Harvard Business Review, the MIT Sloan Management Review, Wired, NBC, CNBC, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and The New York Times have featured his contributions. He also hosts the podcast Conversations About Collaboration.
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Blog postTiago Forte is one productive dude. He joins me to talk about his new book Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Legos, productivity, pencils, and metadata are also on the docket. WANT EARLY ACCESS TO PODCAST EPISODES? ➡️ The post Episode 67: Building a Second Brain With Tiago Forte
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Blog postDennis appears to work hard because his manager sees him regularly clock in and out. For her part, Denise (couldn’t resist) is twice the performer but everyone assumes that she’s a slacker.
Why?
Because she works remotely.
Welcome to the world of proximity bias. Few problems vex management, HR departments, and organizations these days as the Dennis-Denise Dilemma. (Check out an extensive Future Forum report on the subject here.)
There’s a simple way to eliminat1 week ago Read more -
Blog postsrc="https://cdn.lordicon.com/lupuorrc.json" trigger="loop" colors="primary:#121331,secondary:#dd8500" stroke="75" style="width:250px;height:250px"> I am pleased to announce that Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace is now available for purchase.
Why give it a read?
Lots of reasons, but here’s a
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Blog postAnh Dao Pham joins me. She is a VP of Product & Program Management at Edmunds. We talk about her book Glue: How Project Leaders Create Cohesive, Engaged, High-Performing Teams.
WANT EARLY ACCESS TO PODCAST EPISODES? ➡️ The post Episode 66: Project Leadership With Anh Dao Pham appeared first on Phil Simon.
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Blog postMy new book Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace drops on June 15 of this year. For now, enjoy an excerpt from the audiobook. My narrator Gary Bennett again hits it out of the park.
Pre-order the book here. It should be up for pre-order as an audiobook within two weeks, give or take.
WANT EARLY ACCESS TO PODCAST EPISODES? ➡️1 month ago Read more -
Blog postBrian Elliott, Executive Leader of the Future Forum, joins me again. This time, we talk about his new book How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams To Do The Best Work of Their Lives. We also discuss team-level agreements, hybrid work, and the need for experiments.
WANT EARLY ACCESS TO PODCAST EPISODES? ➡️ The post Episode 64: Team-Level Agreemen
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Blog postIt's not a TikTok video, but here's a quick twerk-free video explaining my new book.
The post Book Trailer for Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace appeared first on Phil Simon.
2 months ago Read more -
Blog postBelow is an excerpt of my new baby Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace. In it, I set the table for the rest of the book.
Note that a few minor things may change between now and publication.
BUY THE BOOK2 months ago Read more -
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Blog postThe cat is out of the bag. Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace drops in June. To promote the book, I’m giving away a few copies. Here’s the catch: You promise to give the book an honest review on your blog/site. You copy and paste that review on Amazon and GoodReads. You promise to do so in a relatively timely manner. You give it a little love on social media. You live in the United States.1 OK … c
3 months ago Read more -
Blog postElizabeth Harrin joins me today. We discuss her new book Managing Multiple Projects, sushi, spaghetti, side dishes, productivity, timeboxing, and more. I had a blast on this one.
WANT EARLY ACCESS TO PODCAST EPISODES? ➡️ The post Episode 63: Managing Multiple Projects With Elizabeth Harrin appeared first on Phil Simon.
3 months ago Read more -
Blog postThe Kindle edition of Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace is now up for pre-order, but not the physical book.
As far as I know, there’s no easy way to offer signed copies of a book on Amazon or other sites for pre-order, so we’ll go old school.
If you’d like a copy—or ten—of my new opus, have at it below. Note that it might take a few extra days to get you the books. That is, they may not arrive on J
3 months ago Read more -
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Blog postI have been pretty quiet on the podcasting and blogging fronts lately—and for good reason. Yep, I’ve written another book.
Here’s some more information about my forthcoming opus.
