Simon G's Blog

"Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us" is an easy read from Seth Godin that presents the case for why You should be leading. Everybody can inspire a tribe towards collective action, regardless of where they sit in an organisation, and this book challenges you to step up, lead and challenge the status quo. There are some great snippets of information throughout, and I agree with most of what he is suggesting re Leadership, although there is also a hate message re Management that I think is a bit too strong. It is a good book for motivation and whilst not prescriptive in how to lead provides some good pearls of wisdom for leading in the digital age.

I purchased a BlueAnt Supertooth 3 bluetooth handsfree kit yesterday and spent several hours trying to find an easy way to get the Contacts list from my Okta Touch (aka HTC Touch) which runs Windows Mobile 6 Professional and failed. The BlueAnt Supertooth 3 is a nice device and pairing it with the phone was super easy (I was up and running in about a minute!), but getting the contacts across was a challenge with Windows Mobile 6 since there is no option to select multiple contacts to Beam (send via Bluetooth) across. The benefit of having the contacts on the device is that when there is an incoming call, the callers name will be announced. I tried a variety of methods, including trying a piece of software that claimed to enable selection of multiple listings. Well, to be fair it did allow selection of multiple listings, but trying to do anything with them as a group failed. I then tried sending the contacts directly from my PC via Bluetooth but for whatever reason had no joy that wa...

John Battelle raised a discussion on his blog on the connection between Twitter and Facebook for status updates , and that Twitter is a Facebook Application but Facebook is not a Twitter application (but should be). I totally agree. I update my Facebook status with my Twitter updates and have found that it has generated some good discussions on Facebook. This is however a one way update and conversations do not span across both systems which is not ideal. I predominantly have a different set of people on Facebook than Twitter, so find that sharing the status works well for invigorating discussion. It would however be nice to be having one conversation, and not conversations independently on each platform. The thread based approach of comments on Facebook aids in providing more structure that Twitter could benefit from, and for conversations to nicely span across both platforms, I think this needs to be addressed. Between this and Facebook Connect, I think there is a solution if the v...

I am of the opinion that whoever calls a meeting should be responsible for ensuring that Meeting Minutes are circulated to all attendees . It is a good habit to get into, and can aid in reducing issues being relitigated and having a record of when decisions were made. It does not need to be an onerous task and only the key points need to be captured. Meeting minutes should be circulated within 24 hours of a meeting occurring , whilst the information is still fresh in people's minds; I often strive to get them out within an hour or two of meeting completion. I use a standard (yet simple) template for my meeting minutes which aids in me being able to quickly type them up. I tend to in fact usually type up the vast majority of the meeting minutes during the meeting and then tidy it up and distribute afterwards. If it is a regular meeting I usually have the first agenda item being agreement of the previous minutes, and sometimes will include the full list of open issues, risks and de...

The end of my Summer vacation has come to an end, but it is interesting to think back on how this holiday was different from others, primarily due to the use of Social Media. Social Media applications are based around the concept of user-generated content and include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Photo sharing and Review sites, all of which I utilised this holiday period. We spent the holiday period in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand in a few different locations (the Waikato, Whitianga, Napier & Taupo). At these locations we often did not know what restaurants and cafes were good, so other than just using the Internet for what to do in an area, we used http://dineout.co.nz (a restaurant/cafe review site with user-generated content) extensively to validate or find what restaurants and cafes we wanted to try. I also submitted my own reviews for a large number of the places we visited to dineout (see here for my reviews). Jane & I also wrote a number of ...

I am a big advocate for sharing information, be it personal or more business-oriented information. I share information from experiences at restaurants, what I thought of books I have read, where I am, links to things I think are interesting, productivity tips, experiences with programming languages and the list goes on. There is obviously also information that I do not share widely (if at all) due to confidentiality reasons, or if I do share it I only share it to a closed community. Why? I share information for a number of reasons, including: Sharing enables others to learn from my experiences. I can learn from others, and by Sharing this lets others know what I am up to or what information I am finding that I think is interesting. I may not even know initially that they have knowledge or interests in a particular area. Communities of Interest and Friendships evolve by finding people with similar interests. If you don’t convey to others what your interests are, you are closing out ...

Based around the concept of thin-slicing, this book promotes the idea that your initial thoughts / gut feeling are often the right way to proceed (but not always). There are many case studies to hammer in the point and look at it from different perspectives. I feel the concept was a bit oversold, confused, and not pulled together nicely at the end. In terms of the fundamental concept that we can learn to make better and faster decisions when we filter out excess data, I agree. This particularly holds if you are experienced in the field (i.e. with experience comes intuition). As for the "Compelling", "Astonishing" and "Brilliant" words being used to describe this book, I think that maybe "Thought Provoking with Interesting Stories" might be a better way to describe it.