I subscribe to a newsletter from Springwise and this post turned up: Floating offices for two.
It’s an interesting concept, I love being by the sea and an office like that would be terrific.
A Floating Office
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Category Archives: Business
Inside the Third Tribe
The Third Tribe is a collaboration between Darren Rowse, Chris Brogan, Brian Clark and Sonia Simone. Add other Third Tribers like Chris Garrett, Jonathan Fields, Hugh MacLeod, Mark McGuinness, Leo Babauta, Pam Slim, Naomi Dunford, Johnny Truant and Dave Navarro and you get an impressive set up.
I rarely join courses or forum on the internet because they mostly feel off target for me. The concept of The Third Tribe feels right though and many in the list of names above are people whose blogs I follow. I have signed up and joined The Third Tribe, it will be very interesting to see what comes out of this.
What’s the Third Tribe?
This definition comes from the introduction at The Third Tribe:
Over the last several years, online marketing has been split into two opposing teams. Two tribes, if you will.
One tribe is called the Internet Marketers. They use aggressive hype and obnoxious tactics to fool people into believing there really is a “get rich quick” magic bullet.
The other tribe is the Social Media Cool Kids. They reject hype and aggressive sales tactics in favor of relationships, community, and value . . . and yet seem to have taken a vow of poverty along the way.
The black and white division of online marketing into two tribes is not real. There’s a big (and growing) middle tribe, one that avoids spammy IM approaches while having no problem asking for the sale and making money. This is the Third Tribe.
What do I think about Inside Third Tribe?
The Third Tribe is an interesting and great concept:
The Third Tribe is a private community where like-minded people help each other out. It’s based on a combination of education and interaction that takes everyone’s Internet marketing skills to a higher level.
The education part so far contains The Quick Start Guide to Making Money Online with Johnny Truant and interviews on Building a Business around a Blog with Chris Brogan, Darren Rowse and Brian Clark. The forums are active and people willingly share their experience. In short, it’s great value for money if you’re set on improving your Internet marketing skills.
Third Tribe Marketing has started an affiliate program that’s only open to members. That’s professional, only members know the value of what they are promoting.
If it’s that great, why do I leave?
One of my goals for 2010 was to take my blogging and Internet marketing skills up a notch (or more), to make it more professional. Those who follow my blogs might have noticed that it did not turn out well, posts have been random and I don’t blog on a regular basis.
I have realized that the aim of becoming more professional as blogger turned writing into a must, at the level of dusting my apartment, instead of something I want to do and love to do. My solution is to remove pressure, scratching the goal as blogger and to focus on bringing the fun back to my writing. I leave Third Tribe Marketing because it does not suit me now, where I am with my blogging and where I want to go in the near future.
This post was updated March 7, 2010.
Seth Godin and Linchpin
Seth Godin launches his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? How to Drive Your Career and Create a Remarkable Future in an unusual way. Today he is interviewed or guest post around the blogosphere, a good starting point is his own post The 2.0 media tour. I have followed some of the links and this piece of text from Escape From Cubicle Nation: You are not a cog is great.
if you’re a freelancer and you’re doing what everyone else in your market is doing, why on earth is someone going to hire you? Why will you be able to charge more? Where will your freedom come from?
The need to stand out and be different makes a lot of sense and it’s something I am working on for my own business as coach and mentor.
I have ordered the Linchpin book, it sounds very interesting, but it’s not delivered yet. A linchpin is defined like this:
linchpin = a pin inserted through holes at the end of an axle, so as to secure a wheel; a central cohesive source of stability and security; a person or thing that is critical to a system or organisation
Is it really a good thing to become indispensable? If employed, will your boss let you move on or try to keep you?
Dan North on Our Obsession with Efficiency
When browsing Øredev’s videos from the 2009 conference I found another one that interests me. Dan North talks about Our Obsession with Efficiency.
