DCO Weekend Reader - 8/29/08
The web is a vast repository of opinions, commentary and occasionally, wisdom. Here’s a selection of the best articles I read over the past week.
If you would like to recommend an article, blog or book, please leave a comment with your suggestion. Weekend Reader is a regular feature here at DCO, and you can read past Weekend Readers here.
For you E-mail readers of DCO, I changed the timing of when updates get sent out. You may have noticed you only get one E-Mail and it gets sent early afternoon-ish (EST). I changed this to be earlier in the day, so you should receive it late morning now. This was mainly to get the “weekend” reader into your hands early enough so you could actually have it for the weekend.
It’s hard to believe Labor Day is upon us already, but Monday is the holiday. Summer sure went quick this year. Is it getting older that makes the years go by so quickly, or do we just get busier as adults and let things pass us by easier?
Regardless, have a great holiday weekend. Do a favor for me and let someone special know how much they mean to you.
Personal Excellence & Leadership
- Is creating your own personal mission statement on your agenda? Not sure how to get started. Following the link to a summary of three separate articles addressing the topic.
- Creating a sense of urgency is an important skill for many of us. However, that doesn’t mean you want your organization running around frantically in unorchestrated chaos. Here’s a good introduction to something called “urgent patience”.
- In my opinion the best leadership blog I’ve come across yet, George Ambler’s The Practice of Leadership never disappoints. It seems like every post is a candidate for the Weekend Reader. His most recent is no exception, writing about the 4 key components of a personal leadership vision.
Thought-Provokers
- Looking for a universal metric by which to measure yourself, your life or your work?
For Fun
- If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time online, both for work and for play. This quick post outlines 14 simple ways to boost your online productivity. All the tips are very simple, but make a lot of sense. There should be something for just about everyone in there.
- SlideShare is an online site that allows you to upload presentations and share them via a blog, website, or allow them to be downloaded. I tested this out with a recent post embedding a presentation on Positive Attitude. If you’re looking for a simple way to share and/or embed presentations in your site, check out this SlideShare demo.
Books
- The book Leading with Kindness covers the topic of respect and it’s relationship to honesty. With an overview that links dishonesty to disrespect and ultimately to hatred of self, what would appear at first as a rather pollyanna topic, ends up with the potential to greatly impact your organization, and yourself.
Tips & Tricks
- Why is an online presence important to your career? Here’s a short article with some answers to that question and some suggestions for getting started if you haven’t already.
Related posts
Hey - this is fun!
Slideshare is an online service through which you can upload and share PowerPoint, Open Office and PDF presentations. You can share the presentations publicly with no restrictions, and there are options for private sharing also.
I set up an account a while back and really never did anything with it. Honestly, I still haven’t, but I was on it last night playing around some and came across this presentation that fit nicely into some of the themes we’ve been talking about here. Looking for a reason to test out Slideshare’s embed functionality, I thought it would be fun to give this a go on the blog and see how it works.
Previewing the presentation, it seems to work fairly well. Unfortunately, since the presentation is mostly text, it is very hard to read. If you would like to see the rest of the presentation (and/or see how Slideshare might work on your blog or website), simply click the “full screen” icon in the lower right-hand corner of the window. You will then get a full screen view and you can return to the blog by simply pressing the escape key, or pressing the “full screen” icon a second time.
Those of you receiving these updates via E-mail - my guess is the presentation won’t display in the E-Mail and you will have to click through to the actual post to view it. Could one of you confirm this for me?
Related posts
5 steps to sustained personal change
I’ve been using this concept of a “crucible” or intense life event as a backdrop lately for some of my posts. Today, I’d like to talk a little about something that has been an element of my current crucible, and what I have learned from it.
The topic is change, specifically personal change. Even more specifically, addressing the question of not simply how to change, but whether we can change, especially aspects of ourselves that are part of “who we are” and we would consider central to our personality makeup.
I’m not sure I can answer any of those questions yet. Change is a complex, complicated process and my experiences over the last year have shown me that while fundamental personal change is possible, it’s making the change permanent that is the real challenge.
In this post I’ll talk about the 5 steps I identified as essential to any attempt at sustained personal change. I’ll end the post with a few quick thoughts I’ve taken away recently from my “crucible”.
Related posts
DCO Weekend Reader - 8/22/08
The web is a vast repository of opinions, commentary and occasionally, wisdom. Here’s a selection of the best articles I read over the past week.
If you would like to recommend an article, blog or book, please leave a comment with your suggestion. Weekend Reader is a regular feature here at DCO, and you can read past Weekend Readers here.
Last week I promised to try to limit the number of links this week, and sadly I just wasn’t able to live up to that promise. Whereas I initially thought this feature might not even be weekly, it now appears not only will it stay weekly, but it will be chock-full of great posts and links. To help you decide which links are most appropriate for you, I’ll expand my descriptions of posts that might not be self-explanatory, to help guide your weekend reading.
