1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing – David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple – MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing – Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook – Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets – SEOBook

6. Get Viral Get Visitors – Stacie Mahoe
7. Marketing With Case Studies – Dynamic Copywriting
8. How to Write a Marketing Plan – Geisheker Group
9. SEO for WordPress blogs – Blizzard Internet
10. Social Web Analytics – Social Web Analytics
11. Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter – Geekpreneur
12. The Zen of Blogging – Hunter Nutall
13. What is Social Media – iCrossing
14. A Primer in Social Media – SmashLab
15. Effective Internet Presence – Effective Internet Presence
16. Introduction to Good Usability – Peter Pixel
17. Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program – CRM Transformation
18. We Have a Website. Now What? – Craig Rentmeester
19. Blogs & Social Media – PRSA
20. The Podcast Customer Revealed – Edison Media Research

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.

[Don't see anything? Watch it on YouTube.]

So, having watched it again I’m wondering why these questions remain unanswered:

Is “being distracted as evidenced by this post” itself a cognitive bias, or is “one thing leading to another?” Hmmm…once again, I’m buggered, daggit!

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.

In particular, this poignant passage stopped me in my tracks:

A Shift from Capital to Talent

The critical factor controlling success in business is shifting from capital to talent. Employees are no longer interchangeable parts. This is not good for everyone, the undereducated and those whose talents are not now in demand are losing ground. But there is a bright side. Employers must curry the favor of their talented employees who increasingly have an ethical agenda. Employees who can easily find work elsewhere are refusing to work on projects or for companies that offend their values, even if they would be well paid to do so. As this trend increases, as people take a stand for sustainability in choosing their work, even public corporations seeking the favor of bloodless institutional investors will find that sustainable companies have the best future because they have the best talent. In fields where creativity counts, sustainability is a competitive weapon.

This strategy will not work if we are so pure that no realistic level of improvement would meet our standards. It will not work if we sell out for greenwashing instead of instituting real environmentally conscious practices. Biasing the system for sustainability requires some of us to be in the game demanding change.

Frugality and Choice

Our ability to make our talent count for change will often require us to take less for our services than if we were selling to the highest bidder.

One consulting firm I know virtually requires new consultants to use their fine salaries to buy expensive cars and houses. They want them up to their eyeballs in debt so the company can have complete control over them. They want their consultants living in fear of losing their jobs so they don’t ever put ethics ahead of their sales and profits.

Voluntary simplicity is not just polluting less, it is having more to “spend” on integrity at work. If we can live on less, we can turn down unsustainable projects at work just as we do in our choices at home.

Talented people have been making sustainable career choices in increasing numbers. This gives businesses that can provide good work towards good ends a great advantage, and this advantage will grow as the highly environmentally and socially conscious generation in school now becomes important talent to business.

The real game in the business world of the ecological age is running a business or a career so as to make a contribution to the community, the nation, and even to the planet as a whole. True business competence in the ecological age is demonstrated by producing a better product or service for customers and at the same time setting new standards for reducing pollution, for creating habitat, for helping the less fortunate. We cannot play this new game until we move beyond the fear of insolvency and learn to live frugally regardless of financial success.

The old status system is hard on the heart. Living for the larger self through a strategy of frugality and service opens up the heart to the glory of creation all around us. The gift is repaid manyfold.

Wow! How cool is that? You wriggle and writhe trying to articulate something so abstract — or so you think — and there it is, where you least expect to find it!

Thank you, Gifford, you’ve made my day — yet again.

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One of the benefits of chasing your tail is that in the process there is so much interesting stuff to discover and think about, all wonderful distractions from the bitter irony that if I am ever successful in my quest I’ll finish up kissing my ass good-bye.

And so I discovered Dr. Richard Barbrook who recently published what looks like a smashing book, Imaginary Futures.  I am setting this aside to study more closely because the thesis is fascinating and there is something about the overall feel of the thing that resonates with me, something retro maybe?

Here is the professor in his own words…

…and the text to study. Also, Sarah Snider’s review in Culture Wars, perhaps a better place to start.

Daggit! I’ve really got my work cut out…

I came across this example from Cisco which illustrates the point — take your pick from any one of those above:

Ah, the human condition and the human network are becoming indistinguishable. What a bummer.