The description says:
So here’s the thing, I don’t believe in efficiency. It’s our obsession with efficiency that has got us into the current technology mess, and which has led almost directly to heavy waterfall processes. Efficiency is how you let the big vendors sell their bloated technologies to the poor CIOs.
Dan talks about efficiency (doing things right) versus effectiveness (doing the right things). One is his comments is that Effectiveness is often inefficient.
Aspects of Leadership at Øredev 2009
Thursday November 5 was the second day of Øredev 2009. I followed the track Aspects of Leadership which had this desciption:
Leadership is a fine balance between drive and the capability to efficiently and humanely manage people. The speakers invited to speak on this track have extensive experience of leadership in many different organizations and lines of business. You will learn to adjust your leadership style to reflect the circumstances you face, how to use coaching to improve collaboration in your projects and gain insight into the causes of destructive leadership behaviors.
The first session was No More Death by Meetings with Erik Lundh. The program said:
The Planning Pump is the emergent behavior observed for 10 years in and around agile teams that gets motivated to plan two weeks of work in just 60 minutes.
The essence of the presentation – as I understood it – was that if people know in advance what’s on the agenda (and that the meeting will only last 60 minutes) then they will prepare and connect in advance.
Next session was Understanding the origins of destructive leadership – Why bother with bad? with Leo Kant. The program said:
Studies explaining the causes of destructive leadership behaviors are very few. This presentation will cover two ongoing studies of such situational and individual antecedents of destructive leadership behaviors. One of the studies is conducted in a normal working environment. The second study investigates the antecedents of destructive leadership behavior in a crisis management simulation.
Leo Kant talked about constructive (good) leadership versus destructive (bad). Passive leadership is considered destructive. What’s interesting is that:
• Good and Bad are not opposites on the same scale.
• Bad and good co-exist.
• Bad is stronger than good.
• Most leaders do both.
My own presentation was titled Project success by helping project members realize their full potential and my core message was that Coaching brings out the best in individuals and in teams.
After me was Situational Leadership on Projects: Adopting Leadership Style to Conditions with J. Davidson Frame, PhD, PMP, Academic Dean at the University of Management and Technology, Arlington, Va. The program said:
On projects, you need to adjust your leadership style to reflect the circumstances you face.This presentation offers a framework for identifying appropriate leadership style, based on such factors as project size, time horizon, risk, complexity, novelty, and level of team cohesiveness. It also points out that you don’t need to have great charisma to be a good leader. Transactional leadership is often good enough. If you are really good at what you do, this will gain you followers.
We got an engaging introduction to Situational Leadership. He mentioned that Transformational leadership (think Martin Luther King) is 5% and Transactional leadership (think Jack Welch) is the remaining 95%.
Ending the track was Leif Dagsberg from Wenell Management AB who talked about ABC in Projects.
“A” stands for the activators and relates back to what actions we can take to make a preferred behavior happen. “B” is the behavior as a result of an activator. “C” means that we need to support the individual with consequences such as motivation. Psychological research tells us that If we want to change a Behavior, 80 % of the impact is related to our way of working with the Consequences of the changed behavior in comparison with working on different Activators.
Note! In the Archives at the Øredev site are videos from previous years. The 2009 videos will be there too.
PM in Practice at Øredev 2009
Wednesday November 4 was the start of Øredev 2009. I decided to join the track PM in Practice which had this desciption:
Project Management is about identifying and building effective relationships with the key people and groups on which project success depends. Project Managers focus on two sets of responsibilities; managing the team and ensuring tangible project deliverables and business value. Listen to a Case Study that describes and explores the learnings of old truths, combined with an agile approach, or to the true story of how large organizations have implemented Scrum and agile methods.
The first session I attended was titled Good is the Enemy of Great – a case study of continued success. It was presented by Hans Selén, Program Manager at IKEA. The program said:
As professionals we all strive for good results and achievements. But how do you accomplish repeatable project success and day-to-day operations in IT programs involving between 25 and 80 persons? And how do you improve when you have delivered reliable service of business critical applications around the clock and 6 projects, all with the agreed scope and quality, on time and on budget? And how do you utilize the agile approach and still use the good things you have learned over the years?