This week I’m also adding a new section to the Weekend Reader: Tips & Tricks. I read a post that simply had to be mentioned and it really didn’t fit any of the four categories, so I just created a new one.
I don’t know what it’s like where you are, but the weather here couldn’t be more pleasant. Late Summer / Early Fall weather gives us sunny days in the low 80’s and cool clear nights perfect for opening the windows. Have a great weekend - take a hike!
Personal Excellence & Leadership
- Courage has been discussed on this blog as a possible “essential” quality of entrepreneurship. This post examines what happens when you have to little or too much of it.
- Are your corporate (or for that matter personal) metrics not in line with your goals? If you hit your metrics can you still miss your goals?
- Some insightful comments on why leadership development might be such a popular topic these days in business.
- Positive Leadership (also a book).
- On staying committed… Warning #1 - some “salty” language. Warning #2 - may be extremely motivating.
- Are you the leader of an organization that needs a better sense of urgency? Could you use more urgency around your personal goals. Here is a good article outlining the difference between true urgency and false urgency, along with four tactics to create a true sense of urgency.
Thought-Provokers
- What beliefs support your Leadership philosophy? I’d love to see some thoughts from all of you in comments.
- Sitck with this one. It ends better than it starts.
For Fun
- This is fun and might even be useful! Screen2 lets you share your web browser with a friend or colleague. Nothing to install, safe and secure.
Books
- How to be useful: A beginner’s guid to not hating work. I’m glad to see themes like being nice and using common sense so prevalent in today’s leadership commentaries. This new book shows “how to restore courtesy in your work and your organization, and move up in the world while doing so.” It may sound a bit trite, but based on the extended overview of the book, this one may get added to my reading list.
Tips & Tricks
- The concept of one’s “personal brand” is one that I’m seeing more and more articles about. If this is an issue that is important to you, then you may be interested in this article on tracking your online brand. It’s not just as simple as “googling” your name once a month, and the author offers some tips on monitoring not only news, but blogs, forums, discussion boards and twitter.
Related posts
Lessons to be learned
It’s rather ironic that I recently recommended a book called Crucibles of Leadership. The book sounded interesting as it is centered around creating a Personal Learning Strategy to take advantage of particularly stressful life experiences. The author calls these experiences crucibles, and his premise is we all have enough crucibles to provide the basis for a lifetime of learning. I looked for the book recently at my neighborhood B&N, but they didn’t stock it. I ordered it and just picked it up a day or so ago.
What’s ironic about the book is that I just went through several days of a very intense personal situation. It would definitely count as a crucible. I’m not sure what I would have learned from it had I already read this book, but I did have some personal observations.
Related posts
Stories from the field: Passion and Commitment
While being exposed to creative business ideas day in and day out is a fun part of my job, probably the best part is getting to meet the entrepreneurs behind those ideas. In talking to one recently, it really reminded me of a couple of the core entrepreneurial qualities: Passion and Commitment.
The Story
This woman (let’s call her Jill) has a good job, as does her husband, and a couple kids. They would do quite well for themselves in their current jobs and be able to provide anything their children might need.
The problem is, Jill came up with a good idea. Then she got passionate about it. Then she committed to it.
Like many first time entrepreneurs, Jill had the idea but didn’t know how to get started. She was smart enough to do some research and had started a business plan, but needed help honing in on what was most important during this phase and what really needed to be in her plan. A friend of hers I had met with before referred her to me.
In the course of our conversation, Jill told me that her and her husband had decided to “downsize” their life by selling their house and buying something smaller, in order to free up a sizable chunk of equity for the venture.
Normally, when we hear something like that, we send up the red flags immediately to the entrepreneur. With a “fail early, fail cheap” point of view, we get very nervous when we hear entrepreneurs talk about spending their life savings or taking a second mortgage on their house to finance their ideas, especially when they don’t even know if they have something anyone wants to buy.
But in this case, Jill’s decision didn’t send up any red flags. She wasn’t planning on going into debt, merely freeing up some capital to get started. She and her husband obviously had the business experience to do this correctly and more important, Jill had the passion and commitment to take advantage of this short-term personal sacrifice.
I was glad to be able to help Jill get focused on next steps to get her closer to her goal, but I suspect I got more out of the meeting than she did.
The Leadership Lesson
Commitment is making a sacrifice to achieve our vision. Passion is feeling like it’s not a sacrifice.
Related posts
More entrepreneurial qualities
I was skimming the bookshelf looking for some different methods to value early-stage companies (if anyone knows of some good online resources, please comment with them), and I came across another list of entrepeneurial qualities.
This list is out of The New Venture Handbook. Published in 1993 it is a little dated, but it’s not a bad little book. Targeted at aspiring entrepreneurs new to starting up their own business, it does a good job of walking them through the basics and telling them what to expect in their journey.
