CEO Bloggers' Club

media trend links

the media2 c-level topline: Brands using widgets is the theme of the day. Via the launches of both Sutori and CREAMAid it's clear brand managers see widgets as Web 2.0 "killer apps" to build and maintain customer relationships. Tools, tools, tools - it's about empowering online users, being useful to them and thus bringing them home to the website, repeatedly.

• Sutori is Here - At the moment, you can click a brand name in the tags and see all the most recent posts on a company, but there’s not an aggregated view yet - it also lacks a search box. But it’s early days and I’m 100% positive that these features are on the to-do list. - Mashable
• YouTube Vs. MySpace - The video sharing site has taken a 3.9% share of global internet visits a day compared with 3.35% for MySpace, according to internet analysis company Alexa. - GigaOm
• Ad Placement Gets Extreme - Look for publicity messages on everything from eggs to air-sickness bags as companies compete for offbeat niches to create that extra bit of buzz - BusinessWeek
• Small Is the New Big - In a long-tail theme Seth Godin argues in his new book release that all businesses (and all of us) have to start to act like small and agile businesses in order to succeed. - PSFK
• Is Your Company Leaking Customers? - Unless you are tracking your customers through the sales process, you may lose them. - Promotion World
• Video Killed the AOL Star - Consumers aren't warming up to tollbooths and ad breaks with YouTube around. Even if one were to snap up YouTube and euthanize the model by monetizing it in cumbersome ways, there are dozens of YouTube wannabes ready to take its place. - Rick Munarriz, Motley Fool
• The Value of Blog Advertising - Blogs provide advertisers an excellent opportunity to reach a devoted audience niche. - BL Ochman
• Is Virtual Life Better Than Reality? - Living online — with dream house, job, friends — may be preferable for some - CBS News
• Facebook, MySpace and Other Social Networking Sites, Dangerous or Opportunities? - Unlike most sites where even regular visitors spend at most minutes a week and look at a handful of pages, visitors to social networking sites often invest hours a day at the sites, view hundreds of pages, and disclose a tremendous amount of information about themselves and their friends. - Onrec.com
• Online Video to Surge Tenfold by 2010 - this according to a new report released Wednesday by market research company In-Stat. - MediaPost
• CREAMAid is Here - CREAMAid which stands for “Customer Relationship Extension And Management” allows companies to “manage” the conversations about their brands. - Mashable
• What Constitutes A Click? - Google searches for a standard definition of "click" - BusinessWeek

media trend links

• Peter Drucker On Marketing - Today, when top management is surveyed, their priorities in order are: finance, sales, production, management, legal and people. Missing from the list: marketing and innovation. - Forbes
• Product Placement For Blogs - PayPerPost.com links up bloggers with advertisers who want to promote their product or service. If you're a blogger you basically choose from the list of advertisers products and how they want their product mentioned, and hey presto you get paid for it. Like it or not, it's happening - this is just a transparent service. Although, if you're a blogger with a readership you care about, surely you wouldn't sell posts for a couple of bucks? (Or, would you?) - PSFK via BusinessWeek
• Social Computing in the Web 2.0 Era - Forrester Research and others have categorized social computing technology or Web 2.0 into various "buckets" that will be reviewed in Buzz Networks, a new weekly article from WTN.
• Marketing On MySpace - Rob Frankel doesn't suggest turning to MySpace as the stage for a business' digital dance. As a social networking site, says the branding expert and consultant to companies looking to form revenue-generating online communities around their products, it fails to achieve the goal of businesses joining it in the first place: more business. There's a lack of clear organization, he points out, and a lack of someone leading the digital dialogue.
• The Future of Advertising Is Now - Marketers take heed: After years of overhype, the digital revolution is finally mainstream. - Strategy & Business
• What's Next For (Social) Search - Collective sharing is arguably the next chapter of the web, with the user turning publisher. Barriers to entry for content creation on the web are constantly being lowered and new technologies are allowing people to create, develop, produce, market and sell content in ways previously unimaginable. - Brand Republic
• Cell Phones: The New Platform For Social Computing - The Internet is now overflowing with user-generated content -- photos, videos, blogs, wikis, garage-band music. As it becomes easier to transmit this content over cellular networks, the phone -- arguably the first social machine -- is helping to make the "social computing" revolution mobile. - MIT Technology Review

Tagging: Into the Mind of the CEO

I am cross-posting this from my personal blog, Znetlady: ModernMediaModo.

