I am a robot reader for anything Kathy Sierra writes: I don’t know Kathy Sierra except for the consistently thought-provoking Creating Passionate Users blog posts she writes about business, marketing and life. I’m sure if she were asked, she’d say she prefers blog readers who disagree with her — who aren’t afraid to shake things up and point out why she may not always be correct. I’m sure she’d be the last to say she likes her readers to be yes-people, always agreeing with everything she writes, always making obsequious comments about how smart she is.
Unfortunately for me, I’m one of those obsequious types when it comes to anything she writes. I just fall in line and say, “what she said.” I’m a zombie reader of her weblog. A robot. Like when she writes how CEOs all say they want independent thinkers and then reward employees who never question anything they say: Employees who see their jobs in terms of how well they can please the boss (or VC?). Kathy points out that parents can be like that also: saying they want “independent-minded” kids while punishing any smack of such independent thinking. Yes, so while reading her stuff makes me squirm with discomfort and recognition, I still find myself wanting to link to her posts and say, “what she said.” And a lot of the time, I do.
On Thursday I heard a well-known management consultant tell the story of a CEO of a large company who casually asked a line worker for a bit of information about one item: “Just send me a note on some scrap paper,” the CEO asked as he was walking by. The story, which smacked of urban myth despite the speaker’s attribution to a specific individual and company, has the line worker’s boss and boss’s boss, and boss’s boss’s boss, etc., take over the “report” and project when they learn the CEO had “ordered it.” A couple months later, a three-inch thick report landed on the CEO’s desk, a complete mystery to him. After tracking down the source of it, the CEO estimated that the time and resources devoted to it was close to $1 million.
And he didn’t even get the answer to his question.
To keep that from happening at Hammock Publishing, I long-ago ordered all employees to never listen to anything I ever say. The company’s success can be chalked up to their zombie-like adherence to that directive.
Technorati Tags: work
How to blog a conference: Josh Hallett posted a super how-to guide for blogging a conference. Actually, it’s a good guide for setting up a group blog for any purpose. As Josh and I use all the same tools, I especially like it. I would only add one thing: While Josh reminds you to encourage attendees to tag Flickr photos with a pre-determined tag, I would broaden the “tag” evangelism to cover all things tagable. And have a conference/event tag determined beforehand and publicize it beforehand, during and after the event. Even if you don’t know what “tagging” is, come up with one. (Just think of a keyword that
Even when I attend tech conferences, the official tag is still something I guess on: i.e., is it SXSW or SXSW06 or SXSW2006?
Another more thing (and this is highlighted by one of the comments on Josh’s post). Rather than trying to figure out how “to blog” a conference, many event and conference organizers are still in another camp, wondering, rather, how do I keep attendees from blogging the conference — Josh, himself, has been dinged by a conference for posting audio of sessions, I recall.
Obviously, I’m in the camp of doing all one can to encourage open conferences — and setting up the systems for giving voice to all who attend. I’m in the camp of suggesting to conference organizers to learn from Josh. No matter what you do, however, those who attend your conferences will figure all of this out anyway.
Technorati Tags: bloggers, blogging
No jinxing this from me: Okay, there’s this NFL football game taking place right now. It’s halftime. One of the teams playing is a team I follow and mention here on this blog several times each fall. But this year, that team sucks. In fact, at this point, they are statistically, the worst team in the NFL — by a mile. However, right now they’re not sucking. They are looking really good against one of the best teams in the NFL. In fact, they are winning the game 10-0 and are really playing well. Did I mention the team I like is a three touch-down underdog against the team they are playing?
But I’m not going to blog about it.
I’m afraid that if I mention anything good about my hometown team, as soon as I hit the publish button, this game will head south. Anyway, I have too many years of experience watching the other team’s quarterback win games in the fourth quarter — coming back from some deep deficits. I think it’s amusing, however, that such a great quarterback and a team that is now 4-0, is getting booed by their hometown crowd.
No, the quarterback of the other team can win this kind of game all day long no matter how bad things look at halftime.
It’s the big games he loses.
Did I say that?
I think I’ll turn off the TV and pretend like my team plays like this all the time. The way the used to.
Update: Well, a 14-13 loss is better than the crap we’ve been subjected to the last few weeks.
