Second thing: Recent conversations with all sorts of people who lament the problems they have implementing things 2.0 in their organizations’ thinking and practice.
Hmmm…
In speaking to hundreds of workers and managers for large organizations (government and private sector), I’ve been asked the same questions, over and over:
How do you convince your boss to even experiment with social media?
Doesn’t it mean a lot of extra work?
Isn’t this sort of stuff blocked by our organizational policies?
Particularly disappointing was Scoble’s self-confessed, web-enabled obsessive-compulsiveness and apparent delight at finding new ways to feed it. Rather than seek help for what most would consider a disorder it appears he finds all the solace he needs in a similarly unhealthy physical attachment to his computer. I could be wrong but it just struck me that way, very odd.
If you want to cut to the chase, here’s the video…
I guess these days I am easily distracted as evidenced by this post, one thing leading to another…
On researching cognitive bias I came across Enemies of Reason by Professor Richard Dawkins. The program originally aired on Channel 4. This discovery coincided with my browsing around on YouTube this time researching, um, YouTube. As a result I now know how to create a playlist and have the series of five YouTube clips roll in one continuous play. Another coincidence perhaps, but this could be what I was looking for for another project of mine. My God, that’s it! Eureka!
Ahem. Sorry ’bout that.
If you don’t have an hour now, bookmark the page and come back to watch Episode One later. It’s very good.
If I had a dollar for every time I quoted from the book: “It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” or warned a friend, “You don’t want to trigger the ‘corporate immune system,’ Bud,” I would be quite a few dollars better off than I am this morning. Of course, it would hardly be as I had billed it then, free advice!
Anyway…
I have been busy researching open source values and various concepts that fly in the face of my traditional upbringing. It is a struggle to reconcile what I have learned in a career spent leveraging competitive advantage with what I know is a better model given a whole new set of circumstances and the proliferation of enabling technologies.
Bill’s presentation introduced “bleeding edge” technology to recruiters who by and large — by their own show of hands — were hemorrhaging on old notions of how to use the Internet. It was that that was was most interesting to me. I wondered, “Is the so-called war for talent going to be won with what most recruiters are currently equipped with?” I don’t think so.
Trying to wrap my head around information foraging theory I’m hoping a modern-day forager can help me make some stodgy stuff a little easier to digest…hmmm, maybe not!
The Discovery Channel airs an interesting program called Man vs Wild. The star of the show is Bear Grylls, a real life Action Man who demonstrates techniques for surviving the most inhospitable landscapes.
To accentuate the extreme nature of his adventures — and the diversity of what we eat on planet Earth perhaps — we are treated to the spectacle of watching iron-gut Grylls eat some particularly horrid things, or delicacies depending on your stomach.
Like most of the southeast, Georgia is suffering from one of the worst droughts in living memory.
In a state with such a large population of believers it should come as no surprise that one popular response to this disaster of near-biblical proportions is to take it to the Lord in prayer.
Atlanta, Georgia: ‘Gov Sonny Perdue stepped up to a podium outside the State Capitol on Tuesday and led a solemn crowd of several hundred people in a prayer for rain on his drought-stricken State’ [Greg Bluestein, AOL]. The Governor was joined by other State elected officials [James Salzer & Jim Galloway, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution]. Here is man in trouble, forgetting that he himself has declared the separation of his Church from his State.
The age-old debate about God and State aside, as one who frequently stumbles in his own walk I found it disturbing to watch the Governor lead the gathering in prayer. I wondered, “Why don’t any of the faithful have umbrellas? You would think at least one of them would have turned out with a raincoat on, wouldn’t you?”
Comebacks...