August – 2009 – Steffan Antonas

Randy Komisar’s Cautionary Word on the Deferred Life Plan and Thoughts on Cultures of Entrepreneurship

I find myself coming back to nuggets on Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner frequently. These two, taken together, are like a motivational one-two punch if you’ve got entrepreneurship in your blood. Randy is right on the money. In the first video, he warns against the concept of a deferred life plan, when people put off what they really want to do for what is expected of them. He says that deferring life is when you are deferring your sense of excitement and passion for what you really care about and points out that working hard is not inconsistent with the deferred life plan, but doing so for a product that you do not have interest in is.

In the second video Randy points out that most entrepreneurship in the world is not mission-driven, but inspired by necessity and he challenges the audience with the idea that fostering a strong culture of entrepreneurship can provide a surrogate notion of empowerment and democracy (that we are lacking). So what do you love to do? Wanna change the world? What are you waiting for?

A Cautionary Word on the Deferred Life Plan

Embracing A Value Driven Culture of Entrepreneurship

Expert Tip: How To Use Google Alerts To Monitor Links To Your Profiles and Sites

Knowing how to use Google Alerts to monitor what people are saying about you or your company online is a fundamental skill for managing reputation on the web. Setting up a host of keyword alerts for your name or company brand is a great start, but here’s the rub…what if you have a common name like “John Smith”, or someone writes about you and uses just your first name, or worse yet, something more…ahem..creative? You’re hosed. Not anymore. Here are a few expert tips to help you get more mileage out of your alerts…

Your Best Friends And Worst Enemies Rarely Use Your Full Name

Familiarity and creativity tend to come from one of two extremes – people who you have strong relationships with, or those that want want to talk about you but distance themselves from you. The funny thing is, these are the people you want to monitor most. A good friend might write “I was chatting with John about this” in a blog post and be talking about you, but unless that friend shot you a note and told you that she “mentioned” you in the post, you’d never know – and that’s probably a conversation you’d be interested in joining! Then there’s the guy who wants to sing from the hills just how hard they think you and your company sucks. If that guy knows how Google alerts work, he might try and get creative or vague with your name, or just leave it out entirely and link to your site (there are thousands of examples of this on the web). In both cases, you want to know about what’s going on and be able to engage the friend or enemy quickly.

People Use Links To Indicate Identity And Show Relationships On The Social Web

People often don’t use full names on the web because they don’t need to. Linking to someone’s site, social media profile or blog article is much more effective for clearly showing who or what you’re talking about. I could just say “I had a great chat with Robert on FriendFeed” and you know that I’m talking about Robert Scoble. People use linking like this to talk positively and negatively about people, brands and products every single day, and monitoring this with basic keyword alerts is impossible. But you can monitor it…

Use Google Alerts To Know Whenever Someone Links to Your Blog or One of Your Social Profiles.

If you monitor links as well as keywords, you’ll adapt to the blogosphere’s writing culture and catch a LOT more of the instances discussed above. Here’s the ninja skill. With a small change of syntax in a Google Alert, you can monitor when anyone links to any web page, including your blog, social profiles etc. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Go to www.google.com/alerts (you’ll need a Google account, so set one up if you haven’t already)

2. Instead of entering keywords into the “Search Terms” box, cut and paste the link to the site, page or profile you want to get inbound link alerts for like this…. “link:[putyourURLhere]”

3. You can configure the alert to get sent to you as it happens (the moment Google knows, you know), or you can get it to send you a summary at the end of the day or week. For this type of monitoring, I’d recommend as-it-happens, but if you’re heavily into social media and interact a lot, you may want to go for just a daily summary.

Note: This strategy works GREAT for finding out when people write about you and link to your blog or a static social media profile like LinkedIn or Facebook, but you’ll get mixed results with links to more dynamic profiles like Twitter (you’ll get an alert every time someone adds you and you show up in their “following” box on their profile).

Know of any other neat tricks? Please let us know in the comments!

Netflix’s Freedom And Responsibility Culture

I came across this awesome 128 slide presentation from the CEO of Netflix today (below). The presentation is meant to be read, rather than presented and offers a quick-fire reference guide on the values, behaviors and skills Netflix upholds in the effort to create a culture of freedom and responsibility for their business. Regardless of your position in your current organization, these slides are worth spending some time absorbing – they represent a massive (and necessary) shift from the values and thinking that define rigid cultures of control and process adherence to those that create cultures that set the appropriate context for workers to form nimble, effective teams who constantly innovate, share ideas and challenge and learn from one another. At it’s core this new cultural framework requires a simultaneous top-down and bottom-up infusion of values. Making it work is about getting managers figure out how to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control their people, as well as about building teams of self motivating, self-aware, self disciplined, self improving people who take ownership and responsibility and are willing to work cross functionally when challenges arise.

The full presentation is embedded below for you to flip through. I’ve included a break down of the 9 behaviors and skills that the company highlights as most important to their culture:

#1 Judgement

You make wise decisions (people, technical business and creative) despite ambiguity
You identify root causes, and get beyond treating symptoms
You think strategically, and can articulate what you are, and are not, trying to do.
You smartly separate what must be done well no, and what can be improved later.

#2 Communication

You listen well, instead of reacting fast, so you can better understand
You are concise and articulate in speech and writing.
You treat people with respect independent of their status or disagreement with you
You maintain calm poise in stressful situations

#3 Impact

You accomplish amazing amounts of important work.
You demonstrate consistently strong performance so colleagues can rely upon you.
You focus on great results rather than on process.
You exhibit bias-t0-action, and avoid analysis paralysis.