The enemy of all IT-projects is size, complexity. That led them to set a maximum complexity at 8-10 people and 8-10 months. I like this comment: Anyone can start a project, the trick is to finish them.
The next session I attended was The Manager’s Guide to Agile Adoption with Mike Cottmeyer (Agile Project Coach, Process Methodologist, PMP Certified Project Manager, Certified ScrumMaster). His presentation was about:
A roadmap for agile adoption that begins with teams and demonstrates how teams work together to deliver more complex projects & portfolios. Mike will expand the team concept to include capabilities & show how capabilities can be organized to optimize value across the enterprise value stream.
Then I attended Agile Adoption at Enterprise Level with Petri Haapio who now is Director Coaching at Reaktor Innovations in Finland. He talked about his experience from Nokia Networks and the desciption said:
The true story on how large enterprises have implemented Scrum and Agile methods and the result. Are there any metrics? Are the companies more effective? Who benefits? How to deal with resistance? Which roles are pro and which roles are negative to these methods. All these questions are answered from an enterprise view and with strategy in mind.
Note! In the Archives at the Øredev site are videos from previous years. The 2009 videos will be there too.
Turn Almost Anything Into a Whiteboard
Have you ever felt that your Whiteboard is too small for your ideas? There is a smart solution to that. Fast Company has an article about IdeaPaint: Turn Your Entire Office Into a Whiteboard.
IdeaPaint turns virtually anything you can paint on into a dry-erase surface. Your creativity is the limit, paint walls or tables or doors or…
Take a look at IdeaPaint on YouTube for ideas and HowTo.
Creative Business Valuation
37Signals posts a press release stating that 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT. The press release starts like this:
37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1.
Founder Jason Fried describes one way – quite commonly used by startups – to increase the value of a company:
In order to increase the value of the company, 37signals has decided to stop generating revenues. “When it comes to valuation, making money is a real obstacle. Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation,” said Mr. Fried. “Once you have profits, it’s impossible to just make stuff up. That’s why we’re switching to a ‘freeconomics’ model. We’ll give away everything for free and let the market speculate about how much money we could make if we wanted to make money. That way, the sky’s the limit!”
I love this post, creative and inspiring. First comment says ‘shoulda waited to post this on April 1st’ but the impact is higher now.
To see what 37Signals really stand for, go to Simple small business software, collaboration, CRM: 37signals. They have interesting software solutions that I intend to look at.
Marketing with an attitude
I came across this on Twitter, shit creek consulting. Hugh MacLeod writes that ‘The name of their company implies they have a lot of attitude. They wanted a cartoon that conveyed this.’ And they got it, check the link above.
Shitcreek Consulting has a nice looking homepage that explains their business concept. They sum it up as:
This is Shitcreek Consulting… the guys you call when you find yourself up Shitcreek without… well, a paddle.
The Tao of Coaching
The Tao of Coaching by Max Landsberg is an excellent book about coaching as a leader. The tagline on the book says Boost your effectiveness at work by inspiring and developing those around you which sums up coaching from the leaders perspective.
The books is described like this:
This book offers information on how to unlock the potential of people by applying the techniques of coaching. Coaching is the key to realising the potential of your employees, your organisation and yourself.
This book provides the techniques and tools of coaching that are vital for those who want to develop a team of people who will perform effectively and who will relish working with them.
The techniques and tools of coaching are integrated in the story about Alex and his career as manager. That makes it easier since you see them used in context.
The book lists these reasons why a manager shall use coaching:
• Create more time for yourself
• Achieve better results
• Build your interpersonal skills
If you want a great introduction to coaching as a leader, and a book you later can use as manual, I suggest that you buy The Tao of Coaching.