October 3, 2007 – 7:04 am
Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect suggests that much reporting and analysis and expounding on what businesses are doing right or wrong is subject to the halo effect: when a company’s doing well, everything they do looks smart and visionary. When they’re not doing well, they look awkward, uncertain, and fumbling.
You might say, “that’s because good […]
October 2, 2007 – 7:52 am
Andrew McAfee suggests that Facebook and similar social tools bring value to business by allowing employees to create and maintain more weak ties with people. Weak ties often bridge across groups and thus offer access to information and other resources that might not otherwise be available. Andrew likens these to options (e.g., financial ones that […]
September 16, 2007 – 4:48 pm
Perhaps the most important tool you have for keeping your relationships in good shape is positive flooding. You need to keep the bulk of interactions with those you care about positive; in fact, you probably need far more positive interactions than you think. There’s even research showing what ratio of positive to negative interactions you […]
August 15, 2007 – 5:06 pm
My most marked-up book of recent has been Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts. Among the many insights I found:
Some communities can be too clustered, leading to stagnation, where no new ideas can percolate. That happens when every person is so connected that whatever they hear about matters very little […]
In this post on enterprise applications and social media, Hugh MacLeod brings up the issue of hierarchies:
Big businesses will always have trouble with anything that subverts hierarchies, for hierarchy is the glue that holds large organizations together. Small businesses have an easier time with blogs and whatnot, for there are fewer layers to keep happy. […]
The second generation of the Web represents a radical shift relative to the first. A number of trends underpin it… trends that change the way many of us work. These new ways of working don’t eclipse the old ways but play out alongside them, creating a parallel culture of work.
The older and newer cultures of […]
I posted a manifesto of sorts on Web Worker Daily today about the difference between the old work culture and the new one enabled by the Web. Of course, I glossed over all sorts of complexities — and a whole lot of thinking I’ve been doing on this topic. So I was a little annoyed […]
I got Ronald Burt’s Bokerage & Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital from Amazon last week, so I can stop quoting from John Hagel and start quoting directly. I’ve only read the first 20 pages, but I’m already afloat in ideas from it. Great book–and so applicable to the blogging world.
One of the most interesting […]
