Browsing Tag

Culture

Recognize your prime as an opportunity to learn…

This is a guest-post from Kris Rowlands who blogs at Fresh Focus who was thought she might just write a guest post on one of the questions I asked to get feedback from folks.  Kris’ tackled one of the questions I proposed in crazy real-time.  This would certainly makes sense she blogs on productivity.  I struggled a little bit with the title, I didn’t know what Kris wanted, but I definately wanted to get it online, in the same rapid fashion in which it was created so I made one up.   It is a blend of a quote which Kris’ had on Fresh Focus and the question I asked.


“Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.” – Muriel Spark

Thanks much to Kris for the guest post below:

This was one of the questions that Jon posed to his readers. He was looking for someone to do a guest post, and I decided to be a victim!

So, building on the sentence above has proven to be a challenge to me. Picking one single experience would be hard. But, I’ve found a way to wriggle outta that box and put my own spin on it. – hang on for the ride!

The single experience is called LIFE. Obviously, living our LIFE allows us the grand opportunity to learn each and every day…..I hear grumblings in the audience……”GRAND OPPORTUNITY”??? Yep – you bet.

LIFE is a grand opportunity for many, many things. Meeting people, traveling, having a career……….but none of that is more important than the lessons that you learn along the way. Once a lesson is learned, and really learned, your rid of it forever. But if you hem and haw, don’t learn the lesson and repeat the pattern, they you aren’t learning a darn thing! In my opinion, our purpose, while on this Earth, is to learn and teach. You may not thing of yourself as teacher, but you truly are. The people that are involved with you learn from your experiences, trials and tribulations. They also learn from your joy, exuberance and successes. Everything that you do touches all the people that surround your life. The LIFE that they see you live is impressed indelibly upon them. Hopefully, they will learn from your mistakes, as you have……….and if they don’t, and follow in your footsteps, then you have the skills and ammunition needed to help them learn the lesson this time around.

My LIFE has been a university with a mixture of hard knocks, Masters’ Degrees and kindergarden. There have been easy, hard, and lengthy lessons to live……but I, as well as all of those around me, have learned from all of them. It seems, to me, that once I learn a LIFE lesson that someone will present themselves that is going through that same lesson so that I can teach them what I have learned – they say the best way to learn something is teaching another! And I have, many times.

Live your LIFE and learn from all the experiences that come into it. Don’t dread the leaps and hurdles that you will have – learn and grow! But most of all, try and retain all that knowledge that you learn – you’ll never know who needs it next!

August 8, 2008 by
(5)

Great Ideas? Maybe not, but they are YOURS!

So I continue to just be so busy with life, that it is hard to keep the content comming, but true to my less fluff more value statement, I thought I would spend some time and share some topics hopefully you can blog on. I’ve already had a couple of great guest posts from folks and 2 more on the way. My thanks to the Bigg Success Show and Stephen for their efforts. I also am interested in letting folks guest post on the following topics (especially the first 9) or another topics which you feel might fit well into this eclectic mix here at Spatially Relevant:

Business and Social Media

  • What is the biggest challenge for social media for general corporate wide participation/acceptance?
  • What is the best use of social media for a business? Service, demand gen, knowledge management…
  • Our brand has been hijacked online – now what?!?!

Social Media and Ethics

  • What role do standards play in creating transparency and authenticity, if any?
  • How can identity management improve accountability?
  • What is the biggest hurdle for establishing best practices and ethical frameworks for social media?

Standards

  • How can standards assist in scaling a given activity?
  • What controls and governance opportunities exist for standards organizations/development which are NOT being pursued today in Social Media?
  • What is the value in a standards based approach?

Product Management and Marketing

  • Can a technology development model change a product or companies viability in the marketplace?
  • Who owns the product strategy – the customer, the product management or the market?
  • How can positioning and targeting of buyer persona’s improve sales execution?