Blogging is often offered up as a tactic CEOs should employ to humanize the seemingly too distant CEO or as a way to communicate regularly and effectively to internal audiences.

But blogging is hard - and besides, really getting inside your own head to communicate “who you are” is impossible for anyone. After all, when we sit down to write a blog post, it’s almost always reactionary - we write what is immediate, burning at the moment, on our radar right then, or what we believe the troops need to hear about a specific issue.  It is rarely with the discipline to communicate consistent visioning or mentoring or even the passion we have for what we do everyday.   And, even if you were that disciplined, it would take a long time of reading your blog for a clear window to develop into what drives you and your decisions or your leadership.   

Enter tagging.  CEOs should be tagging. It is the most powerful way to communicate what makes you tick or what is important to you as a CEO.

It provides insight into why you make the decisions you do and what flavors your leadership.  Tagging adds up all those vital little “bits” that make up your personal “CEO-ness” - like a mind scan but without all the high-tech equipment.  It is something no other medium can do quite as effectively - or as simply.

Tagging can help CEOs meet the eternal challenges of leading.  What if you tagged things like:

• Books you are reading
• Book that have inspired you
• Articles that you find yourself wishing everyone would read
• Web sites that worry you
• Web sites that inform you
• Web sites that “get it”
• Competitors whom you have your eye on
• News pieces that point to current or emerging market pressures
• Articles that mention your company
• Interviews you do
• Industry reports that you think will impact your products or services
• Blog posts that say something you wish you had in a way you wish you could
• Your RSS feeds or email subscriptions
• Jokes that are funny because they seem to comment on something as you see it in your organization
• Case studies that you wish were yours
• Things that illustrate industry or consumer trends you think the company should pay attention to

Now, by simply being able to scan through your tags, you are giving everyone in your organization a window into not just who you are, but the things that drive you, your decisions and your vision.  How much more impactful is this than your once a year or quarterly address; or your blog posts that are, by their nature, excruciatingly narrow? 

Tagging gives your entire organization an evocative view of both you and the challenges you see that face their industry, their company and their jobs.   It is a bird’s eye view they can get no other way.  It’s even better than winning a “day with the CEO” because it evolves over time - just like you and your challenges and your organization.

Here's how to get your own CEO tag cloud started:

1)  Choose a social bookmarking site that allows private tags and register for an account (most are free).  I like Blogmarks.net, but del.icio.us and Blinklist.com are also great choices.  (You can also do this with public tags, if you don't mind the entire world seeing them.)

2)  Take a second to drag the bookmarklet provided by your bookingmarking site to your browser toolbar - it makes for one fast click while you are viewing something you want to tag.  You’ll find the bookmarklet in your account settings/tools of your chosen bookmark service.

3)  When browsing something you want to tag, click your bookmarklet in your toolbar and simply type in your tag words in the appropriate place in the bookmarking form (they usually pop up in a small separate window).  Use any words or concepts as a tag.  Words that make sense to you or your organizational culture - it might be “competitors,” “must-read,” “trends,” - you get to choose.  Use several tags, as content you bookmark often fits into more than one “category.”

4)  Give everyone in your organization access to this “private” account and url so they can view your tags. 

5)  Encourage everyone to subscribe via RSS - or by email - to your entire tag list; or just to the tag they might specifically want to watch.   Feedblitz is a nice service that turns any RSS feed into an email for those not yet using RSS on a regular basis.

If you are brave, you can even suggest employees tag items with your name that they think you should see.  Check in on that tag periodically, or better yet, subscribe to your name tag via RSS to keep the information flowing both ways.

You just might find tagging gives you an evocative view of yourself.

Have you heard about blooks ?

A blook is a printed and bound book, based on a blog.

Most famous ones are from 'Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi' (Grove Press), the eye-witness accounts of the Iraq war by the blogger known as Salam Pax, 'Small Pieces Loosely Joined' (Perseus Books), Dan Gillmor's "We The Media" (O'Reilly), David Weinberger's spiritual interpretation of the Internet, actor Wil Wheaton's memoir 'Just a Geek' (O'Reilly), and Jessica Cutler's 'The Washingtonienne' (Hyperion), a novel based on her scandalous blog of the same name. More scandalous still is 'Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures Of A London Call Girl, by Anon' (Phoenix), which started life as an infamous blog, describing the life of a north London prostitute, and read by 15,000 a day.