🥁
For decades, organizations of all sizes and in all industries have struggled at managing projects. Even though employees primarily worked together in physical offices, rare was the project that came in on time and on budget and
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Titles By Phil Simon
"A clear-eyed call to reevaluate project-based teams in the days of remote work." –Publishers Weekly, BookLife review
For decades, organizations of all sizes and in all industries have struggled at managing projects. Even though employees primarily worked together in physical offices, rare was the project that came in on time and on budget and delivered what stakeholders expected.
The M-F/9-5 in-person world of work is gone forever. Depending on the country, more than nine in ten people would rather quit their jobs than return to the office five days per week. Brass tacks: Remote and hybrid workplaces are here to stay, and they pose formidable obstacles that complicate managing projects and launching new products.
Against this backdrop arrives Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace, Phil Simon’s timely and highly anticipated follow-up to his award-winning book Reimagining Collaboration.
In his inimitable style, Simon adeptly fuses critical research and concepts from a slew of diverse and seemingly unrelated fields, including Agile software development, human resources, supply chain management, cognitive psychology, organizational behavior, and labor economics. Brimming with detailed case studies, penetrating insights, and practical advice, Simon’s twelfth book is a tour de force. Product owners, new and seasoned PMs, service providers, freelancers, small business owners, and students taking PM classes will benefit from Project Management in the Hybrid Workplace.
For years, holding a videoconference or sharing your screen with a colleague was maddening. We could put a man on the moon, but we couldn't seem to get videoconferencing right.
At least until now.
More than 300 million people have seen the light in the form of Zoom, the world's hottest communications tool. Zoom For Dummies shows you how to get the most out of Zoom. Discover how to do the following:
- Hold group video calls
- Install time-saving, third-party apps
- Dramatically improve the way that you communicate and collaborate with your colleagues
- Enable Zoom roles, IM groups, user groups, and other advanced features
- Easily move from one communications medium to another
- Engage your audience with interactive webinars
- Secure Zoom from prying eyes
- And much more.
See philsimon.com/books/zoom-for-dummies for more information.
If you've ever received a pointless email and wondered why workplace communication and collaboration were so inefficient, wonder no more. A tool called Slack is taking the business world by storm. This full-color guide tells you how to become a Slack power user and leave 1990s-style email-based "collaboration" tools in the dust. You'll learn the ins and outs of creating workspaces, channels, user groups, and much, much more. Once you go Slack, you'll never go back.
Inside...
And much, much more.
For years, organizations have struggled to make sense out of their data. IT projects designed to provide employees with dashboards, KPIs, and business-intelligence tools often take a year or more to reach the finish line...if they get there at all.
This has always been a problem. Today, though, it's downright unacceptable. The world changes faster than ever. Speed has never been more important. By adhering to antiquated methods, firms lose the ability to see nascent trends—and act upon them until it's too late.
But what if the process of turning raw data into meaningful insights didn't have to be so painful, time-consuming, and frustrating?
What if there were a better way to do analytics?
Fortunately, you're in luck...
Analytics: The Agile Way is the eighth book from award-winning author and Arizona State University professor Phil Simon.
Analytics: The Agile Way demonstrates how progressive organizations such as Google, Nextdoor, and others approach analytics in a fundamentally different way. They are applying the same Agile techniques that software developers have employed for years. They have replaced large batches in favor of smaller ones...and their results will astonish you.
Through a series of case studies and examples, Analytics: The Agile Way demonstrates the benefits of this new analytics mind-set: superior access to information, quicker insights, and the ability to spot trends far ahead of your competitors.
Winner: International Book Award, Business: Communications/Public Relations
Microsoft Teams. Slack. Zoom. Google Workspace.
Every day, hundreds of millions of people use these über-popular collaboration tools, but only in decidedly limited ways: as email and Skype replacements. Because these folks are merely scratching the surface of what these robust collaboration hubs can do, they fail to realize their massive benefits.