This is a study of the technostructure as described by J.K. Galbraith and Henry Mintzberg. Their notion of the technostructure is compared to Gareth Morgan’s eight metaphors in “Images of Organization” to see if Morgan’s metaphors can provide new aspects of the technostructure…

In 1967 John Kenneth Galbraith wrote The New Industrial State. In the book he analyzed his new finding The Technostructure as a part of his description of modern economic life. He defines the technostructure as the leadership of the modern industrial enterprise. He found that it is the complex of specialists and technicians that exercise the decisive power.

In 1983 Henry Mintzberg published both Structure in Fives and Power In and Around Organizations, which among other topics describe the technostructure as taking part in the management and development of individual organizations.

In 1986 Gareth Morgan published Images of Organization where he is using various metaphors to scrutinize our perceptions of organization. The book does not treat the notion of the technostructure as such. Second edition was published 1997.

Since my introduction to Gareth Morgan’s book in 1988 — golly Olly, I’m getting old — it has been a recurring reference for my research and a helpful tool for reconciling some of my experiences in, and at, work. To the extent that have returned over and over to a new reading of Morgan’s metaphor’s I have hardly read John Kenneth Gailbrath or Henry Mitzberg. Ebbe Munk’s reasearch — which is not recent — has rekindled a desire to revisit them more often. And I will.

Ah, metaphors…here’s another that goes with Morgan’s Psychic Prisoner Metaphor - enjoy!

However, I have yet to find something equally substantive to read that addresses the more fundamental issues of how to create an environment in which Web 2.0 applications and social media can be adopted when the underlying management style, corporate thinking, vested interests and technology are typically All-things 1.0. Perhaps I should look harder.

Tom Davenport who is referenced in Dion Hinchcliffe’s post writes in Why Enterprise 2.0 Won’t Transform Organizations on Harvard Business Online. He suggests that organizational hierarchies and the centralization of power within larger bureaucracies will thwart the aspirations of advocates who would advance the agenda for a flattening of traditional models but offers no thoughts on how to reverse this dystopian — and likely accurate — view of the future. Rather Tom Davenport asks, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a way to create more democratic organizations?”

Well, to my own question — how to facilitate adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in the face of prevailing convention — and Tom Davenport’s tease regarding the creation of democratic organizations, quite frankly, I don’t know. I do think social media enables a vanguard of activists — agent provocateurs, intraprenuers and “radical transparencists” — to force rapid and irreversible change by deploying technology and widgets and things to oblige accountability, transparency, authenticity and responsibility.

The question then is, how many are there willing to lay it on the line for an ideal which may never profit them directly? For sure, they will more likely be crucified than promoted to positions of “power” and influence. Historically, the vanguard and avant-garde have been the culture catalysts but rarely the beneficiaries of social change.

I don’t see social media and mashups in of themselves changing that much about how corporate culture is catalyzed, do you? Maybe it will take an Army of Davids and then some. Or is that wishful thinking too?

I came across this post, The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging by Brian Clark who writes Copyblogger. I can honestly say that I must have read hundreds of posts and articles that similarly advise tenderfoots like me how to tiptoe through the tulips. But this one is the one I will reference as I move forward, at least for now.

Why?

Not because it is better than everything else I’ve read, although I like it best. Not because it’s short and sweet. After all, there is the The Two Immutable Laws of Blogging for that. And, not because these five things…

• The Law of Value
• The Law of Headlines and Hooks
• The Law of “How To”
• The Law of the List, and
• The Law of the Story

…are unduplicated pearls of wisdom, they are not. So, why?

When you consider the awful noise to signal ratio of blogging I think it might be just as well to tune into one thing that resonates clearly and stay tuned. Too often, at least as it seems to me, in the quest to find the best information or resource out there we forget it’s not the information or resource that is of any use, but the use we put that information or resource to that makes one man’s post another man’s…er, post? Dammit! So much for “The Law of Value!”

Interestingly, I came across The 5 Immutable Laws of Persuasive Blogging two clicks away from The Enormous Linkbait List published on cornwallseo.com proving once again, in researching blogging best-practice – at least as far as I’m concerned – less is more, even when it’s enormous.