It seems like more than 100 blooks have been published till now, there is now also "The Blooker Prize" that has been launched on the 10th of October 2005, the world's first literary prize for blooks, organized by Lulu, a website that enables anyone to publish and sell their own book. (well, yes, that's linked...)

The prize will reward blooks in three categories: Fiction, Non-Fiction and Comic-Blooks, it is open to blooks published anywhere by anyone, provided they are in English (Loïc, you should translate your blook in english to compete against Scoble's and Shell's one !)

Judges will be: Cory Doctorow, co-editor of BoingBoing, Robin Miller, editor-in-chief of Slashdot and Paul Jones, director of iBiblio.

The Lulu Blooker Prize will take place annually. The short list of books for the inaugural prize will be announced in March 2006 and the winner on 3 April, 2006.

Know what, there is an additional step: Flooks ! Film based on blooks ! ;o)

Technorati Tags: blook

Thinking about Ethics and Transparency

I have been doing some more thinking about ethics and transparency, and I'd like to share some of my thoughts with you in the hope that you will respond with your ideas.  My basic premise is:

...that truth and transparency are, in fact, two very different things, and that transparency needs to be pulled apart from truth and examined on its own merits....

Wikipedia has a good working definition of transparency. Here’s the kicker: “In government, politics, ethics, business, management, law, economics, sociology, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is open and freely available.”

Let’s repeat: “Transparency is the opposite of privacy.” Of course, you can’t say that about truth, which drives home the difference between truth and transparency. Truth doesn’t require that “all information…is open and freely available.” It only requires that the information that is presented is honest and accurate. And that gap between the information that is presented and making all information available ... [has resulted in charges of unethical behavior].”

The conflation of truth and transparency is therefore a problem...

I think we need to define some basic guidelines of how to bridge that gap in the face of the new realities of participatory communications (consumer-generated media).  I'd like to hear from you as to what you think some of the challenges are and/or how you are trying to solve this.  Or, if you think I am totally off-base, please let me know why you think so.  I look forward to hearing from you; just leave your comments below or contact me at ealbrycht [at] gmail [dot] com.

US VC Insights

Allen Morgan, one of the General Partners of "Tier 1" west coast firm Mayfield, has just finished his "10 Commandments" series of posts. Any first-time entrepreneur planning to seek VC financing at some point will find worth reading and reflecting on Allen's interesting insights. I always say in such circumstance that no one should take "VC Do's and Don'ts" literally because each startup and each fund are particular. However Allen's points are often practical, and sometimes candid, and can be applied to many (first timer's) situations. Here they are:

1. Do your homework, and contact the right person
   
2. Be on time
   
3. Tease, don't overwhelm
   
4. Know your audience
   
5. Create the "Aha" early
   
6. Explain the idea by analogy to, or contrast with, older ideas
   
7. Go with 13 or less slides
   
8. Know what you don't know -- and admit it
   
9. Be like Goldilocks, when it comes to competition
   
10. Control the meeting -- but be smart about it

Congratulations to Allen for taking the time to put these thoughts "on paper", they are a great complement to Brad's own contribution on clarifying financing terms that are found in typical US termsheets. I should also have mentioned the three part series on "Saying No" that Bill Burnham has recently published. Why ? Because it is critical for entrepreneurs to "read" through Yes, No's and Maybe's. Ross provided the entrepreneur perspective with which I agree.

Cross-post from Software Only.

Competition

I have recently started totally focusing on services I can offer and not worrying so much about competition positioning. I would be interested in other insights into how CEOs react to individual competitors positioning. I would suspect that reacting to this would be a bit of a time waste and yet it can't be totally ignored. (or can it?)

Measuring Investment in Blogging

At the New Communications Forum a couple of weeks ago, we started a discussion about the ROI of blogging.  My point was that we cannot begin to measure "return" on investment until we know what the "investment" is.

As business leaders who blog, the members of this club have invaluable information on this topic.  Therefore, I was hoping to start a discussion here that may turn into a formal research study down the road.

