First thing: An earlier reading of Gifford Pinchot’s book Intrapreneuring, a topic worth revisiting I think;

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?

This Secret Underground Guide to Social Media for Organizations is meant to help you answer some of those questions.

Enjoy — the whole thing is here.

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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…

[Wassup, can't see it? Try WorkFast TV instead.]

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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!

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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!

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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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Read the post here…

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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.

You can read the whole post here…

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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.

Read the rest here…

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Can’t see the presentation? Click here to view on SlideShare]

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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?”

Flaunting your piety like this – in business as well as in politics — can be problematic on many levels. As a strategy it will backfire more often than not.

Secular audiences do not see beyond the handholding and muttering lips to examine the possibility that miracles do happen, on a daily basis. Nor do they consider that “No, not now…” is also a prayer answered. They just scoff and understandably so.

Signs and wonders rarely happen in the public square or on the scale of a Cecil B. DeMille production. They happen on neighborhood corners, in the back of ambulances and in checkout lines. The biggest of miracles are small scale affairs. They come in one to five hundred dollar increments; they are about being given “our daily bread” not about the image of Christ burned magically on a slice of toast. Miracles are everyday occurrences that go unnoticed except by those innocents who experience their wonder.

Because most miracles happen out of sight and behind closed doors neither the media nor masses is quite prepared to accept that Sonny Perdue’s public display of devotion could be anything but faith-based hype. Therein lies the problem.

For public consumption miracles equate with scientific marvels, everything from the separation of conjoined twins to the overnight healing of acne — not spiritual spin on the Capitol steps and Sonny Perdues’s state-sponsored shamanism.

Really, what was Sonny Perdue thinking? If the skies obligingly opened up did Sunshine-Sonny imagine for one moment that it would be enough rain to fill the empty drink? Daggit! It would have to rain for forty days and forty nights, then what?

I think Joe Schmoe — who wants to believe — can be forgiven for asking, “Where’s your brolly, Brother?” Similarly, some skeptics should be forgiven for thinking that the forecast of rain for the day being wrong was greater than the Governor’s communing with God resulting in anything to take cover for. So why hide those lovely summer outfits under something drab and water resistant? For the skeptics either way it looks like a cover-up, a sham.

On the flipside some of us who live in neighboring states — similarly desperate for a good soaking, also affected by Georgia’s plight — should be careful what we pray for. I live in Florida. Spared another season of destructive hurricanes that blessing has come at the expense of our not getting nearly enough rain. Like the good Governor, “damned if you do and damned if you don’t.“

Yep, praying for rain on the Capitol steps is a tricky business.

In the final analysis, doing things “faith-based” is no guarantee of anything other than the faithfuls’ faith will be tested. You can ask the good folk at Atlanta-based HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation that as it relates to business. And this week in politics, Goergia’s super-goober too.

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