What If You Fired Your 8 Million Most Influential Users?
What if you were running a big web business and you fired your 8 million most influential users? Would that be a smart thing to do? Would your shareholders be happy? Would your board be happy? What possible reason could you have to do such a thing? What perceived advantage would offset the cost of […]
The CEO is the Most Confident Man in the Company
I heard somewhere that one definition the Navy has of a ship’s captain is that he is, “the most confident man on the ship.” A CEO could be similarly defined. Why confidence as the defining quality for these leadership roles? It’s because these roles will ultimately have to deal with leadership in the absence of […]

Seth: Netflix Avoided the Tragically Knowable
Seth Godin is perhaps my all time favorite blogger, and I have recommended him frequently. We mostly agree, but not this time. His recent post is trying to convey the need to “just do it” as Nike says, without a lot of testing and analysis. Godin is big on getting on with it and not […]

Great Products Need Something Borrowed and Something New
Seth Godin, one of my favorite bloggers, has a great post on the value of clichés. His observation makes a lot of sense: we need the familiar to be able to lock in on a product or idea. Without it, whole new cognitive mindshare has to be built before we have a place to pigeonhole […]

Divided We #FAIL
With all my dedicated passion for the social web and its inspirational, world-changing promise, people often wonder why I’ve chosen to focus on the enterprise. My answer is: because it’s hard and #ifnotyouthenwho? One of the last bastions of resistance to embrace the tenets of 2.0 philosophy is found in the large corporate culture. It also […]

An author’s hour in heaven
When I started to write the book, a friend of mine wise cracked “All you need is a hairdo like Malcolm Gladwell’s”. You know I would kill for that hair :)But I am just as flattered by this comparison Tom Foydel makes between The New Polymath and Gladwell’s Outlier. Or the one Sadagopan makes with […]

Forget Slick: Reputation, Transparency, and Guts
It’s been a little while since I wrote about a Seth Godin post. ‘Bout time. Godin is a must-read for me, and all of his posts are pithy, relevant, and urgent to understand. Today’s subject is a brief post entitled simply, “Slick.” We all crave slick. In media, it is a signalling device for success […]

The Linchpin and The New Polymath – The Indispensable Individuals and Organizations
One of my favorite books of the year is the Linchpin by Seth Godin – it takes you on a journey from how our economy has evolved to a point where its neither necessary nor optimal for you to be a cog in the wheel of a faceless system that treats you as …

Great Read for Small Businesses and Startups: The Referral Engine
I loved John Jantsch’s book, “The Referral Engine“. Like the book jacket says, it’s about teaching your business to market itself. It’s funny, but I expected the book to be about something else from the title. I guess I had visions of multi-level marketing when I heard the word “referral”. While the strategies and tactics the […]