DCO Weekend Reader – 1/2/09
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.
Many times I embed rich media into the Weekend Readers that may not show up in E-mails or RSS readers. For that reason, I generally recommend you click through to my blog to read Weekend Reader posts.
Welcome back and Happy New Year everyone. Here’s wishing all of you a most excellent 2009!
The holidays are, among other things, a time when many of us reflect on what’s important to us and try to connect more deeply to neglected priorities.  Taking a full two week vacation this holiday for what I believe to be the first time ever, I had plenty of time to do both.
The symbolism of Christmas and New Year’s offer us the opportunity to give thanks for the blessings of our past, and prepare for new beginnings.  While our blessings may change from year to year, and new beginnings can be intimidating, this time of year helps us all put into perspective what is truly important for each of us, and how fortunate we all are. Life can be messy, confusing and complicated to be sure. My guess each of us had our fair share of disappointments, even tragedy, in 2008. But as I’m fond of saying: “you find what you look for,” and there are so many happy, fulfilling, excellent aspects of our lives to focus on. In the end, it may come down to simple balance, and an accepting wisdom that slowly comes with age.
Personally, I’m excited about the new year and in so many ways it does represent a new beginning for me; a fresh canvas upon which to create.  It could be the heady glow from two weeks vacation, a new year, and way too much pork and sauerkraut, but with some recent decisions and a fair amount of self-examination under my belt, I feel more direction and purpose than I have felt in a while. I look forward to sharing it with you throughout 2009.
Getting back on track – we do have some must-reads this week. The “advice to young entrepreneurs” under Entrepreneurship is an extremely well-written and content-rich article. “Dealing with no” under thought provokers will take you a minute or less to read, but may inspire you to totally change your company’s sales process. Lastly, please take the time to click the very last link of this post, the “bonus” link. If the link isn’t showing up, then click through to this post on my blog and you will be able to watch it. You will need your speakers turned on for this one and as a word of warning, I wouldn’t be drinking any liquids as you watch.
I’m looking forward to continuing our conversations in 2009.
Personal Excellence & Leadership
- If you’ve never heard of “crowdsourcing” you might expect the first time I link to a post revolving around it, I would put it under Tips & Tricks, or maybe Entrepreneurship. You might be right, except when it involves our President Elect and his transition website, where more than 74,000 people have submitted more than 53,000 questions (and counting) for his administration and voted 3,122,015 times to prioritize the question.
- Whether you’re talking about yourself or your company, your brand can be a valuable asset. With the state of technology these days and the proliferation of self-publishing tools and social networks, it can be harder than ever to keep tabs on what is being said about your brand online. Personal Branding guru Dan Schwabel therefore offers this valuable post on ten reputation tracking tools worth paying for. (He also includes a link to some free tools if that is more appropriate.) Personal branding may be an overworked buzzword, maybe not, but your corporate brand is certainly something to keep your eye on.
- 5 challenges that accelerate leadership development.
Entrepreneurship
- Angelsoft, a New York based company that develops a platform for connecting early-stage investors and entrepreneurs and managing investment deal flow, has released a significant update to its software and is finally opening up its network to VCs and angel investors.
- I’ve read a few articles over the past couple years with advice for the young entrepreneur. A couple went so far as to give advice on raising money. My evaluation is that while all the article purported to come at the topic seriously, they almost all ended up giving trivial advice that treated the young entrepreneur like a, well, young entrepreneur. Finally, I’ve found a content-rich article with advice to young entrepreneurs on raising money and approaching investors that is actually worth reading.
- Interested how VC investing has changed during this downturn?
Thought-Provokers
- A few years back when I was involved in selling IT and web services to middle market companies, I was fond of telling companies that the Internet “was the new Yellow Pages”. Should you doubt the truth of that statement, read this article detailing a survey by Comcast on how people find local businesses. How’s your company website?
- Are you a salesperson, or involved in your company’s sales operations? Please read this short post on two ways to deal with “no”. How you deal with losing an opportunity says as much about your organization (maybe more) as when you win. Make sure you’re sending the right message.
Tips, Tricks & Resources
- Have you ever wanted to send an anonymous E-Mail? Look no further than noSPM.org. Please use responsibly.
- Top social media sites of 2008.
- I recently made the switch from IE to Firefox. I don’t know about you, but having to download and install multiple security updates just about every week for the last month or so on IE was not only a productivity and bandwidth drain, it didn’t give me a good feeling about the security of IE. So I’ve switched full time at home, and I’m about 75% there at work. So when I came across this article outlining 8 ways to make Firefox more search-friendly, I immediately bookmarked it. If you do a lot of searching, and use Firefox, there are some good tips here. (BTW – LOVE Firefox).
- Did you get too many gift certificates as presents? More specifically, are you wondering what they were thinking? Don’t worry, be happy, go here.
One For Fun
- Random quotes and sayings – no registration required!
- And since there was no Weekend Reader last Friday, here’s a bonus this week. Enjoy:
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Comments
I just stumbled on an article that may be worth posting from Forbes. It is on the value of online document management.
On a side note I always enjoy receiving your posts they tend to make me pause and think.
Here is the article link:
http://www.forbes.com/entrepreneurs/2008/12/22/online-document-management-ent-tech-cx_bm_1222bmightydocmanagement.html?partner=smallbusiness_newsletter
Cheers!
Happy New Year and looking forward to more DaveCrainOnline.
Nice Site layout for your blog. I am looking forward to reading more from you.
Tom Humes