A Crucible for Blogging, Business & Life in the Bubble
Back in December I saw this teaser posted by Miikka Leinonen on SlideShare, and more recently updated on Insightory.com.
Here is a copy of the book, Strategy of Giving free to download and distribute of course! The Strategy of Giving site is packed with lots of goodies. Enjoy!
It has been a good many years since I first got my hands on a copy of Intrapreneuring: Why you don’t have to leave the corporation to become an entrepreneur by Gifford Pinchot. Few books have had such a lasting impression on me. I have kept a copy close to hand in every office I’ve worked in since 1986.
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.
Reading up on The Gift Economy I bumped into Mr. Pinchot again, writing on the very subject in In Context: A Quarterly of Humane Sustainable Culture. Once again what he had to say resonated with me in the same way as when I first picked up Intraprenuering.
Read the rest of this entry » ‘Gifford Pinchot: A Gift That Keeps Giving’
Wired posts The See-Through CEO that explores the advantage corporate top-dogs gain from understanding and managing transparency as a strategic tool. The article weighs the pros and cons of radical transparency — as questionable a term as “totally honest” as if to suggest there are degrees of integrity – and cites some examples worth thinking about.
In discussing the strategic potential of CEO transparency Clive Thompson makes this interesting point which should resonate with business bloggers who consider such lofty things to their own advantage:
Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that’s one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.
Why don’t we ditch the tautology “radical transparency” and opt for something that more accurately reflects what really goes on in the C-suites of many corporations? How about “opacity” instead?
At least then we can honestly frame a discussion about about the degrees of filtering that are appropriate for those areas of business which properly belong out of the public domain. We can also begin to examine the dubious motivations for those who choose to adopt “openness” as a means of obscuring the truth, managing reputations that may not withstand the tests of real integrity.
This gave me pause for thought…
Jason Goldberg, Jobster’s Blogging CEO Learns a Lesson
Richard Becker who authors the Copywrite, Ink blog posts a fantastic reply to comments left by “fire-brand” Jason Goldberg on his inaugural posting on RecruitingBloggers.com. For some, Jason Goldberg energized the debate on CEO blogging, albeit polarizing a great many within the fast-growing, lively and precocious Recruitosphere, and beyond.
As an aside, Jason Goldberg has been a favorite topic in many posts on my semi-retired Recruitomatic Blog. I couldn’t make up my mind then whether he is Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, and I still can’t make up my mind now. Anyway…
A reading of Richard’s post will give anyone who is not familiar with the recent debacle surrounding layoffs at start-up Jobster – and Jason Goldberg’s opaque and inept handling of the situation in real time — will find this an excellent point of entry into what is for me, undoubtedly, one of the most interesting twists in the developing genre of CEO blogs.
There is an object lesson here for those who are prepared to learn from Jason Goldberg’s naivety and Richard’s PR prowess, not least of all, for Jason Goldberg himself. Richard’s “living case study assessment” is proving to be a growing resource for understanding the related issues of CEO blogging, crisis communication and understanding that sometimes it is better to be thought a fool than to remove all doubt.
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