Work Matters

Tag: Bob Sutton

  • Work Matters Passes 1.5 Million Page Views

    I just noticed this little milestone. According to stats supplied by Typepad, Work Matters passed 1.5 million page views this week (1514242 at the moment). Typepad also shows Work Matters has averaged 946.99 page views per day.  I've done 1002 posts (wow… what a blabbermouth) and you've made 4404 comments.

    It seems like I just started blogging yesterday, but I wrote my first post on about June 10th, 2006. It just said "hi, I am blogging" basically, and I deleted it (now I am sorry). My first substantive post was called Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal in which I commented, and challenged, research and stories suggesting that "brainstorming doesn't work." My next post was called Masters of the Obvious, which argued that the best managers don't do magical, mysterious, or massively complex things well — they use widely known, well-understood, and simple methods, and implement them relentessly and well.  This theme perists in Good Boss, Bad Boss and in this HBR post.

    Looking ahead, I am thinking about finding an alternative to Typepad as I find it most user-unfriendly.  The editor is awful and does strange and unexpected things to my text that I can't figureo ut how to repair.  If you have any suggestions, please let me know.  Also, will keep blogging away, but anticipate that my range of topics will get broader as I am starting a couple new projects.  I also expect that I will blog a bit less in the coming year or so because I will start writing one, possibly two, new books. I also expect, knowing me, that at some point I will stop blogging.  I can't predict when, but I give myself standing permission to stop doing things when they are no fun any longer!

    As I am in a reflective mood about this blog, it would be great to hear some feedback from readers. What do you want more of? What do you want less of?  Any ideas about how to improve things?

    Finally, I want to thank all of you for reading my blog over the years, for your comments and emails, and for all the wisdom you've provided over the years.

     

     

  • Work Matters Hits One Million Lifetime Page Views

    I started writing Work Matters in June 2006.  Diego Rodriguez (of Metacool fame) and I were teaching a class called Creating Infectious Action, and Diego convinced me that — if I was interested in infectious action — I ought to start blogging.  Diego also correctly pointed out that I liked to write and seemed to have a short attention span, and thus was well-suited to blogging (an accurate observation).  I also got great early encouragement from Guy Kawasaki,  Todd Sattersten, Kent Blumberg, and Gretchen Rubin.   My first post (more accurately my second post, I think I deleted the very first one, which was just a short welcome) was called Brainstorming in the Wall Street Journal and was a response to an article that questioned the value of brainstorming — I was motivated to write it because academic researchers have taken such a narrow view of what "brainstorming effectiveness" means that it reflects severe ignorance of how and why brainstorming is used by real experts in real organizations.

    I knew that Work Matters was getting close to a million page views, but didn't expect it to happen so fast as this blog averages about 800 page views a day, but yesterday's post on my trip to Singapore and suspect HR assumptions apparently struck a nerve aa almost 5000 people visited yesterday (the most ever, I think). To be precise, Typepad statistics indicate that Work Matters has as of this moment 768 posts, 2863 comments (thank you!), an average of 822.60 page views per day (thank you), and a total of 1002748 lifetime page views. 

    I would like to thank everyone who has visited and commented on this blog and helped me in hundreds of other ways.  But I would especially like to thank a few readers out there — especially Rick — who have figured out that I am prone to producing typos and often unable to see them, and for taking the time to point them out. 

    I am not completely sure why I keep doing
    this, but it is fun, I have learned an enormous amount from the
    comments that people post and email me, and as 55 year-old guy with an
    increasingly bad memory, it is a great place to store all sorts of
    stuff that many readers aren't interested in but help me (like the list
    of 150 or so books that I like).      Who knows how long I will keep doing this, but for now, I am still enjoying it a lot.