culture

Open Leadership

Open LeadershipAm reading an excellent book at the moment – Open Leadership by Charlene Li.

Fans of dead-tree web 2.0 reading will be familiar with Groundswell, which Li co-authored and was chock-full of interesting case studies – mostly from the US private sector – around how collaborative relationships with customers, often using the web as a platform, lead to success.

Here’s some of the blurb for Open Leadership:

Open Leadership reveals step-by-step, with illustrative case studies and examples from a wide-range of industries and countries, how to bring the precision of this new openness to both inside and outside the organization. The author includes suggestions that will help an organization determine an open strategy, weigh the benefits against the risk, and have a clear understanding of the implications of being open. The book also contains guidelines, policies, and procedures that successful companies have implemented to manage openness and ensure that business objectives are at the center of their openness strategy.

It’s a great read too. One of my favourite bits is where Li lists early on five new rules for leaders to bear in mind when managing relationships:

  1. Respect that your customers and employees have power
  2. Share constantly to build trust
  3. Nurture curiosity and humility
  4. Hold openness accountable
  5. Forgive failure

Hear, hear!

You can get a flavour of the book with this free snippet:

Bookmarks for April 25th through April 30th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Productivity, responsiveness and lighter weight

I rather like this, from Gartner’s Mark McDonald:

While the future will require IT to deliver enterprise specific strategies and initiatives there are a few considerations to keep mind:

Bookmarks for April 11th through April 16th

I find this stuff so that you don’t have to.

You can find all my bookmarks on Delicious. There is also even more stuff on my shared Google Reader page.

You can also see all the videos I think are worth watching at my video scrapbook.

Recruit the internet-savvy

The Telegraph had an interesting article this week: MI5 dumps spies who can’t use Facebook and Twitter:

Patrick Mercer, chairman of the Parliamentary subcommittee on counter-terrorism, told the Daily Mail: “As terrorism changes, counter-terrorism officers have to adapt to keep up.

‘Our enemies use every available method to attack including using technology. We have to be aware of the imminent threats of cyber attacks and the old generation of MI5 have to be completely comfortable using computers and the latest technology.”

You might not be surprised to learn that I’d recommend hiring internet-savvy candidates, no matter what position it is you are trying to fill. Think about it – what makes a good member of a team?

I reckon that the behaviour and attitude that the internet encourages are things that make for great employees:

  • curiosity
  • generosity
  • openness
  • cooperation

Of course, if you do hire people like this, you’ll need to provide them with a working environment in which they’ll want to stay.

“Always hire the internet-savvy” is a similar message to what the 37 Signals guys say in Getting Real about good writers:

That’s because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.

Mary blogged about recruitment recently, referring to a speech by the American academic Dennis Kimbro. Some attitudes about this issue in local government, as Mary notes, are worrying.

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