Better Place Concepts

  • This <single experience> represents an opportunity for all of us to learn <X>?
  • In the last 90 days this in the biggest lesson I learned which should be shared
  • If <X> was a commonly held belief/activity/x it would be easier for everyone to <x>?

Personal Growth

  • I’m putting an personal action plan in place to accomplish <X> in the next 30 days?
  • I just realized I’m not the center of the universe, now what?
  • I used to think X was sorta important, now I think it is a requirement for a fulfilled experience

Personal Shrink (two sides to every coin)

  • I am the center of the universe, deal with it jackass.
  • If everyone would stop X, I’d be a better person
  • I can’t believe you don’t appreciate X

Geography

  • What cities are all of your Grateful Dead/Phish/Panic/Yonder T-shirts from?
  • Where is the best place to do nothing at and why?
  • What is the smallest city you actually flew to and why?

If you end up posting on one of these please link back and send me an email, I’ll do a summary post which itemizes all the blogs which posted on Wednesday and links to the posts.

If you think you have a guest post in one of these send me an email at publisher AT spatiallyrelevant DOT org.

I will schedule my guest post schedule for next saturday due to travel, so I look forward to your posts and submission by Thursday – midnight for an eligible guest post. Ok, Friday am will work, but much later than that – no promises.

So the question is – can you get listed in both the Wednesday list and the Saturday list? Yup, you just have to participate/do the work. It does have kinda of an outsourcing feel or another way to look at it is I’m going to pimp my list for you.

When you send the email for a guest post or to point me to your post on one of the above, please include the following:

Name, blog URL and Post URL – A sentence about your blog would be cool, so the folks here might want to add you to their RSS reader.

if you are interested in a guest post, just give me a sentence or two on why your should be considered along with the post you think should make it. I will post no more than 10 during the month of August.  Everyone looks forward to YOUR POV on these.

Hope this is fun and works, because I clearly would like to learn more about the folks that read my stuff and how we can as a group influence our space.

~jon

August 3, 2008 by
(7)

Principles: Shading strategy, execution and interactions

prin·ci·ple [prin-suh-puhl] –noun

1. an accepted or professed rule of action or conduct: a person of good moral principles.
2. a fundamental, primary, or general law or truth from which others are derived: the principles of modern physics.
3. a fundamental doctrine or tenet; a distinctive ruling opinion: the principles of the Stoics.
4. principles, a personal or specific basis of conduct or management: to adhere to one’s principles; a kindergarten run on modern principles.
5. guiding sense of the requirements and obligations of right conduct: a person of principle.
6. an adopted rule or method for application in action: a working principle for general use.
7. a rule or law exemplified in natural phenomena, the construction or operation of a machine, the working of a system, or the like: the principle of capillary attraction.
8. the method of formation, operation, or procedure exhibited in a given case: a community organized on the patriarchal principle.
9. a determining characteristic of something; essential quality.
10. an originating or actuating agency or force: growth is the principle of life.
11. an actuating agency in the mind or character, as an instinct, faculty, or natural tendency: the principles of human behavior.
12. Chemistry. a constituent of a substance, esp. one giving to it some distinctive quality or effect.
13. Obsolete. beginning or commencement.

—Idioms
14. in principle, in essence or substance; fundamentally: to accept a plan in principle.
15. on principle,
a. according to personal rules for right conduct; as a matter of moral principle: He refused on principle to agree to the terms of the treaty.
b. according to a fixed rule, method, or practice: He drank hot milk every night on principle.

The funny thing about principles is that not only is the construct so nuanced that it supports 15 different dictionary use cases, but we often forget iT shades most daily actions. I was reminded of this throughout the week based on three different interactions within multiple settings – professional, social and familial. The trifecta of situational proof points that principles could be seen as an individual’ personal acceptable use policy.