Blame ignorance, not malice. With rare exception, organizations, executives, and rank-and-file employees have historically worked in piecemeal fashions. They have lacked a holistic framework to fully understand the remarkable power of these applications, much less unleash them.
At least until now.
Reimagining Collaboration—the eleventh book from award-winning author and world-renowned collaboration expert Phil Simon—provides this essential gestalt. Simon introduces a bold new model of work. Ideal for HR professionals, knowledge workers, executives, remote workers, and small business owners, this timely, ambitious, and provocative book offers concrete tips for companies and groups on how to transform the way they work by embracing hubs and spokes.
Residents in Boston, Massachusetts are automatically reporting potholes and road hazards via their smartphones. Progressive Insurance tracks real-time customer driving patterns and uses that information to offer rates truly commensurate with individual safety. Google accurately predicts local flu outbreaks based upon thousands of user search queries. Amazon provides remarkably insightful, relevant, and timely product recommendations to its hundreds of millions of customers. Quantcast lets companies target precise audiences and key demographics throughout the Web. NASA runs contests via gamification site TopCoder, awarding prizes to those with the most innovative and cost-effective solutions to its problems. Explorys offers penetrating and previously unknown insights into healthcare behavior.
How do these organizations and municipalities do it? Technology is certainly a big part, but in each case the answer lies deeper than that. Individuals at these organizations have realized that they don't have to be Nate Silver to reap massive benefits from today's new and emerging types of data. And each of these organizations has embraced Big Data, allowing them to make astute and otherwise impossible observations, actions, and predictions.
It's time to start thinking big.
In Too Big to Ignore, recognized technology expert and award-winning author Phil Simon explores an unassailably important trend: Big Data, the massive amounts, new types, and multifaceted sources of information streaming at us faster than ever. Never before have we seen data with the volume, velocity, and variety of today. Big Data is no temporary blip of fad. In fact, it is only going to intensify in the coming years, and its ramifications for the future of business are impossible to overstate.
Too Big to Ignore explains why Big Data is a big deal. Simon provides commonsense, jargon-free advice for people and organizations looking to understand and leverage Big Data. Rife with case studies, examples, analysis, and quotes from real-world Big Data practitioners, the book is required reading for chief executives, company owners, industry leaders, and business professionals.
More than a buzzword, agile is a powerful business tool for all.
To the uninitiated, agile is a software development and project management process involving white boards, colored Post-it Notes, and stand-up meetings. It may seem as though agile doesn’t and won't ever apply to you. But agile is here to stay, and its benefits can be realized beyond IT and project management into other areas of your business. If you're a leader, it's worth exploring how your group can benefit from the higher productivity and morale agile brings.
Agile: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review brings you today's most essential thinking on agile, from exploring the conditions under which agile is most effective and easiest to implement to reducing new-product development risk to bringing the most valuable products and features to market faster and more predictably. The lessons in this book will help you introduce agile into a broader range of activities and accelerate profitable growth for your company.
Business is changing. Will you adapt or be left behind?
Get up to speed and deepen your understanding of the topics that are shaping your company's future with the Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review series. Featuring HBR's smartest thinking on fast-moving issues--blockchain, cybersecurity, AI, and more--each book provides the foundational introduction and practical case studies your organization needs to compete today and collects the best research, interviews, and analysis to get it ready for tomorrow. You can't afford to ignore how these issues will transform the landscape of business and society. The Insights You Need series will help you grasp these critical ideas--and prepare you and your company for the future.
And these four companies are hardly unique. A new breed of small businesses is using Software as a Service (SaaS), free and open source software, social media and networks, mobility, cloud computing, and other emerging technologies to do things simply not possible even five years ago. In The New Small, you'll discover how these companies creatively and intelligently use technology to:
* Reach new customers
* Reduce costs
* Increase internal collaboration and communication
* Create flexible work environments
Rife with profiles from a wide variety of industries, The New Small offers pragmatic advice and lessons about how small businesses are harnessing the power of emerging technologies. It's a must-read for small business owners-and those thinking about starting their own shops.
