Leadership and the Companies that We Keep

I am fascinated by the way people relate and behave within business organizations. I've worked at aggressive start-ups and lumbering giants, and every organization has its unique "feel". Business cultures are shaped from the top, and the people within the businesses make choices and demonstrate actions, behaviors, and attitudes each day that can enrich or subvert the effectiveness of their organizations.

I attended a seminar last night at Stanford Business School called "Intention: The Heart of Leadership" by Dr. Jeannie Kahwajy. Her message is simple, hard, and important. Most leaders do not know how to encourage or "receive" innovation and, therefore, most corporate cultures (small and large) do not behave in ways that encourage their people to tap into their own energies and passions. In short, too often management reveals its biases and preconceptions first and then ask for others to contribute. Even if the employees have better ideas than their managers, these employees become conditioned to deliver to their management's predetermined directions. The irony is that management will then hire other managers to "bring in new ideas", and often the new managers will introduce their own set of biases that encourage the employees to recalibrate their contribution rather than free them to be more creative. Unfortunately this counter-productive cycle is all too prevalent in today's organizations.

There is no ready solution to this dilemma. I'd venture to say that trillions of dollars in value are lost annually and, more importantly, millions (maybe billions) of people are not encouraged to reach their potential in their places of work. One place to focus is on the leaders themselves. Dr. Kahwajy suggests that company leaders need to reconsider their leadership styles and the behaviors that they exhibit, and she offered a compelling Harvard Business Review article called "Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve" by Jim Collins. I hope you find the article as enlightening as I do.

Using Twitter for Time Management and Productivity in the Workplace

I have been a fairly consistent user of Twitter for the past 3 months, and I have some thoughts regarding the use of Twitter (and potentially other social media) for better managing our time and our workload. Twitter and other social networking tools are becoming parts of our communication, data collection, and collective thought. With the broad adoption of these tools in personal and professional lives, we need to figure out how to use these tools to focus our thoughts and our efforts.

Our work worlds are extremely noisy places. Mine is evermore packed with extraneous information and a multitude of potential time wasting paths. In our largely unstructured workplaces, time management has become the ultimate challenge. I'd say that the Greek directive to "know thyself" has morphed into "know thy priorities" (and manage thy time accordingly).

Yet (sigh) we are human after all and, if the Internet, social apps, and collaborative environments have taught us anything, it is that people like to think, learn, and communicate in ways that are not always logical, structured, or linear. Therefore, if we want to be most productive at work, we need to be able to structure our flow of information and ideas in ways that may not always conform to a Gantt chart or a prioritized task list. Yes, prioritization and scheduling is critical to success but so is the collaboration and community engendered by social media tools.

Twitter is unique in that it allows us to create interactive communities that can share information in real time. And I particularly like the 140 alphanumeric limit because it tends to steer us toward more succinct communication and a conveyance of focused information. Twitter is to email as headlines are to copy. The copy can be provided as a URL in the Twitter message (I still have trouble calling these messages "tweets"), but the key points should be called out in the Twitter message.

Think of Twitter as a means for sharing potentially key information across groups of people. By carefully choosing your Twitter community and by building protocols of communication that provide value (and a sense of shared spirit), Twitter can help channel and prioritize information that should be important to you and others within your network.

The following link from zappos.com provides some interesting perspective on a company that is using Twitter to build their corporate community and culture.

http://tinyurl.com/Building-Company-With-Twitter

Top Social Sites for Business

Excellent list of social sites for business. We all could add a few, but here is a start.

http://www.focus.com/fyi/marketing/50-social-sites-every-business-needs-presence/

VC Investments Underperform For Past 5 Years

But can Silicon Valley continue (as we know it) while VCs downsize? Government stimulus for R&D should help, but....

