These are my shared links for March 22nd through March 28th:
- It is not just the exceptions it is the exceptional – OK, it's a sales pitch, but there's an interesting point in here about using social networking tools to capture "exceptional moments" in employees' work.The idea behind this is that the Pareto effect is in play with employees (80% of your profit is generated by 20% of employees), and that it probably happens in conversations and moments that are NOT part of the employee's "normal" job. That sort of thing has rarely been captured accurately, or even contemporaneously – it becomes a story where the facts may get lost but the concept gets embedded into the company's culture – if you're lucky. The chance of that happening are a lot better, and the outcome a lot more useful, if the story is captured at the time and persisted in a searchable archive … like, say, some "social business system".
- ☆ The Tyranny Of The Urgent – A timely reminder from Simon that we pay too much attention to the "urgent", and ignore the "important", often to our own detriment. The post reiterates the importance of taking some time away from distractions (usually our on-line life!) to think about what we should and shouldn't be doing, and try and get some perspective on the important things, rather than what's in our face right now.
- When Social Bites Back: Dealing With Missteps – A sensible, well-considered post on what to do if you (or an employee) screws up in public via social media (referencing the infamous Chrysler tweet). It's worth reading the post for Amber's good advice, but one phrase she used hit me in the face, and I'd love to see it lights on billboards all over the country: "but you can’t build a business or a team based solely on preventing the mistakes of the past." When I think of how much of the process cruft most organisations deal with is a result of attempting to avoid what was probably a one-off mistake, I weep. The cost of the "preventative" process is almost certainly greater than the cost of making the mistake again, but we persist in reacting to mistakes with overheads that penalise every subsequent activity. In Amber's words: "let it go"!
- 10 Projects Moving Us Towards a Superfluid Economy – A critical step to a new form of economy is a new currency. In this post, Vanessa highlights ten projects (in various stages of development) that aim to get us thinking differently about "money", both as an item of exchange and as a store of value. She calls the future of money a "superfluid economy", one powered (often) by direct peer-to-peer exchanges, and at Internet speed.
- Netflix stung with privacy lawsuits – Kim Cameron makes the point that a "right to be forgotten" when cancelling a Web account of some description, is actually arse-about – unnecessary information shouldn't be captured about us in the first place. This, to my mind, is the intersection of Infocards and VRM: establishing our identity to a Web-based service should not entail the capture (and retention) of private information, and our likes/preferences etc should remain OUR property, that we share with a service provider in a personally-unidentifiable manner, and only when WE decide that the sharing has sufficient value.