DISQUS

James, I think we have the issues fixed with Lulu. Please give it another try and let us know how it works out. Thanks!

http://www.lulu.com/content/6113756

Todd

Thanks for your interest, John. The ebook is now available at:

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/im_outta_her...

Todd

The unfortunate part is that I can throw a rock and hit enough mediocre web-sites in very competitive markets looking for a quick-fix traffic boost to keep the legions of SEO specialists in business for a while longer. If you have high hopes, money on the line, and you're running out of runway, quick fixes look pretty good.

With that said, this was the best post on the subject I've read!

I'll be there.

Alex, great post. I recently hosted an event where the question of paying open-source developers came up. At the surface, it seems reasonable. But it's prickly in the same way coworking and/or incubation is prickly, because while the ideas are really very different in their goals and values, there's enough obvious synergy and enough overlap in daily activity to 1) make the differences less obvious on the outside than they appear to the insiders, which 2) results in lots of questions about the two models, and potentially lots of confusion. I've recently noticed that searching for "coworking" on Google returns a lot of sponsored results for cube farms, executive suites, etc. Clearly commercial interests are playing on (preying on) the confusion to fatten their sales pipeline. I'll be very disappointed if the trend continues.

Todd

John, I think this is exactly the kind of thinking we need. Consider this, in spite of lifelong continued pressure to "keep a journal", blah blah blah, I've never made as complete a record of my life as I have since I started using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, etc. Right now, the people using these systems are creating an invaluable record of their life and our time, for their descendants and for the future. But it's all locked away in Facebook's database, Twitter's database, Flickr's database, Google's database, etc. At some level this is okay. Google runs a tight IT organization. But what a huge point of failure. And consider the reaction people had toward Flickr/Yahoo when Microsoft started thinking about acquiring. This information needs to be portable, transportable, and in our control. I realize this kind of cuts the nuts off the "competitive/incumbent advantage" of sites like Facebook and many a VCs plans for monetizing social plays like these... but tough!

- Todd (AKA Bandit)

We are hard at work on the book--research is, for the most part, complete--writing productivity is the great challenge.

More than anything else, I am inspired by the fact that people I admire and consider creative, bright, and entertaining find value in the work that I'm doing.

Watching groups of people who hadn't all met before come together and walk away as a much larger group made me realize that there is definitely a movement afoot in coworking.

Too many people to mention (for both the path to achieving awesome and the miss the most questions). How long until SXSW '09?

Yes, sir!

Alex, I'm not going to add any value to the discussion of doers and doer-enablers except to say that the group I dislike are the doer-managers--the people who keep the doers inside the lines and in their pens.

For my own benefit, I've framed my experience this way: mentor vs. manager. There are times when I am the guy who is calling the shots. Maybe because I have the most experience or because I have the vision or whatever... This isn't the case in every project I'm part of (the book, for example, is an even split) but when it is the case, I try to frame myself up as a mentor rather than a manager.

Specifically, I take an active role in ensuring that what I am doing is in some way passed on to the rest of the team--even if all I have is the vision. Because it's "active" it becomes another kind of doing.

I also seek out opportunities to work with people who are willing to take the same mentoring attitude with me. So life becomes a braid in which I move in and out of these roles at different times. Sometimes doing and receiving, sometimes doer-enabling and giving.

As long as there is "doing" ;-)

Todd

It's an interesting question. Much of the information is publicly available, so there's nothing to stop parents, friends, teachers, social workers, from digging in (and taking action). However, I wonder what the ultimate effect would be on making this information public -- would the people in question stop being so open. Only time will tell, I suspect.

For what it's worth, I happen to live in the community where the three students who did all the church burnings in 2006 came from. One facet of the case was the fact that their MySpace pages painted a very different picture of who they were (inside?) than their public persona. It was eye-opening.

Todd

I was going to try to summarize this post, but I'd just screw it up...

http://notanmba.com/blog/2008/02/space-trust-in...

Check out the link the Business Week article about BMW. There's a set of cultural values that encourage openness and transparency, and a (more common) set of values that encourage hierarchy and order. The BMW article talks about the importance of a near-death experience as the catalyst to changing those values.

You may be trying to cut the distinction too fine. I like Julie's definitions -- they're very close to how I think. And an effective businessperson needs to be able to do both to some degree. Problems occur when you try to "manage" people the same way you "manage" projects.

I suppose, depending on how you define leader, you could have too many leaders. In the coaching/teaching/communicating sense you describe, however, I don't think it's a problem in practice.

I don't think leadership is reserved for executives.

Good questions. Someone needs to tackle Skyler's comments, though.

This is great, guys!

I'm not going to try to address the entire thread but I will add one comment.

I try to emphasize the difference between a "leader" and a "manager". John, you just described a "leader". In my opinion, we have too many managers and too many good people trying to move up into "management"--it's not that great a role. I want to see people strive to be great leaders.

I wish I could have listened into the conversation.

There are good solid reasons to build interfaces between customers and employees/management and between employees and management. And between employees and employees (in different functional groups). In fact, it's hard to imagine why it's not more common.

Here's where it gets weird. In 1999 (the height of Web 1.0) a group of people got together and wrote the Cluetrain Manifesto (http://www.cluetrain.com/). They had identified issues in the way companies were being run, and called those companies out. #41: "Companies make a religion of security, but this is largely a red herring. Most are protecting less against competitors than against their *own market* and *workforce*." The emphasis is mine. There are many other fine gems.

Why were they pointing this out?

The problem is, in 1999 and today, in many many large organizations, there is tremendous personal advantage in opacity and control. Even when this personal advantage comes at the expense of customers and employees (and the company as a whole). Remember, there are huge six-figure salaries and bonuses at stake. I've met one or two executives who will say "I don't know" to a customer. I've never met an executive that will say "I don't know" to an employee. Social media is about transparency... And that's the problem.

Okay. Enough negative.

There are good reasons why more transparency would be beneficial to companies, if you can sell them on the benefits. A good company culture encourages employees to expend their discretionary effort in ways that help the company, for example. Transparency is either going to help build a good company culture, or it's going to be the nail in the company coffin (if the company's culture is a disaster and they won't fix it). Transparency also facilitates cross-functional collaboration, up-down communication, etc.

Your question is a great question and it identifies a great problem to solve because it cuts to the core of company work-culture, and impinges on strategy, innovation, etc.