jmacofearth’s posterous

Why are we involved with digital marketing? Cutting edge? Bleeding edge? It's where things are going? Advertising is advertising where ever it takes place? In seeing a tag line and list of speakers at IDEA 2009, a top Interactive Marketing conference I starting trying to imagine what ONE SHOW I would attend, which show would it be? What path would I choose as a statement about my passion and my creative vs. business acumen.

On the advertising and marketing side I have the IDEA conference. The presenters runs like a list of visionaries and people to watch in hip marketing, pr and advertising [yes there is a difference].

On the uber-visionary side I have TED. Yes it's expensive but just going sets a bar pretty high for your ambitions.

Then there's WOMMA and the InBound Marketing summit. More for the practitioners of social media and the monetary connections to be made there. People we are all addicted to like Chris Brogan, David Armano, Seth Godin.

And lastly is Austin's own SXSWi (South-by-Southwest Interactive). I still have a panel in the running for presenting in 2010, so wish me luck. [I know this is a limited and incomplete list, but this is supposed to be a short engaging post.]

And this year, my answer is... IDEA. Roy Spence from GSDM, Barry Diller, Paul Bennett from IDEO, Alex Bogusky from Crispin Porter + Bogusky. And the list goes on. The whole inspiration for this post was their tag line that touched a nerve or a vein [if we are characterizing passion rather than irritation].

IDEA 2009: Reinvention. The Velocity of Ideas. What are your thoughts, choices, additions? What ONE CONFERENCE would define your passion and core strengths best?

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/name-your-passion

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From a high of 7,093 I have agressively BLOCKED spammy followers using TwitBlock.org, my new favorite tool. [I'm not sure how I got spam listed by 9 twitblock users, but I have some suspicions. Oh well. If you're in the neighborhood and would like to "whitelist me" as not spam I'd appreciate it.]

Well, my aggressive unspam blocking has resulted in a drop in my follower count to 6,870. Seems like the Tweespammers are agressive about unfollowing unfollowers. I say if you're gonna blast crap quote spam, MLM marketing messages and sexcam soliciations I think you should be blocked. Perhaps those folks can figure out who blocked them and block back?

No worries. Seems like the value of a tweet just got a little more easy to spot with Twitblocker.

Two great things about this tool.

1. It shows all your spammy followers on one screen allowing your to unfollow a lot of people at once. And the spammers are easy to spot, believe me. Especially when they are all lined up together like a police lineup.

2. As the tool gets more users and more accounts are rated as spam, the ratings will get better and the tool will be better at pulling spammers out of your flow.

Here's a sample output as TwitBlock began scanning my followers:

You can see I have not blocked sxpanel, but I am about to block Schwartz632. It's easy to spot the spammers, but TwitBlock makes it really easy to find them all in one place.

What we need perhaps is a kick ass Tweeter list. I've been wanting to build a matrix of folks I follow in different fields. Like a verification or a seal of approval for some folks I think are awesome. Starting with my very few #FF #followfriday nominations and Mr. Tweet recomendations, I'm sure I could produce a shortlist of recommendations. That will be my next task.

In the mean time keep it clean and add your account to Twitblock.org and get blocking. The twittersphere will thank you and together we can reduce the noise.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/twitblock-inaction

NOTE: If you think I'm spammy please let me know. I'd be happy to understand how I can provide more value for you. My motto is WIIFY (what's in it for you).

And an ON NO: In unfollowing so many peeps I just upset my follow/follower ratio and I can follow no more people. Gotta get out the wackin tool again. ARRRGGH!

See also The Twitter Way, the collected posts about Twitter and Doing Twitter Right A funny post from Mashable on the Top 25 most spammy Twitter Avatar images.

Latest Twitter Posts

• Why Everyone Wants to be Your Social Media Strategist
• Bored Tweetless: When Twitter Is Not About Conversations
• Dear Twitter Sniper: Shooting Sparks, Blanks, Hollow Points, Warm Fuzzies, Nerf Darts
• Guy Kawasaki Phone Home Your Integrity Is Calling < Ghost Tweeting Anyone?

