Coordination trifecta: Abusable Tech (Clay Shirky). To make a trilogy of places where the net’s coordination costs change the nature of collaboration, I add a link to Abusable Tech, a weblog devoted to chronicling abuse or misuse of security tools, to today’s earlier posts about Howard... [Many-to-Many]

An all-star list of contributors to the new blog. There is an RSS feed , although I really, really, wish that the default out of Moveable Type was a full feed instead of the niggardly first 30 words or so. It's a design decision that appears rooted in old assumptions.

7:39:33 PM •  • comment  

Developing the Master Skill of the Leader

I prepared this top ten list of listening skills with an eye towards developing mastery. Not that I have mastered the skill of listening, but because it is a skill worth mastering. I am sharing it here due to the enthusiasm readers have shown for the topic.

...

[Reforming Project Management]

Hal Macomber has a long, but excellent, post on listening as a core leadership skill. Full of good advice and pointers to more.

Good listening starts with genuine curiosity. But in a leader it also requires the strength to set aside any assumptions  that you might already know the answer and be willing to be surprised.

7:16:06 PM •  • comment  

A history of the Internet. It's history night. Here's one version of the history of the Internet.... [IDblog]

Rich timeline full of links to relevant sources and resources.

4:58:15 PM •  • comment  

Take 10 Seconds to Get Soup to the Needy. Take 10 Seconds to Get Soup to the Needy -- Here is an easy way to make a difference this holiday season. Campbell's is donating a can of soup to the needy for every person that goes to their site and votes for their favorite NFL team. Their goal is 5,000,000 cans. Go here to vote. It will only take a few seconds of your time to fill some empty tummies with warm soup this winter.

Like Zach Lynch, on whose Brain Waves blog I found this bit of charity (and from whom I appropriated this text word for word), I'm not a big football fan, but this is a no brainer. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

Even if the TV commercials are stupid.

3:56:17 PM •  • comment  

Seeing through slides.

Scott Rosenberg: The single deadliest thing a speaker can do is read from his own slides. Agreed. It always exasperates me to see slides used as speakers notes rather than as helpful visual aids.

Want to know how to give a good presentation with slides? Here's what I learned from two masters. It's more than a half-decade old, but its tips are no less useful.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

I've used this before as part of teaching presentation skills to consultants. Blogging it now so I can find it again later.

1:35:15 PM •  • comment  

10) Tools Rule.

Jay Rosen's latest is Nine Story Lines in a New Campaign Narrative. Excellent, as usual. It should be required reading for candidates preparing to mix it up as the political season gets into full swing.

I wouldn't be a techblogger if I didn't add one more story line, without which the other nine wouldn't mean squat.

We've only begun to see what can be done with tech tools as instruments of applied democracy.

More later, after I get some sleep.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

While Jay and Doc are focused on the political process, their analyses also apply to organizations more generally. Both political campaigns and organizations are instruments for acquiring and deploying power (in the sense of the ability to accomplish work) effectively. The Dean campaign is a case study in progress of what can happen if you start with different premises. That case study is worth tracking on both levels - for what it portends for our political leadership and for what it suggests for leadership and management in general.

I'd also recommend looking at Ed Cone's excellent case study of the Dean Campaign in Base Line magazine, "The Marketing of the President 2004."

Finally, let me suggest that all of this can be fruitfully thought of in terms of the late Donella Meadow's advice on places to intervene in a system.

10:57:23 AM •  • comment