Here is the author’s list of entrepreneurial qualities:
- Industrious
- Rugged
- Stubborn
- Objective
- Independent
- Resilient
- Creative
- Responsible
We should recognize some old standbys from that list, but there are also some new takes. I especially like “objective” as it speaks to the ability to see things without emotion, from a business sense, enabling you to take hard stock of the situation without bringing personal biases into the equation. “Industrious” and “rugged” are good ones also to be considered.
Related posts
DCO Weekend Reader - 8/15/08
The web is a vast repository of opinions, commentary and occasionally, wisdom. Here’s a selection of the best articles I read over the past week.
If you would like to recommend an article, blog or book, please leave a comment with your suggestion. Weekend Reader is a regular feature here at DCO, and you can read past Weekend Readers here.
Wow - LOTS of links this week. I’m not sure if I just enjoyed everything I read or if there really was that much good stuff this week. Either way, you should find plenty here to keep you busy over the weekend. The good news is, most of these links are short reads with a lot of value-add content. I promise I’ll try to be more selective next week.
Leadership
- The importance of conversation as part of your leadership practice.
- 5 tips for implementing innovation.
- A good quick read on 5 barriers to decisiveness and how to overcome them.
- A great list of beliefs that support leadership. I’ll be reconciling this one to my initial list of essential leadership qualities to see what I might have missed.
- Related to the bad habits post below, here are some examples of how too much ego can get in the way of effective leadership.
- Please, no complaining.
Thought-Provokers
- A Nice Guy Bill of Rights. Are you a nice guy? Is it hard for you to say “no” or to be firm with someone. Well you can be a no-nonsense leader and still be a nice guy. Here are some simple thoughts to get you started.
- This post was titled The Secret of the Web. I think it’s good everywhere.
- Do you have a bad habit or two that might be holding you back from that executive position you applied for recently? Check out this list and see. (Personally, I found myself guilty of the first two and will begin paying attention to these immediately).
- File this one under Dress for Domination. What color clothes do more winners wear? You may be surprised.
- The lengthened shadows of leaders.
For Fun
- Using online tool Dipity, you can create a visual, scaleable timeline that looks great. Check out this timeline of Internet fads, or this one on the conflict in Darfur. Signup is quick and painless. Adding “sources” like photo-sharing site, YouTube and blogs, you can add rich media to your timeline. Timelines can be embedded into websites, and tools are offered to link into various social sites. While I’m not sure I will use Dipity right away, I like the concept. It seems to be an easy way to relate history via rich media. What I don’t see is a way to create a timeline and package it up for stand-alone presentation. This is a new tool, so stay tuned for future features.
Books
- A list of 5 books covering the topic of the value of social media to the enterprise. Don’t discount this topic - social networking is here to stay and smart leaders will understand it and use it.
- I just read a great quote on books, attributed to Winston Churchill:
“If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or, as it were, fondle them–peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on their shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that if you do not know what is in them, you will at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”
Related posts
Your morning routine, interrupted
When you wake up in the morning do you have a smile on your face and a sense of happy anticipation for the day you are about to enter into? Or do you wake to “just another day”, or worse a sense of dread or depression?
If you fall into the second camp, ask yourself the following questions. You can ask them in your head on the way to work, so no one will hear you. I just ask one thing - just this once, be absolutely brutally honest with yourself.
Ready?
- Why am I not excited at the prospect of a new day?
- What would have to change for me to waken with a smile on my face?
- What’s the worst that could happen if I made that change?
- Now the Zinger: which is worse - how you feel each morning or making that tough change?
These don’t have to be huge life issues we’re talking about here. It could just be you’re bored at work, regret not apologizing to someone for some harsh words, or haven’t come to terms with getting a bit older. Whatever it is, confront it, figure out what it would take to move past it, then decide which is worse.
Either way, accept it and move on. Life’s too short.
Related posts
Essential qualities of entrepreneurship - ver. 1
Okay, time for you all to speak up and tell me what you think. After taking my own notes as to the qualities I think are essential for entrepreneurship, I posted a question on the topic over at LinkedIn’s Q&A section and got some great additional feedback. So in this post, I will quickly outline three lists:
- The qualities I believe are essential for successful entrepreneurship
- Qualities “on the bubble” that I can’t decide are essential or not
- Some ideas on what might be missing from the first list
I’m looking for your feedback. As I’ve said numerous other places on this blog, I want to develop this topic through not only my own thoughts but a rich dialogue with everyone reading the blog. Please comment early and comment often.
The yardstick I am using for these essential qualities is one of “necessary and sufficient”. That is to say that each of these qualities not only has to be present for successful entrepreneurship (e.g. it is necessary), but possession of all these qualities is all you need(they are sufficient). Therefore in your feedback tell me not only what is missing, but what can left off. If “entrepreneurship” is not a familiar term to you, then evaluate these qualities from a leadership perspective.
The goal of this post is not so much to examine the qualities in detail, as to simply start the process of getting a list we all agree on.