Book "Sinergia" (Synergy) from Sergio Lins

Last week I received an e-mail from Sergio Lins, that was my professor in MBKM, offering his book named Sinergia (Synergy in portuguese). I had a look at some pages in his website and the book seems to be great. I'm very excited to start reading it.

The book talks about how to create, develop and keep the synergy, capitalizing the knowledge built in this process, not only in an Enterprise world but also personal and interpersonal.

Also some lessons learnt from consultants and executives that are investing a lot in Collaboration and Knowledge Management methodologies to improove the synergy in their business.

For the ones who speak portuguese, it is a very good book to read. I'm already waiting for mine to arrive.

Alexandre lopes

Kiva.org - loans that change lives

Some weeks ago I found a very interesting site called Kiva.org that is a social network to provide microcredit.

The idea is very simple. There are many microcredit institutions around the globe and all of them need money to give as much credit as possible. Also, there are many people around the world who would like to help people in other countries with at least a small quantity of money. Then Kiva, created by Matt and Jessica Flannery in 2005, came to provide this link between people who wants to help loan small quantities of money to those people in developing countries who needs money to improove their small business and pay it back later.

The only concern I would have to Kiva is that we loan money to them, they send to those organizations locally and they loan our money with very low interests, but still interests. When the person pays back they keep the interests and just pay back to us our money. It's like we are a bank with 0% interests. Anyway it is still a good initiative.

Kiva is already in 39 countries, helping more than 28700 projects with an average of 600 dollars each.

If you want to help someone in the other side of the world with some dollars you have stopped in your account, just go there and create an account. This is one example of connactions that trigger actions.

Alex Lopes

Interactive Innovation and Knowledge Management group

Last week I received an e-mail asking me if I could be the focal point in Shell Brasil inside of a group that will discuss and share what is being done around innovation and knowledge management inside the big companies in Brasil. Petrobras (NOC), Vale (3rd biggest minning company), Embraer (flight constructor), 3M (innovation company), BNDES (National Bank for Development – getting specialized in intangible assets), and some brasilian government institutions: FINEP, INMETRO, ONS, ANP and TJ.

After ask my manager permission, she approved and now I’m going there to represents Shell what will be good for Shell Brasil (having a person there to share what we are doing and learning from them) and to myself (expanding my KM connections inside of the big companies in Brasil.

Next 7th May there will be the first monthly meeting of this group of companies and I let you know here what happened there. Now is time to collect as much information here in Shell Brasil as possible around Innovation and KM being used. If I don’t find much I will talk about Shell global.

Regards,
Alex Lopes

Collaboration Tools in Shell

Friday I was requested by a colleague to do a presentation to his team about Collaboration tools we have in place here at the company. That's interesting because I'm not from any Knowledge Management or Collaboration team but I'm being recognized as a person who knows a lot about the tools in place.

Today I expent almost 2 hours in the morning putting together all info I have from those tools and reusing some presentations from the Downstream Collaboration Center of Excellence to get the right descriptions for all tools. Simple tools like Groove Virtual Office and Wiki are completelly unknown for most of the people here what is surprising. I hope I can bring a general awareness to this team and use this presentation further to other teams.