links for 2009-10-30

• David Straus Interview: Collaboration Then and Now
  From Interaction Associates: Nowadays, collaboration is seen as vital to achieving success strategically.
  (tags: collaboration)
• How to organise a children's party
  a hilarious video of David Snowden on how to apply different systems perspectives when organizing a children's birthday party
  (tags: systems-thinking complexity videos)
• Four Styles of Leadership
  From Forbes: Visionary, empathetic, humble servitude, moral/ethical
  (tags: leadership-styles)
• A Problem-Solver's Guide to Copycatting
  The San Diego Zoo is developing a specialty in biomimicry, a discipline that tries to solve problems by imitating the ingenious and sustainable answers provided by nature.
  (tags: systems-thinking biomimicry problem-solving innovation)

links for 2009-10-22

• David Hockney is painting with his iPhone
  (tags: iphone illustration)
• The 15 Laws of Meeting Power
  From Venkatesh Rao: We humans are simpler in collectives than we are as individuals. We like to think there is a “whole greater than the sum of the parts” dynamic to human collectives, but there really isn’t. The larger the meeting, the dumber it is. If you find a large deliberative body that is acting in ways that are smarter than its size should permit, you can be sure its workings are being subverted by, say, Karl Rove. I’ll argue that larger thesis in a future article, but for now, I’ll just use that element of my personal doctrine to explain why I’ve been fascinated by meetings for years — they are simpler to study, understand and influence than individuals (in particular that most stubborn individual, yourself). When introspection gets to be too tiring, I turn to thinking about groups.
  (tags: group-effectiveness meetings communication)

links for 2009-10-17

• 10 Reasons Social Media isn't Replacing Email
  (tags: e-mail e-marketing social-networks social-media trends)
• The End of the Email Era
  From Wall Street Journal: Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over. In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
  (tags: e-mail e-marketing)
• Usability Testing Demystified
  From A List Apart: The value in usability testing comes from the magic of observing and listening as people use a design. The things you see and the things you hear are often surprising, illuminating, and unpredictable. This unpredictability is tough to capture in any other way. Dana Chisnell shows you how.
  (tags: web-usability)
• Organizational culture and email overload
  From Mark Hurst at Good Experience: Whenever I give a talk on solving email overload, someone inevitable raises their hand and says, "How can I get my coworkers to stop sending me so many emails?" It's a legitimate question, as lots of people suffer from needless emails in the workplace.
  (tags: email-inbox e-mail-etiquette information-overload)
• Leading after layoffs
  Leading After Layoffs: Best Practices for Re-Energizing Your Workforce is a fine and accessible short book. Did you know that a 1 percent reduction in force can have a huge negative ripple effect throughout the organization?
  (tags: leadership down-economy)
• Live Twitter Feeds Into Powerpoint
  (tags: twitter powerpoint presentations)
• Facebook fan pages are the future
  From Church of the Customer: Facebook fan pages are the future for three reasons: They're free, easy to create and build a nearly instantaneous pathway to evangelists, prospects or the curious.
  (tags: facebook)
• Understanding the new FTC guidelines for endorsements and testimonials
  the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released new guidelines (.pdf document) for how businesses can use endorsements and testimonials in marketing. It’s a complicated and nuanced matter. Hopefully the presentations below will help you better understand what has happened and what marketers must be doing now.
  (tags: writing-reference legal)
• Feature: 5 Reasons to Use WordPress as CMS
  (tags: wordpress blog-design cms)
• The Difference Between Strategy And Tactics
  So you want to look like a genius? Most often, we stumble our way into the greatest of breakthroughs.
  (tags: strategy strategic-planning)
• The Confidence Game
  Some research suggests that people will forgive a leader who is wrong some of the time if only that leader is really confident. Apparently people prefer confidence to competence.

  It turns out that groups with confident leaders do better than groups whose leaders are not as confident. So even with incompetence in leadership, those groups prosper.

