Following on from the previous post on "Tribes" and the power of passionate leadership, I stumbled across a great site, the99percent.com that focuses on getting ideas off the ground. One videocast that jumped out was by Ji Lee (Director of Google Creative Lab) - he talks about the transformative power of personal projects (and the fact that the professional and personal world inevitably intersect if we are passionate about what we do, even if we like the idea of keeping them separate).
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Tuesday 16 February 2010
Tribes & leading vs managing
Over Christmas I finally got around to using up a couple of Amazon vouchers that I have had for a while... OK, it was well over €500, which means that I have got enough in the way of business reading material to keep me going for most of the year (I try to balance my reading by cycling through 1x professional book, 1x non-fiction, non-business, 1x fiction and back to 1x professional book etc., but now have far too many in the professional category to make this work this year!). As such, you should expect to see a few reviews, or at the very least references to books worth checking out.
The first two books on my backlog this year were "Tribes" (by Seth Godin) and "Building great customer experiences" (by Colin Shaw & John Ivens) and I have to admit I was slightly disappointed with both:
Having seen a few talks by Seth Godin, following his (unbelievably popular) blog and enjoyed "Permission Marketing" immensely, I was really looking forward to Tribes. The underlying premise (that in the "new world" organisations need leaders of "tribes" of interest to innovate, make changes happen and to create new value and that these leaders are not the managers of old, but rather thought leaders) is potent and attractive - especially for someone working in a professional services organisation that lives from subject matter expertise alongside management competence ;-), but the book failed to deliver any "meat" to back this up.
That said, the book is a quick and easy read. Its appeal to individuals to be passionate about things that they believe in - and to channel this passion into a community to effect change - resonates.
"Building great customer experiences" has the same informal journalistic style as "Tribes", and lays out a set of "philosophies" for delivering customer experiences across channels. To be fair, the book is several years old and may at the time have been innovative, but today it seems to reflect the received wisdom - the power and importance of emotions in customer experience, designing processes "outside in" (rather than "inside out") etc.
The authors are clearly very experienced (and the case-studies within the book are certainly interesting and varied), but the frameworks that they provide are rather generic.
Nevertheless, there were definitely a couple of points that they really hammered home -
The first two books on my backlog this year were "Tribes" (by Seth Godin) and "Building great customer experiences" (by Colin Shaw & John Ivens) and I have to admit I was slightly disappointed with both:
Having seen a few talks by Seth Godin, following his (unbelievably popular) blog and enjoyed "Permission Marketing" immensely, I was really looking forward to Tribes. The underlying premise (that in the "new world" organisations need leaders of "tribes" of interest to innovate, make changes happen and to create new value and that these leaders are not the managers of old, but rather thought leaders) is potent and attractive - especially for someone working in a professional services organisation that lives from subject matter expertise alongside management competence ;-), but the book failed to deliver any "meat" to back this up.
That said, the book is a quick and easy read. Its appeal to individuals to be passionate about things that they believe in - and to channel this passion into a community to effect change - resonates.
"Building great customer experiences" has the same informal journalistic style as "Tribes", and lays out a set of "philosophies" for delivering customer experiences across channels. To be fair, the book is several years old and may at the time have been innovative, but today it seems to reflect the received wisdom - the power and importance of emotions in customer experience, designing processes "outside in" (rather than "inside out") etc.
The authors are clearly very experienced (and the case-studies within the book are certainly interesting and varied), but the frameworks that they provide are rather generic.
Nevertheless, there were definitely a couple of points that they really hammered home -
- that brand and customer experience must be aligned to be effective and
- only by seeing customer experience as a central part of one's overall strategy (complete with a gimmicky, but helpful "customer experience statement" a pinnacle of a "customer experience pyramid" (TM), will it be possible to truly deliver a customer-centric service
Monday 15 February 2010
User Experience of Reality
I am an enthusiastic proponent of online gaming and its value in the development of children and adults alike, but I have to say that this presentation by Jane McGonigal even frightened me a little bit.. "the user experience of reality is broken". Hilfe!
User Experience of Reality
View more presentations from avantgame.
Thursday 11 February 2010
Fantastic complex information visualisations
I just stumbled across a wonderful collection of images showing complex data/information sets in a easily understandable way. Check them out here.
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