Tag Archives | Book/Books

Resilient Organizations & Open Networks

By on April 23, 2012 in Market Power, Social

In Philip Auserwald’s recent book, The Coming Prosperity, he mentioned that open networks beat closed networks and larger networks beat smaller networks. As regular readers know, I’ve been talking about similar ideas in the fast/fluid/flexible series on business models. His set of ideas provoked me into asking a series of questions to and with Philip [...]

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The Synergist; Valuing All the Roles

By on April 16, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

In his most recent book Les McKeown mentioned that work teams needed to include the three different roles of visionary, operator, and processor. I was struck by this set of definitions and how useful they are. In my own experience of working with teams, it seems that almost everyone values the role of visionary when [...]

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3 Books Well Worth-Reading

By on April 2, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

The Synergist A business book meant for the real-working leader, Les McKeown gives an intuitive model to allow anyone to lead. The notion is that every team needs a blend of visionary, an operator, and a processor. And the often invisible but crucial role that blends all these 3 is a synergist, able to find [...]

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Quiet: Understanding & Celebrating Introverts

By on March 29, 2012 in Culture & Leadership

The last few weeks I’ve been as limp as a lettuce leaf that had stayed a few weeks too long in the fridge. This is not unusual. It is what happens if / when I do back to back events / workshops/ etc. I end up putting so much energy into the world to be [...]

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Kill the Meetings

By on November 21, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

After coming off a 6-month sabbatical from Apple, I returned to work at about 5:30 am, cleared my inbox by 8 a.m. (hey, it was 1994 – this was still humanly possible, back then). By 8:30, I was sitting bright and cheery in the conference room for the regular weekly kickoff meeting that our work [...]

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Redesigning Leadership

By on November 17, 2011 in Culture & Leadership

This last year, I’ve felt burnt out on business books. I read enough of them and, frankly, I find myself less and less motivated to do so. I used to take 3-4 of them on every personal holiday and devour them. But I find myself less and less interested. Last weekend, as an example, I [...]

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves

By on October 24, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

When we invite people over at the house, we notice many of our friends have an interesting way of talking about themselves. “I suck at that”. “No way can my company grow given these market conditions” “I’ll never make it”. “It’s never gonna happen because of (these million, ever changing reasons)” “Every time I try [...]

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Is Sharing a Good Idea?

By on October 17, 2011 in Culture & Leadership, Tech & Trends

A good friend of mine, Terri Griffith, lives in these two divergent worlds: First, she’s an expert and enthusiast in the enterprise 2.0 / collaboration workspace. Second, she’s a professor (she has a Ph.D.), yet no one has ever called educational institutions the hotbed of collaboration… She’s got a new book coming out this week: [...]

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Is Success Predictable?

By on October 10, 2011 in Culture & Leadership

So many teams fail in growth. They blame their strategy, or their tactics, or the market, or bring up some issue about product/market/timing fit was off, or that some people failed at execution and so on. The list of reasons is almost endless for any team. As often as this happens, don’t you wonder if [...]

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Online is the New City

By on October 8, 2011 in Social

Richard Florida, the Atlantic editor recently wrote: “Cities are our greatest invention, not because of the scale of their infrastructure or their placement along key trade routes, but because they enable human beings to combine and recombine their talents and ideas in new ways. With their breadth of skills, dense social networks, and physical spaces [...]

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