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Why do I feel like the word Revolution is all over the place? Maybe it’s that ‘ear worm’ of the Beatles signature tune from my radio show that’s in my head.
Jason Baer and Amber Naslund’s upcoming book, The Now Revolution, has the word in its title, though it’s the word NOW that jumps out. As they lay it out, they say that this book isn’t about how to “do” social media, but about a broader need to rejigger the organization on the ‘now’ factors. The chapters have those broad goals, such as how to ‘engineer a New Bedrock;’ ‘Organize Your Armies;’ ‘Answer the New Telephone;’ ‘Build a Fire Extinguisher’ etc.
You could find a free chapter if you go here.
On February 1, the book will be on shelves across North America.
Jay and Amber have a post-launch speaking tour for The NOW Revolution. If you, or an organization you know of, likes to have either of them to present the “7 shifts” to make business faster, smarter, and more social, they are open to talking.
Here’s the deal. Just commit to buying 200 books (ideally before release) and we’ll work with you on a date between February and June where we can visit your region and do a presentation, book signing, tweetup, game of Twister, etc.
Email them at info@nowrevolutionbook.com.
But wait! There’s More! If you’re into the Quick Response Codes, use your phone and take a picture of this image (right) using the Microsoft Tag software, for bonus content.
It’s a pretty cool way to promote a book using the very principles it talks about.
Employees are either ticked off or raring to go. That’s the commonly held wisdom, right?
I wanted to find out and conducted a survey before my radio show, Your Triple Bottom Line. Some pleasant surprises: A large percentage of responders have positive things to say about the workplace. (The survey is still open for a week, so that number could change.)
However, when asked to describe what a terrible place to work was, one respondent cited “Filth, blind micro-management, too many chiefs.”
Hmmm! Too many chiefs is a common refrain whenever I speak to companies about what’s the biggest stumbling block to a more collaborative workplace.
I conducted this snap survey because we were planning on asking our guest, a much-acclaimed author of the book Fired Up Or Burned Out, about what kind of leadership makes workplaces so dreary or at other times, inspiring. The book (it’s received great reviews on Amazon!) takes you into the ‘power of connection’ at work from the American Revolution to… Starbucks!
Show # 8 – with Michael Stallard
Download a PDF of the book free here.
Cross-posting this from the Show blog, Your3bl.com
Whenever I digest Clay Shirky’s books, such as Here comes everybody, I always wonder where someone like him finds time to draw out such astute observations about so many social and technological events swirling around us.
His latest, Cognitive Surplus, is a must read for anyone wondering (or responding to the cynical question)’where do people like you fund time to blog and hang out on social media sites?”
So when I heard him last week on a webinar, remark that he often goes to a place with his Netbook and turns the wi-fi off, it all made sense. We celebrate the fact that many gadgets around us are wi-fi enabled –now including cameras and MP3 players. But just because we have the default option of being always on, always connected to the grid, we could be denying ourselves the time to sit back and come to our own conclusions.
“The volume of the media coming at us is so large,” he observed;” we need to filter it and ‘do new imaginative things’ out of them.
Whereas once literacy was once a goal for our children, we now need to teach children how not to be distracted, he said. “Being deluged,” is the norm. “For all the fetishizaion of ‘inbox zero’ for example, there is no way to keep people from wasting your time. The discipline comes to basically turning off the channels.
I tried it today at the coffee shop. I got so much more done. I was reminded of the book I intended top pick up, Distracted. It deals with “networks of attention.”
That’s a new phrase to me!
“Attention is not always within our control. The unexpected, the changeable, the novel, even the habitual abduct our focus, intrude upon our awareness, and pull us off course for a time.”
The funny thing is, I would not have been able to find that book is not for my wi-fi connection. I know what Clay would say: “Get thee to a library!”
If you had been following the spike in attention given to the concept of buzz about five years back, you may have come across the name Emanuel Rosen. He came out with an amazing book, The Anatomy of Buzz that peeled back the layers of buzz –the nodes, connectors, clusters and triggers– that propels something into popularity.
So it came as a great surprise when I received an email from Rosen a few days back asking me if I was interested in reading his updated book. How did he find me, or know I was a big promoter of the book? Apparently I had referred to it in an article at that time –a Google search solved the mystery.
Before I sent him my address I called him –to make sure I was not responding to some phishing scam!– and he gave me the background to why the book needed to be ‘revisited’ (rather than updated). Two seconds into the conversation it struck me. This was before the iPhone, before YouTube, before a lot of things that have inbuilt wiring for buzz. We almost take buzz for granted. Buzzworthiness is almost a hidden design feature. No wonder this concept needed to be looked at once again.
