DCO Weekend Reader - 12/5/08
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.
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 to December! Turkey Day is over and we’re headed straight into the heart of the holidays. I had an enjoyable Thanksgiving and hope you did also. I don’t know about you, but it seems like those couple T-Day pounds take longer and longer to work off every year that goes by.
In observance of the holiday, I did not publish a Weekend Reader last Friday, so we’ve got a jam-packed on this week, with something for everyone I think. There are so many great articles this week you really should browse through them all to pick out what interests you most. If I had to pick this week’s must read I would direct you to the CEO’s recession survival guide under Leadership and the article asking if you’re ready for Web 2.0 under Thought-Provokers.
I trust you’re all well. Can you believe there are only 20 shopping days left until Christmas!
Related posts
Are your customers part of your Business Plan?
Sounds like a crazy question, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve been following an online saga over the weekend that makes me think that some entrepreneurs aren’t aware, or don’t care, about this simple premise.
I Want Sandy is an online scheduling and reminder service. Get any kind of information about daily “stuff” (appointments, things to remember, lists, reminders, etc.) into Sandy and she will not only kept track of them, she would send you timely digests and reminders.
The service, nicknamed IWS, was extremely popular in the online scheduling community. Although IWS had a number of competitors, the flexibility with which one could get information into the service was, I’m told, head and shoulders above her competition. Sandy was also integrated into some popular gateway services, like Jott and Google Calendar, making the service even more convenient and woven into the Web 2.0 fabric of (online) life.
So I was surprised when over the weekend I saw a post in one of the tech blogs I follow that I Want Sandy was shutting down. You can read the official announcement from the I Want Sandy CEO Rael Dornfest here. Basically, the IP was acquired by Twitterwith no intent to do anything with in the near future, Rael took a job in Twitter’s User Experience department (after working there as a consultant), and the servers keeping IWS and another of Rael’s services running, will be shut down December 8th.
Related posts
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.