My favorite twittertools:

• TweetReach (measure your reach)
• TwitBlock (scammer deletion!)
• TwitterCounter (keeping count)
• Twitterholic (search + discovery)
• Mr. Tweet (discovery + recommendation)

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Everyone is new on Twitter. Everything changes and everything stays the same.

On thing that doesn't change is the flood of scammer twitter artists leaching on to your account. Here's what they look like and here's what they do.

This is a collection of TwitterSpammers I BLOCKED from following me today:

Notice the last tweet was 2 days ago! For a tweeting tips service, you'd think they'd update at least hourly if not daily. Maybe they just don't have many good ideas yet. Notice the tweet is also nothing but a quote. [NOTE: QuoteSpam is alive and well on Twitter as well. After a while you tire of the people who think it is a good use of their time to cut and paste famous quotes into their Tweetstream. Well, it DOES up their tweet count, but the value of an Einstein quote to my daily interests is quite low. And if the quote is from Oprah... well, I think she stopped tweeting a while back.]

Let's see two biggies: 1. no avatar; 2. random letters for name. Only tweet starts with "Make Money..." If someone would build an app that immediately unfollows and reports all tweets that begin with "Make Money..."

Bad Twitter ID. Contains "f" and "_" to snag a real sounding name. But there's that first tweet again, with these magic words "internet marketers." And she's got "make money" in there too. Poor woman in the picture is probably a real estate agent and has nothing to do with this account. And lastly the last tweet was 21 hours ago. [Hey Twitter, could you give us a way to filter followers by "last tweeted?"]

And the "making money" with "sexy torso" approach. This one adds "get paid" as a nice come on. So let's see, we've got SEX, HEALTH and MAKE MONEY. It's the San Diego address that really sets off the alarm bells though... (just kidding on that one)

So there are two reasons these type of scammers join Twitter and follow everyone.

1. Just like spam, they believe that they can drive traffic to that "make money" or "teeth whitening" or "get out of debt now" link if you just click on it.

2. And they follow you in hopes that you will follow them back. [There's a funny consequence of Mr. 50k and his auto-follow auto-bot tool. He follows all the pornsters too. And he's SOOOO busy he doesn't even have time to look over his follower list.] And even if you don't follow them back, and I would suggest you don't unless you want a lot of their friends dropping by, they are hoping that visitors looking over your "followers" list and see their ID.

You can report these abusive accounts by forwarding the tweet onto the @spam account. Apparently someone at Twitter takes that responsibility seriously.

But please do BLOCK the scammers and save others from accidentally following them when they look over your stream of "followers." It may take you a bit longer to get to 100 or 1,000 followers if you are editing and blocking the scammers, but it goes with the territory. And until Twitter adds a BLOCK and REPORT AS SPAM function we'll just have to do it the old fashioned way. One follower at a time.

UPDATE 8-15-09: I think my very mention of MLM in my post about TweeSpammers got me a lot of MLM related crappo followers. I woke up this morning with this smiling face along with about 15 new scammers trailing my tweets.

In discussions with @michaelpearsun last night we were wondering, if Twitter and Co. are touting their phenomenal growth curve, what would be their incentive to block people from creating multiple and bogus accounts? To Twitter's stats it's merely another user. As Michael said, "If you have 28 million users with a lot of spammers vs. 2 million users of very clean users the proposition is very different." So Twitter says, "Gosh look at our amazing growth. Yes, we know there are some people gaming the system, but look at the growth rate on our monthly page views."

And did you notice that to "manage" your twitter account you are forced to weed through users 20 IDs at a time. Now I'm thinking there are much better and more efficient ways of managing my users, BUT... for Twitter it's a ton of page views every time I go in, even just to clean out the spammers, Twitter racks up the stats. And what can we do about it, but comply and complain. Or not complain at all.