Google Apps Sync with Exchange Winning Enterprise Converts

Google continues to define itself by its bold innovation and sky's-the-limit mentality. Yesterday Google offered it's Google App Enterprise customers the ability to sync with Microsoft Exchange, winning accolades from customers like Genentech, and continuing to build alternatives Microsoft's Enterprise desktop hegemony. No, Google Apps does not yet replace Office desktop functionality but it does promise to allow enterprise customers to sync with their mission critical Outlook Exchange Server infrastructure. By syncing Google Apps such as Calendar and Gmail with Exchange Server (for a charge for Enterprise customers only), Google continues to enhance its cloud vision and erode another major objection from migrating from Microsoft.

Here's Googles official announcement and reference demo and testimonial: Google App Announcement

And here's a representative response from the press: ZDnet on Google App Outlook Sync

Cloud Computing Overview And Predictions May 2009

This is a basic and fundamental overview of cloud computing and related trends. I like its simplicity.

Cloud Computing Overview And Predictions May 2009

View more Microsoft Word documents from brentjackson.

Clouds and Virtualization to Spawn a "Googleplex" of Innovation

All the world is abuzz with talk of enterprise clouds and the virtualization of IT. I have a personal, anecdotal story of my own that supports these trends. I share offices in Mountain View with a company that is developing a complex and feature rich enterprise software application. They have a 20 person U.S. based development team and they have spent next to nothing on IT infrastructure. They do development with Google Apps, use the Google cloud for hosting, and beyond that have outfitted each developer with a PC and high speed access. They are building an app that would have required at least six figures worth of hardware and software purchases alone to develop just three or four years ago.

This developer/IT model is radically efficient and will lower barriers against innovation on a grand scale. This model will allow "2 guys in a garage" to develop businesses again. And this time, they won't hit their credit card limits until they actually have a working prototypes.

The tech ecosystem will be forever changed, with a move away from very early VC funding, far less need for extensive (and really chilly!) office space dedicated to server racks, and the opportunity for nimble software developers to more readily compete with the large, incumbent software vendors.

Yes, the successful high tech companies of tomorrow are much flatter today, and the Silicon Valley organizational model will have to adapt itself to change once again. But with the innovation machine just starting to flex its muscles, would you want it any other way?

Broadband Stimulus: Critical, But Not Ready to Rock

I've watched the US Broadband Stimulus legislation with great interest. I consider the intent of the action to be positive, but am beginning to be dismayed by delays and poor communication. The action will go a long way toward providing better access for unserved and under served areas in the US. With better access to communications for rural areas, these areas can become more productive and also allow virtual companies to work from places other than the normal metropolitan centers. Here's a great site for more updates. http://calix.com/bbs/

And here's a general purpose list of milestones for the Broadband Stimulus.

Of interest, many of the broadband stimulus projects are slated to be $5M, $20M, and more. Here is a survey that was done of attendees to the webinar, followed by their chosen access technology.

10 Years and Still Waiting For New Telecom Services

When are Telecom services going to become interesting? Other than "over-the-top" data services, which allow us to do Internet access (which we'd been doing on our PCs since the mid-90s), what's changed over the past 10 years? Speed, devices, and online sites have improved...but where's the bounty of new services and applications? Service delivery platforms, IMS, voice app servers, etc have done next to nothing to create new user experience. Where's that multimodal experience that is consistent between devices, that takes our preferences and real-time context into account? Is this really so hard?

Obviously, service providers are finding this just too damn hard. Not that SPs haven't made enormous strides. They have streamlined operations, they have provided almost anywhere connectivity, and they have created pricing and packages that suit most all of our needs. But where for art thou interesting content and user experience? Clearly, SPs are not that creative, so we have begun to turn to other players for this kind of innovation.

Apple has blown everyone away with their iPhone capabilities. Wow, it's a wonderful user experience...but unfortunately, it has done very little to create a new COMMUNICATION experience. Yes, the iPhone is cool and fun to use, but beside a very useful mapping capability, there is a paucity of new real-time services that could follow me, provide me targeted offers, route my calls based on my calendar schedule, integrate video in creative ways, or merge my social networking communications with my voice and data communications.

But, we shouldn't expect the Apples or Nokias, to be able to provide these services. They are device providers after all. They are not developers and service providers. So we must look to developers to create the next cool and integrated applications. We'll address this issue in my next post.
Dan Geiger