Messaging News posted my latest blog post:

“In his review of my latest book, Thomas Duff wrote that I stayed “firmly on the ‘soft-skill’ ground, which is actually where most implementations live and die.” That got me thinking about the commonly accepted labels that we put on things.

If it’s a product, or it’s hardware, then we’re told to call it “hard”, maybe because the product feels hard when you touch it. If it’s to do with the business and people aspects, then the commonly accepted label for that is the “soft stuff”. Perhaps that’s because human flesh is soft to the touch, the business benefits are not always tangible ‘whack-you-in-the-face’ kind of things, and a lot of it has to do with ideas, concepts and ways of looking at things. So it’s the opposite of “hard” or “soft”.

And, yet, perhaps we have the wrong end of the stick.“

Read the article online, at messagingnews.com.

Update: Sean wrote to me and said that I am being “unfair to Thomas Duff” and that he is “in no way rejecting the key value of “soft skills” in deploying collaboration technology”. I’ve made a slight change above (quoting his complete sentence), because both Thomas and I agree that the soft stuff is hard. It was not my intent to be unfair to Thomas. What he wrote got me thinking … hope this clears it up!!