#4 Curiosity

You learn rapidly and eagerly
You seek to understand our strategy, market, subscribers, and suppliers (factors that impact the business and customer experience)
You are broadly knowledgeable about business, technology and entertainment (you understand the various contexts the business operates under and the interplay between them)
You contribute effectively outside of your specialty

#5 Innovation

You re-conceptualize issues to discover practical solutions to hard problems
You challenge prevailing assumptions when warranted, and suggest better approaches
You create new ideas that prove useful
You keep us nimble by minimizing complexity and finding time to simplify

#6 Courage

You say what you think even if it is controversial
You make tough decisions without excessive agonizing
You take smart risks
You question actions inconsistent with our values

#7 Passion

You inspire others with you thirst for excellence
You care intensely about Netflix’s success
You celebrate wins
You are tenacious

#8 Honesty

You are known for candor and directness
You are non-political when you disagree with others
You only say things about fellow employees you will say to their face
You are quick to admit mistakes

#9 Selflessness

You seek what is best for Netflix, rather than best for yourself or your group
You are ego-less when searching for the best ideas
You make time to help colleagues.
You share information openly and proactively.

Culture

View more presentations from reed2001.

Are We Innovating, Or Are We Doing Exactly The Opposite?

In this keynote on Constructive Capitalism, Umair Haque reminds us that not all profits are equal. While some truly innovative companies are creating authentic “thick value” in the economy, others create profit through economic harm to others that results in “thin value” and (what he calls) a “zombieconomy”. How thick is the value you are creating?

This video was created for VINT, the International Research Institute of Sogeti. For more information please visit the following websites Methemedia or http://vint.sogeti.nl. You can also contact duivestein directly. For those of you that don’t have 45 minutes to watch the keynote, here’s a quick synopsis of the video’s content. Read More

Everything’s Good, Nobody’s Happy

A little shot of laughter and perspective to kick start your Monday. :)

Branding, Adbusting and Culture Jamming

We’ve got a talent problem. We’ve got too many brilliant marketers getting us to love stuff. Somehow they’ve gotten us to buy into this formula: bigger, better, shinier, more expensive stuff = self-esteem. Being the self-esteem seeking creatures that we are, we consume gratefully. The issue is that it’s not doing us much good.

In Small Is The New Big, Seth Godin points out exactly why the side effects of great branding is a problem that needs fixing, and why we should worry that (as he puts it) “the unintended consequences of excellent branding…is one of the great tragedies of [the marketing] profession”. He says -

I think when traditional marketers talk about “brand”, self-esteem value is what they mean. A true brand is something where the self esteem value far exceeds the utility. It might be Heinz ketchup or a Rolex watch or a Marlboro cigarette, but in each case there’s a truly emotional connection between the brand and the user….It might be Timberland boots downtown, or Prada bags uptown. Both are ridiculously overpriced for the utility they deliver, but it’s the story we tell ourselves that matters, the label, the image, the peace of mind.

The problem, of course, is that the values and the messages that are selling us the promise of peace of mind are also leading us astray, and there’s no way to market our way out of the problem. Or is there?

An In-Depth Look at the Most Active Users on Twitter

When Sysomos published its initial “Inside Twitter” report last month that looked at the people on Twitter and how it was being used, we discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity. This finding was based on indexing 11.5 million accounts, and then looking at the top 5% users who accounted for most number of Tweets. Now they’ve taken it a step further and done an in-depth analysis of that top 5%. Here are some of the highlights of the findings…

BOTS Tweet The Most: Of the most active Twitter users updating more than 150 times/day, nearly all of them are bots operated by sources such as hotels offering deals, regional and national news services, regional weather services, the top news within Digg, games, anim services, tags within del.icio.us and financial aggregators. These very active bots account for one-quarter of all tweets.

4 Of The Top 5 People That Tweet The Most Are Celebrities: Among the most active Twitter users with more than 50,000 followers, we find singer Tyrese (@tyrese4real), actress Alyssa Milano (@alyssa_milano), celebrity Tila Tequila (@officialtila), tv host Jonathan Ross (@wossy) and evangelist Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki).

The Most Active Users Live In the U.S. - 60.6% of the most active Twitter users live in the United States, while 6.9% are located in the U.K, 4.7% in Japan, and 4.3% in Canada.

The Top Men Tweet More Than The Top Women: The split between genders among the most active Twitter users is fairly balanced, but the men post more – 54% male, 46% female.

They Rarely Miss A Day – 88% of the most active Twitter users have never missed a day without making at least one update, while another 2.1% have only been inactive for one day.

Only Half Of Them Have More Than 100 Followers: 48% have more than 100 followers, compared with 6.3% for overall Twitter users.

They Follow More People Than The Average User: 44% have more than 100 friends, compared with 7.5% overall.

Most Of Them Are Veterans: 33.7% of the most active Twitter users have joined Twitter this year, compared with 72.5% of overall Twitter users who have signed up this year

A Higher Percentage Of Their Tweets Get Retweeted: In examining more than 80 million updates made since July 23, ReTweets among the most active users accounted for 5.06% of their activity – about 20% higher than overall users which is 4.02%. Given that some of these people are Tweeting as much as 30-50 times a day, this is quite surprising. It gives some indication that for all the noise they’re adding to the ecosystem, they’re adding more (perceived) value than most.

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Month August 2009