When I talk about "investment" I don't mean just the technology costs (which are, honestly, pretty negligible, and easy to discover).  Rather, I want to understand what the elements of the real cost of blogging are:

• Time spent
  • Reading
  • Writing
  • How do you know?  Do you set aside an hour a day?  Do you blog in 5 min. increments throughout the day?  Are you substituting blogging for another activity or is purely an addition to your tasks?
  • How do you measure the cost of this time?  Billable hours?  Percentage of salary?
• Individual vs. group blogs
  • Are you the only one blogging?  Are there other authors on your blog?  Or do you have multiple blogs?
• Employee blogs
  • Do your employees blog on their own time?  Company time? 
  • Do you cover the cost of their blogs? 
  • How do you measure the cost?

Are you actually measuring the investment in your blogs in any kind of systematic way?  Have you been thinking about ROI at all?

I know there are a lot of questions here, but I would appreciate it if you could begin to share your thoughts below, as I think we can all benefit from this discussion.  If you would prefer a private conversation, please contact me at ealbrycht at gmail dot com.  Thanks!

LinkedIn Jobs: a social approach to recruitment

As I hinted last Friday and posted today on my blog, LinkedIn Jobs is now available as a preview.

Like other job sites, you will be able to set search criteria regarding a position (except salary level ?) and access the list of available positions. Where social networking features kick in is in the display of your degree of connection on LinkedIn to the poster of the ad (1 if you are directly connected, 2 if one person connects you and the poster through the network, etc.) and how many people have endorsed that person on the service. The whole idea is obviously to use your personal network to due diligence the company, the team and the person hiring, as well as find ways to get to them through your connections.

The detailed view of a position also mentions how many people in your network work for that company, and whether the person posting and yourself have one or more LinkedIn Groups in common.

Did I mention that posting jobs was free during the preview ? Definitely worth trying: over 360 positions have been posted in the first 4 hours, from small to very large public companies - and it is Sunday. The combination of trusted referrals and due diligence, and what I would expect to be a competitive pricing (though I don't have any specific information), should make this service very relevant a number of positions.

CEOs, can you escape blogging ?

From Fortune's 10 january issues, a special report on 10 Tech Trends to Watch in 2005 . I've been selecting quotes only to get a collection of, could we say, "blogging trends".

First topic of this ten tech trends series: "Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore." An article by David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth

The quotes:

"Blogs are challenging the media and changing how people in advertising, marketing, and public relations do their jobs."
Says Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman Public Relations: "Now you've got to pitch the bloggers too. You can't just pitch to conventional media."

Says Jeff Jarvis, author of the blog BuzzMachine, and president and creative director of newspaper publisher Advance Publications' Internet division: "There should be someone at every company whose job is to put into Google and blog search engines the name of the company or the brand, followed by the word 'sucks,' just to see what customers are saying."

"If you fudge or lie on a blog, you are biting the karmic weenie," says Steve Hayden, vice chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather, which creates blogs for clients. "The negative reaction will be so great that, whatever your intention was, it will be overwhelmed and crushed like a bug. You're fighting with very powerful forces because it's real people's opinions."

Says Bill Gates, who claims he'd like to start a blog but doesn't have the time: "As blogging software gets easier to use, the boundaries between, say, writing e-mail and writing a blog will start to blur. This will fundamentally change how we document our lives."

Says Barak Berkowitz, [CEO of Six APart]: "When everybody has a tool for talking to the rest of the world, you can't hide from your mistakes. You have to face them. Once you commit to an open dialogue, you can't stop. And it's painful."

What are your 2 phrases on blogging ? Your 20 words ?

Terrorist Threats May Lead to Blogging

By Robb Hecht from PR Machine

Americans have a healthy concern about terrorism, feel most secure at home, yet most believe our "War On Terrorism" won't help anything. (So says a recent study by Euro RSCG Worldwide).

Are terrorist fears one of the key drivers behind why America is blogging?

The online survey of more than 13,000 respondents in six countries included 2,000 US respondents and reveals some striking results on the threats Americans perceive they face.

Rieses Challenged by National Geographic?

By Robb Hecht from PR Machine

Does God act through PR managers in evolving and building great brands? Or do brands mutate over time based on Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution?