Amidst all of the chaos, though, a new type of organization is emerging.
In The Visual Organization, award-winning author and technology expert Phil Simon looks at how an increasingly number of organizations are embracing new dataviz tools and, more important, a new mind-set based upon data discovery and exploration. Simon adroitly shows how Netflix, Autodesk, Twitter, eBay and other tech heavyweights use powerful data visualization tools to garner fascinating insights into their businesses. But make no mistake: these companies are hardly alone. Organizations of all types, industries, sizes are representing their data in new and amazing ways. As a result, they are asking better questions and making better business decisions.
Rife with real-world examples and case studies, The Visual Organization is a full-color tour-de-force.
- Create a space for a healthy work–life balance
- Stay connected with Slack, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams
- Maintain productivity and stay healthy and sane
Working from home is the new normal
Working from home was already on the rise, but when COVID-19 hijacked our reality, it became a way of life for many. Whether you're doing it one or two days a week or full-time, you'll appreciate the guidance in this book. Here are tried-and-true tips for enhancing your productivity, creating a workspace that's pleasant and efficient, dealing with distractions, making the most of virtual meetings, maintaining the trust of your manager and teammates, and a whole lot more.
Inside...
- Make online meetings more productive
- Get in the right headspace
- Set necessary boundaries and expectations
- Maintain effective connection with team members
- Learn to stay focused
Although he died in 1950, Shaw's words live on, especially in the business world. Far too many executives, salespeople, consultants, and even rank-and-file employees suck at communicating. Some think that they're speaking and writing effectively when they drop ostensibly sophisticated terms like paradigm shift, synergy, net-net, form factor, and optics. Others think that they're being clever.
No doubt that you know the type. (Maybe you're even one of them and don't realize it.) These are the folks who regularly rely upon obscure acronyms, technobabble, jargon, and buzzwords when plain English would suffice just fine. They constantly invent new tech-laden words, bastardize others, and turn nouns into verbs. They ignore their audiences, oblivious to the context of their words. In other words, they talk without speaking.
If bad business communication is a disease, the prevalence of hackneyed and utterly meaningless terms is just one of its major causes. Aside from using confusing language, many corporate folks depend almost exclusively on a single communications vehicle: e-mail. In the process, they actively resist new, powerful, and truly collaborative tools specifically designed to make people work and communicate better.
What's the net effect of this near-pervasive failure to effectively communicate while at work? The precise monetary figure is impossible to quantify. At the same time, though, it cannot be overstated. At a minimum, communication breakdowns are directly responsible for myriad inefficiencies, duplicate efforts, ineffectual campaigns, project failures, largely avoidable gaffes, internal political squabbles, and forgone business opportunities.
If that seems a bit lofty and abstract, then consider the following real-world scenarios. Think about how many misunderstandings could have been averted at your organization if two colleagues had simply engaged in a five-minute in-person conversation or videoconference over Skype. Ask yourself how many technical problems could have been solved with a quick phone call and a simple screen-sharing session. Have you ever missed a truly critical e-mail because it was hidden in your never-ending inbox? Have you even been unable to your jobs because key documents languished in someone's inbox or on someone's hard drive? How many software vendors have lost a potential sale because the prospective client couldn't or didn't understand what your company is selling?
Fortunately, business communication need not suffer from antiquated tools and a commensurate mind-set. In Message Not Received, award-winning author Phil Simon demonstrates how intelligent professionals and organizations are embracing simpler language and new technologies to communicate in a much more straightforward and effective manner. No theoretical text, Simon takes us on a journey, stopping at progressive companies along the way like Klick Health, Sidecar, and PR 20/20.
Message Not Received examines how we communicate, use, and often misuse language and technology at work. It's high time to reexamine not only what we say while we're on the clock, but how we say it.
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