Each situation for each participant is shaded by not only personal experience/biases, but constrained to the context of one’s principles. A friend has told me time and time again, your “world view” impacts your reactions and others reactions to YOU. For example, my view of productivity and follow up is not the same as others or vice versa. which while circular logic is the recursive spiral many interactions get into because of core DNA differences with folks. At times you just can’t connect your idea, emotions or actions toward what may or may not be common goals. Ultimately, how does an individual internalize a strategy, a brand or an action plan in the marketplace or in a cohort group is often the common thread of miscommunication between folks, as least that’s my lesson of the week around principles.

To effectively lead, manage or interact this is a baseline reality is often forgotten and overlooked, MYSELF included. I find myself not asking enough questions, but instead interpreting reactions and actions within how I would see/feel on a given topic which is more of an anchor than way to move forward and drive change. So my personal and career challenge to myself of week is to use my ears more than my mouth and to ask questions as to why something isn’t as effective as I thought it would be, rather than to make assumptions based on my own understanding/filter.

I think with this approach then perhaps I can avoid the pitfall of the best laid plans going awry. So now I think I have 101 things to be thankful for.

I really get excited when life hits you in the head with a blunt object and make you realize the best thing is that we are all different and bring different view, strategies and tactics.

For me it’s those situational reminders which provides clarity on things. I think I’ll read the 4 agreements again.

July 20, 2008 by
(5)

Social Media Club Hits the Accelerator

With the recent press release from the Social Media Club, everyone is off and running! A new board and new opportunity. So I’ve clearly gotten myself over my head again, looking for some input…. It’s not like being over my head it’s unfamiliar space for me. After my post on the Social Media Club’s execution, I’ve had a flurry of activity around here. After the dust has settled, I have now committed to figuring some stuff out and doing a little effort. Oh what crazy stuff comes from truthiness. Great opportunity, is my take and an interesting process to boot.

After several interactions and a thoughtful discussion with Chris, I’m back to doing standards work, but in the context of Social Media. Chris and I rambled for a couple of minutes on the phone, talked around some my volunteer work in standards and industry groups (X12, VICS, NEECOM, OAGi, RosettaNet and then UCC, now GS1) and shared interest which apparently gave me some street cred. So with this somewhat trivial and completely unverified experience, I’m now able to “officially” allocate some time to the group. The trust economy is indeed a strange thing.

Kinda of refreshing – add value where you can. I guess membership wasn’t a bad idea and yes the t-shirt is great!

The evidently egalitarian approach to this club is fairly refreshing. An interim group to drive the next iteration of Social Media Club was kicked off this week. The group is 42 folks with seemingly diverse skill sets, seems a little big I know. The benefit of this approach is a highly redundant skills architecture to help scale the organization, a service oriented architecture for the organizations. The loosely couple governance model is constrained to a single rule set/theme – “do good for SMC”. In near real-time the group had a list server, press release draft, a wiki and a request for research.

Do The Work

Volunteer organizations are interesting entities – passion, skills and no shortage of things to do to be successful. Same thing at SMC. Every organization I’ve ever engaged in since I was young democrat had more work to go around than folks. So in an effort to start doing the work, I thought I would kick off my participation to better understand Identity.

Social media is a changing landscape where personality, historical actions and group membership/brand association continue to impact the individual and identity. Below is a piece that Chris did a while back to help thinking about how social media and identity are innately evolving or devolving in lock step.

Fractured identity and the limited ability to aggregate access is becoming increasingly laborious set of activities for me at least. Platform fatigue, technology emergence or context changes impact where and how an individual participates, so data portability could be considered important.. That being said, it may not be the priority to focus on which would better enable adoption.

So in the interest of loosely defined research, I am lookin for a little help from my friends. What should be highest priority area of interest in standards alignment/adoption for Social Media Club? Is there another theme or standard which would return significant value to the over all community?

Here is the shortlist:

So let’s prioritize and do the work.

Comment, post or tweet.

If you post your ideas, let me know with a comment or use SMCBOARD as a tag for your post.

July 9, 2008 by
(12)