It's clear from the recent national election results that this country's Christians are a very powerful force. Mastermind PR guru Karl Rove knew this and mobilized the voter base to reinstate our Republican president and throw in the House and Senate to boot.

New economy V2.0

I have the impression that the rapid emergence of blogs (and most notably of this blog;) is tied to the collective sentiment that something important is happening. We want to share new ideas, to verify that we’re not the only ones thinking them …

I think that since September 11 our attention has been diverted, keeping us from fully recognizing the digital revolution that is already well on its way. It’s also possible that the web of traditional opinions (economical and political, brought to us by traditional media) had good reasons to not talk about it …

I’m going to cite 4 recent breakthroughs in the domain of technology:

When innovation sucks

I don’t watch much TV, but my heart simply goes out to those who do. Besides tolerating the agonizing channel-surfing moments, you also have to make your ears re-adapt to the changes in sound volume. Some smarter TVs can save your personal preferences, equalizer settings et al according to the channels; but then again, I’m sure you’ve heard stories of rogue cable-guys! Besides, most people in the world don’t have personal TVs… so much for the personal preferences.

I think instead of the TVs making an attempt at being smart, the TV designers should. Is it really difficult for a TV sense to ambient sound volume in the room and adjust its sound volume accordingly?

Make purchases, not war

Back from China today, I return with beautiful memories and above all the strong conviction that we’re entering a new era. As “young” business leaders, we have an important role to play. We also have a responsibility.

“J’ai vu finir le monde ancien” (*) is the title of a book that describes the upheaval in New York in 2001 while the twin towers were collapsing.

Maybe it’s presumptuous, but I feel that we’re wrong about the date. Personally, I saw the end of “the world of yesterday” one night in 1989 when an old dam that we believed eternal fell.

The Talent Myth

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, a great marketing book, has written a Change This Manifesto called the Talent Myth.

I began reading it with skepticism, after reading its description: "the seemingly paradoxical truth that talent is not a firm's greatest asset." It is, however, a great read.

This is an important paragraph, which I'll quote in full:

The broader failing of McKinsey and its acolytes at Enron is their assumption that an organization's intelligence is simply a function of the intelligence of its employees. They believe in stars, because they don't believe in systems. In a way, that's understandable, because our lives are so obviously enriched by individual brilliance. Groups don't write great novels, and a committee didn't come up with the theory of relativity. But companies work by different rules. They don't just create; they execute and compete and coordinate the efforts of many different people, and the organizations that are most successful at that task are the ones where the system is the star." (p. 14)

Two items are missing in this discussion, I think. The first is a discussion of ethics. As we all know, intelligence and ethical behavior don't necessarily walk hand-in-hand. Secondly, I think that the American cult of individualism also has a strong effect on the "star mentality" found at companies like McKinsey and Enron.

Old Europe - New Worlds

I’m about to board the airplane after a 15-day voyage in China.
Like my trip to Casablanca a few months ago, it was a trip of total immersion and strong sensations. In China, I found much of what I felt in Morocco: energy, movement and a youth that’s waking up to the world.

I said somewhere that many of the Chinese nationals I encountered were happy. Even if this is surprising to some, I hold to this positive impression. The train of progress moves almost a billion voyagers every day. There are dramas and there are deaths and I deplore this. But whether they’re rich or poor, these people see the situation getting better every day. Even those who are not part of the progress think that their children will have a better life.

There’s a downside and a price to pay for this growth. It’s not the absence of democracy that worries me. Democracy is on its way.
For me, the major challenge in China for the coming years is pollution.

The ecological drama is flagrant. Major cities in China are among the most polluted in the world. Industrial zones are frightening for some. Westerners can share some of our experience and know-how to help with this.

It will be up to the young generation around the world to do the cleaning up – a good chance to join hands and get this earth turning in the right direction…

PS People are often reproaching me for being too idealistic, and it’s probably true in part. But as my grandmother said, “smile at life and it will smile back.”

That's why we've got brains

A few years ago, designer Paul Smith wrote a book called "You Can Find Inspiration in Everything* (*and if you can't, look again!)". Jonathan Ive, the designer of the i-Mac, designed a polystyrene slipcase so that buyers didn't know which of the 33 limited edition Paul Smith fabrics covered their edition. The package also included a board game, posters, a comic book, and a magnifying glass with which to examine the smallest images in the book.