  
  
  (tags: leadership leadership-styles confidence positive-psychology)
  
  
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  Making sense of social networking and social media
  
  
  Learn How Using Social Networking and Social Media Can Help Improve Your Nonprofit Organization
  
  
  (tags: social-networks social-media web2.0)
  
  
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  How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online (and What Social Networks Are Doing to Help Them)
  
  
  From Electronic Frontier Foundation: 3rd party advertising and tracking firms are ubiquitous on the modern web. When you visit a webpage, there's a good chance that it contains tiny images or invisible JavaScript that exists for the sole purpose of tracking and recording your browsing habits. This sort of tracking is performed by many dozens of different firms. In this post, we're going to look at how this tracking occurs, and how it is being combined with data from accounts on social networking sites to build extensive, identified profiles of your online activity.
  
  
  (tags: search-engine-optimization customer-experience web-marketing web-analytics)
  
  
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  Experience Themes: How a storytelling method can help unify teams and create better products
  
  
  This article is about a method drawn from storytelling that can help us build a better story about our product, unify teams, inspire design concepts and get us closer to evoking the pleasure, emotion and meaning of the experience we intend to deliver to users through the products and services we design.
  
  
  (tags: storytelling customer-experience design-process)
  
  
• 
  
  Artistic Authority in Orchestras: A Tricky Balance
  
  
  From Henry Fogel. appear to have caused some confusion in the past with my comments about orchestra board members who try to wield too much authority in programming decisions, and conversely about conductors who adopt an autocratic, almost dictatorial stance, saying, "I am in charge of all artistic matters--just leave me alone." In a private email I was recently asked, "Which is it, Mr. Fogel? Is the music director in charge? Or the board? Or, for that matter, the management?"
  
  
  (tags: command-and-control orchestras boards arts-management)
  
  
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  The Bureau of Communication
  
  
  Fill-in-the-blank correspondence
  
  
  (tags: writing-reference)
  
  
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  Why Design Thinking Won't Save You
  
  
  By Peter Merholz at Harvard Business Blog. Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing "creatives," "ideating" tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth.
  
  
  (tags: design-thinking creativity innovation decision-making)
  
  
• 
  
  Collaboration is a muscle
  
  
  In his extensive experience with communities of practice building software together, Chris Mackey says that muscle takes time to build bulk and dexterity. Early efforts are invariably designed to solve immediate problems, often narrowly defined. But the process of resolving those problems together made the group smarter, more sophisticated, and more prepared to grow into the challenge of a larger frame.
  
  
  (tags: collaboration)
  
  

links for 2009-10-08

• Testing Positive Psychology
  Are there really steps people can take to increase their overall happiness and life satisfaction?
  (tags: positive-psychology happiness)
• Wired to Wonder
  Want to live a more meaningful life? Start by asking questions, suggests psychologist Todd Kashdan.
  (tags: positive-emotions questions curiosity)
• Greater Good Science Center
  At U Cal, Berkeley
  (tags: positive-psychology)

Questions for a team start-up

What are your strengths?
How would you like to use your strengths in this experience?
What do you need to do your best?
How can we support you in bringing your best?
What do you want from this experience?
What do you know about yourself in work groups?
How do you best show up?
What concerns do you have about this experience?
What would you like to explore or try?
What are you passionate about?

links for 2009-10-05

• DIY Themes — The ultimate premium WordPress theme marketplace
  (tags: wordpress wordpress-themes)
• Information Is Beautiful
  ideas, issues, concepts, subjects - visualized
  (tags: visualization infographics design)

links for 2009-10-01

• Color by Number
  From Visual Thesaurus: Designating colors with words (and, as we'll see in a moment, with numbers) is a busy industry in English, and one that often leaves speakers of other languages and translators reeling. Perhaps in no other subject area is it more evident that English is truly the language that has to have a name for everything, and a name that can change according to the context.
  (tags: color-palettes)