More about the book, in a few days.
I have to be careful when saying that a digital product won’t undermine the analog experience. I hung on to my Canon Rebel 2000 for years until I realized the digital SLR was ‘not bad’ and in fact, good enough to make me switch. No need to belabor the vinyl music meets MP3 story.
So the news that Random House plans to digitize thousands of books to serve the nascent eBook demand, has me with mixed thoughts. On the one hand, I couldn’t see myself take a Kindle to bed, though I wouldn’t mind owning one. I can’t imagine how the book experience –that’s far beyond the reading experience–will ever be replicated or made obsolete by the tools we love in other platforms: scrolling, annotating, searching, linking etc.
In the end, the best way to think of the analog and digital bookshelf is not through the either/or lens. I may have a highly productive experience with a digi-book on a long plane flight, especially if it helps me load up the reader with other material and lighten my load. But I will always want that dead-tree experience for other times, even for that age old practice of standing in line for a book signing. Not that there won’t be a digital workaround for that soon!
Yesterday we had a book discussion on Thomas Friedman‘s Hot, Flat and Crowded. There was a good cross section of people, and I truly enjoyed the student perspective on the key things Friedman diagnoses as the problems in the US (isolationism, infrastructure and nation building) we need to fix.
What timing! This was first of 4 sessions here at the Decision Theater, a place where we look at alternative scenarios and sustainable futures.
The dominant metaphor in the book is the US consulate in Istanbul that was built so secure, it’s a place where “birds don’t fly.”
Having covered the technology space for awhile, this isolationist metaphor seems at odds with what’s going on in the US with regard to collaboration and connectivity. We build open source platforms for business, gaming, virtual worlds and education. We invented wikis and blogs and send the opposite message outside our borders. Obviously we are not singing from the same song sheet, –as this T-shirt at a rally reflects. (Guess who’s rally that might be?)
As we saw last night, hot, flat and intolerant is a losing proposition.
Congratulations to Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff on being named ‘visionaries of the year‘ by SNCR, the Society for New Communications Research (whose founders are the who’s who of social media.)
By many standards, Groundswell is the most imortant book of the year that answers the Why and How of social media. It’s hard for me to stop talking about it –my upcoming article in IABC’s Communication World is about it.
The authors have demystified the social media hype and given every practitioner something substantial to turn to: case studies, ROI calculations the online Social Technographics tool etc.
Rohit Bhargava, author of Personality Not Included (he is VP of strategy at Ogilvy PR’s Digital 360 group) will be doing a book signing in Scottsdale, Arizona this week.
Date: Thursday, October 23, 2008
Time: 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Location: Borders – Waterfront Street. 7135 E. Camelback Rd., Scottsdale, AZ
Drinks afterward at: 7.30 pm Bungalow Grill in Scottsdale. Tel: 480-994-1888
The book is about brand authenticity, and how to move away from the faceless, personality-free corporate image, and using social media to give employees a voice.
The book is about brand authenticity, and how to move away from the faceless, personality-free corporate image, and using social media to give employees a voice.
We writers tend to think that anything can be explained away with a sentence, a headline, a turn of phrase.
But I am also a huge believer in information graphics and icons. Often a few lines with a Sharpie on the back of a napkin can tell a story much, much better than a few PowerPoint slides. Or an ad. (seen the napkin visual in a Saleforce.com ad?) The downside to this is I have a growing collection of napkins from coffee shops and restaurants.
I picked up a brilliant book that deals with just this –throwing light on complex problems using pictures– called The back of the napkin by Dan Roam. “The best way to see something that isn’t there,” says Roam,” “is to look with your eyes closed.”
Visual thinking is the more intuitive way to understand and crack problems, he says. Couldn’t agree more, being (or in spite of being) a writer. That’s why we still need white boards, Visio, and of course napkins.
On a larger scale I see visualization at work everyday when dealing with intangibles –essentially data– involving complex issues such as epidemiology, environment, performance figures, underground water etc. And the trick is to put visualization at the service of problem-solving and make people “see with their eyes closed.”
Marketers have not tapped into this type of mapping, visualizing and problem-solving. Their ‘maps’ are still connected at the hip to org charts, flow diagrams, spread sheets and supply-chain matrices. The intangibles tend to get lost in the forest of data. When you learn to visualize intangibles, a whole new world opens up.
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