It's not surprising, then, to hear what Smith told The Bookseller magazine about original thinking: "I loathe copying, and I hate the idea that the world is getting so globalized and so full of similar brands. The book is saying come on, we can be individuals, that's why we've got brains. Why copy another format or style or idea? We're getting so full of communication and high technology that we mustn't forget what's left, which is us."

That's what weblogs stand for.
Let use our brains !

Thanks to Jurgen Wolff's Brainstorm E-Bulletin

Asia waves

For many Europeans, China is mysterious, and that's scary. We remain jumpy and afraid to act, as though a tidal wave were going to submerge us …

I saw the waves. They were the waves of consumers crossing commercial streets in Beijing and Shanghai. They dream about the West. They buy L’Oreal, Gucci, McDonald’s, Nokia ... In the end, they're just like us, not better or worse. They're consumers too.

Europe is aging; our social model is in crisis. America is at war, a war of another time. America doubts. Europe has aged a bit, we're a little tired, and we are looking enviously at our young neighbor to the east.

I worry that our economic and political leaders will one day make scapegoats of them. Surely, China’s success is destabilizing our economies, but this is just accelerating a predicted decline.
We are going to have some difficult times in Europe. We have to prepare for it and understand that it’s useless to be afraid. Fear is bad adviser.

Our society will change dramatically. This will be our opportunity to rebuild on new foundations, a new kind of Renaissance.

But for that to happen, we need to understand.
Go to the China Sea, listen to the sound of the waves …

PS Maybe our next meeting for the CEO Bloggers' Club can be held in Beijing? Sending best wishes from China...

Leading (entrepreneuring) at the edge

Yesterday, French TV channel 5 had a great program on Sir Shackleton Antarctic expedition. It reminded me that I had written an earlier (Cyberlibris blog) post on it. Here is a slightly updated (edited) version of it

"Men wanted for Hazardous Journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."

From Leading at the Edge : Leadership Lessons from the Extraordinary Saga of Shackleton Antarctic Expedition by Perkins, Dennis N. T.(Author) Saranac Lake, NY, USA: AMACOM, 2000. Page 2.

"Who in the world would volunteer for this journey?" asks Dennis Perkins. "Amazingly", he says, "thousands of would-be explorers came forward, each wanting to join Shackleton’s expedition."

But, what was exactly this expedition all about? Well, as a matter of fact a rather scary one. As shown in the map, Shackleton’s mission was the first overland crossing of the Antarctic Continent. According to his own computations, Shackleton believed that he and his team could complete the transcontinental journey in 120 days. Ice everywhere, huge crevasses, darkness, extremely low temperature, in a nutshell a trip not for the timids! Shackleton was already a famous explorer who had come within ninety-seven nautical miles of the South Pole before he was forced to turn back because of physical exhaustion and a shortage of food. To complete his journey Shackelton selected a ship which he named The Endurance.

Casablanca is calling

The more I talk with new people I meet, the more it seems I should remain open to launching a business venture in Morocco.

I have no intention of relocating my company.
I am very attached to the idea of keeping what already exists in France. But I’m oriented to the future and to developing new commercial activities.

I should admit that it’s becoming harder and harder to be an entrepreneur in France.
Frankly, the rest Europe isn’t much better.
(Germany, Spain and even Poland are currently in economic crisis.)

Blog inside

We decided yesterday to use blogs to launch our new brands.
This is mostly the result of the debates initiated in the CEO bloggers' club.

As said before, we are at turning point, where customers need confidence, and the blog is the best available tool to restore it.

As the CEO, I’m the natural blogger of the company: customers need to speak to real people and have personalized communication.
New CEO bloggers have to be reactive, creative and inventive.
This might be the start of a new Renaissance, and we must manage our companies a bit like artists.

Team building

I remember the following definition of management:
1) make people dream
2) master the figures
3) be prepared to say thank you.

Let’s talk about dreams.

Over the last 15 years, I managed teams ranging in size from 3 to 50 people.
For me the ideal size is around 20 people.
I agree with Richard Branson when he suggested to create a new company every time you exceed 50 people.

