DCO Weekend Reader - 9/26/08
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 - a great week with some really outstanding articles. The last couple of weeks I’ve kind of felt like the Weekly Readers weren’t as strong as some in the past, but this week it is really hard to say which of the following articles you shouldn’t read. They are all great, so I’ve included a bit more overview than I usually do so you can pick out the ones of most interest and value.
Personal Excellence & Leadership
- If you are a President or CEO, you have a real challenge building and leading a highly performing team. This may sound counter-intuitive, but this post on roadblocks for top level teams does a good job of laying out unique challenges to teams at this level. I find this an especially fascinating little post as the original text was provided by an executive coach and it’s no surprise that executive coaching is provided as a leading solution to the problems cited. Then the blog’s author cuts in to not only challenge that statement, but offer his own divergent observations. Taken in total it’s a fairly balanced article. If you are part of or in charge of a top level team, at the very least there is value in this post for identifying roadblocks you might be hitting keeping you from realizing your collective potential.
- Continuing our discussion of personal branding, The Chief Brand Officer answers the question “so what” with the challenge: if I Googled your name, what would I find?
- Compare yourself to the two lists in this short post. Do you create or break trust?
- The winner for the week - a performance and potential matrix with nine leadership development strategies. If this is on your agenda, this is a must read.
- I love George Ambler (in a completely professional, non-stalker, kind of way). Very close runner-up for winner of the week is his post on how leaders build trust. Your second must read.
Thought-Provokers
- Don’t let virtual networking get in the way of personal contact. Hopefully none of you need to click that link. For those of you that need a refresher, a quick read reinforcing an important point in today’s world.
- Why knowledge isn’t enough. What do you think the secret ingredient is?
- Finally, some real-world thinking on making a decision. This time in the context of career management. Too much I read and hear these days, especially from speakers and book writers, is all about passion with no respect for risk and pragmatism.
For Fun
For fun this week, I just want to highlight a new company that is in online beta right now. The company is Akoha (www.akoha.com) and they call themselves the world’s first “social reality game”. Akoha is a fascinating concept combining online community building with “deliberate acts of kindness” in the real world. As I said, the website and company are currently in closed beta testing, but you can get an overview of how it works, here. I submitted to become part of the beta and you can bet I’ll give you some writeups on it if I am chosen. For the time being I applaud the concept and I can’t wait to see how the company rolls out and I’m also very interested in seeing their monetization model.
Books
- Cute? Perhaps. Trite? Maybe. But this little book on meeting openers, icebreakers and energizing activities might be just what you were looking for.
Tips & Tricks
- Do you attend conferences and luncheons from time to time? Do you feel like you are maximizing your networking at those events? Here are some great, practical, human-centered tips for iniatiting and maximizing your networking at those events.
- Some quick, basic things you can do to get started communicating your personal brand.
- Must have been the week everyone was attending conferences. Here’s a nice list of things to do to get the most out of your conference dollars.
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.”