Blogs and recruitment

Via BL Ochman, I see that this past Sunday's New York Times featured an article on how blogs are used in recruitment (annoyingly, a subscription is required to read the NYT's content). As well as job seekers using a company's blog(s) to get a feel for the corporate culture and whether or not it would be a good place to work, and writing their own blogs as "living résumés," employers are increasingly scouring blogs for leads on candidates. Heather Hamilton, senior marketing recruiter at Microsoft, says that she has found great candidates through blogging, and that she thinks blogs will change how companies recruit. That echoes what Thomas Nelson Publishers' COO Michael Hyatt told me recently:

I think it's a way to contribute back to our industry and recruit new talent to our company. I have had several people write to say, "Gee, I'd like to work for a company that is this forward-thinking."

But the recruitment and HR uses for blogs go much further than the NYT piece explores.

One-to-One Marketing a False Trail

Last night, during a meeting with a bunch of interactive marketing and blogging types, we were discussing the power of blogs, brands and crisis. During this conversation, I was struck by the fact that blogging is of the traditional marcom school of one-to-many, not from the newer fad of one-to-one marketing. So, what about one-to-one? Read on....

One-to-one marketing is a false trail for marketing. It is, in fact, built on a base of lies, and the consumer knows it. Therefore, it cannot work (explanation for this claim in a minute). Blogging, on the other hand, is one-to-many. It uses the blog as a lever, an amplifier, enabling one voice to reach many, yet in a personal manner. Done well, blogs create credibility, trust. One-to-one marketing is never personal, and it never creates trust.

Here's why one-to-one doesn't work (I have been influenced by others in this thinking, e.g., Cluetrain):

To compromise or not to compromise

Here's something that has been on my mind for a while: If you are an innovator in your field, or in a field you are pioneering, how much can you afford to compromise? And if you can afford to compromise even a little, does it necessarily follow that you should compromise at all?

To some degree, the members of this club are innovators - we are each trying to use a new form of communication to enhance our businesses. Some of us are trying to introduce entire industries to blogging and other technologies. And some of us are attempting to shift global business operations from an outdated, tired, inefficient and unsatisfying mode to something more effective, honest, real, exciting and more conducive to prosperity.

Sooner or later, we will all be asked to compromise on our principles - if we have not been asked already to do so. It can be tempting to give in to what may seem like insignificant requests ("I know you say it is impossible to put a dollar amount on the effectiveness of blogging, but we really need some numbers before we can be sure that blogging is worthwhile..."), or equally it can drive one absolutely bonkers to be asked to go along with business as usual for the sake of it ("Hey, that's just how it's done, so it's how you have to do it too...").

So where do you draw the line? What compromises have you been asked to make? Have you ever done so and lived to regret it - or not done so and wished later that you had? Better yet, have you ever refused to compromise and then had the satisfaction of later seeing the rest of your peers catch up to your innovation?

Restoring leadership to the leaders

Robert Paterson has a link to a review of a book called Hope is Not a Method written by Gordon Sullivan and Michael Harper. It is considered to be one of the most important books in military and business management.

The book is an illuminating account of what it actually takes to build a learning organization in practice. Contrary to most conventional thinking, which says results come from good plans of planners executed by trained and compliant managers, it suggests that a learning organization is one designed to be successful in spite of plans which are imperfect, even though they are the best possible in an atmosphere of rapidly changing missions and resources. Good plans in a changing environment are those evolved during their accomplishment by those mandated to fulfill them, who must be willing to examine and learn from what worked and didn't work at each stage of the way.

2 + 2 = 8 (or 1)?... : The challenging world of "blog-iquity"

What is the magic, if any, behind 2 + 2 = 8? Well, the story is that if you try make it happen it usually won't work. To put it in John Kay's words "goals are most likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly." Obliquity is the name for this. What does it tell us about businesses and the goals they shoud be pursuing?

The current fad is for businesses to concentrate on maximizing shareholders value. Metrics have been crafted that supposedly measure the failure of success in achieving this target. They are called EVA, CFROI etc... The theory behind it is that, other things being equal, focussing exclusively on shareholders captures every dimension of the corporation anyhow. But is it that simple?

Is it carved in stone that a rational managerial framework is a sure winner? Or, should we call for a more holistic managerial (adaptative) approach (which blogs are made of)?