I prefer at least giving a little bit of feedback. (grin)

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/twitter-spammed

See also The Twitter Way, the collected posts about Twitter and Doing Twitter Right

Latest Twitter Posts

• Why Everyone Wants to be Your Social Media Strategist
• Bored Tweetless: When Twitter Is Not About Conversations
• Dear Twitter Sniper: Shooting Sparks, Blanks, Hollow Points, Warm Fuzzies, Nerf Darts
• Guy Kawasaki Phone Home Your Integrity Is Calling
  

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Scott Berkun has some amazing posts about managing Rockstars, leading the "smartest guys" and basically working with awesome teammates without pissing them off.

And sometimes the TEAM comes before the Rockstar.

Here's Scott's Teams and Stars essay on the subject and a short excerpt.
It’s hard to understand good teams until you’ve been on both good and bad ones. You can often find frustrated people on good teams and happy people on bad teams: they don’t have enough perspective to see where they are for what it is. Some stars, people of high talent, are poor judges of teams because they’re tempted by the desire to stand out rather than the desire to succeed. Despite this, a common managerial temptation is to hire big talents, challenging the balance of needs for a successful team.

I once was part of the Best Team in the World. And since then I know that at least two of my previous teammates and I have struggled to regain some perspective on our TEAM work.

Once you have been part of an Agile team it is hard, maybe impossible, to go back to a dysfunctional team. In the Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team the core foundation for TEAMing is TRUST. I assert that this issue is the same in social media, or collaborative communities online, where we must find tools and take risks to establish the trust between ourselves and our potential teammates. When the TRUST is threatened the entire TEAM is threatened.

Here is a graphic of Lencioni's hierarchy.

It's only through TRUST is the team willing to have CONFLICT. And without the ability to disagree the TEAM cannot work through difficult tasks.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/teams-stars

• Scott Berkun's Teams and Stars
• Patrick Lincioni's Table Group

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A dear friend and Twitter marketer, contacted me late last night to voice concerns about my negative tone. I thought I had already had that conversation, but he probably doesn't "read me." No worries. So one of the pieces he pointed to was my recent trashing of the UX/UI changes on Twitter. I DID ping @stop and ask if he was the Creative Director responsible for the NEW TWITTER Friends and Followers pages. Here's what he said.

Okay, so perhaps I was being mean, I don't sense that was my purpose, but I do understand online sarcasm and humor can often be confused for bitterness, anger, vendetta, whateva... So here goes my ALL GOOD review... Let's see how this rolls.

+++ THE ALL GOOD REVIEW: Thank goodness Twitter has made some needed upgrades to their UX.

So Twitter's got a new pull-down action menu for dispatching some useful tasks.

Here we can see the new pull-down menu for taking action on followers and followees. With a simple click we can @, DM, Follow or Block any one. And this nifty feature is now available in the same flavor across all the "friends" or "followers" pages you visit. Even when looking at the "friends" or "followers" of other users. Nice! And convenient that you can see instantly, even without using the drop-down, that this person is "blocked" or "followed." [Oh heck, am I still following that silly old advertising agency that I used to work for. Let's see, CLICK: drop-down, PULL: Unfollow.] Nice!

So now let's look at the new and improved Followers and Friends pages.

Here is a shot of the "You Follow" page in LIST view.

So this pretty much looks like the old "You Follow" page. And conveniently the same drop-down box is available here too. [I wish we could choose the number of tweeps to view per page, cause following 5,600 tweeps using 20 tweeps per page... well that's 280 pages of goodness I have to page through to edit and cull my list. Just a thought.]

And here's the greatly improved "Your Followers" page in EXPANDED view:

Here we can see that @stop and company have added a little contextual information with each tweep. So you can see the person's last tweet, very helpful when deciding if you want to reciprocally follow back. And again the nice BIG pull-down button. And also a handy, ADD button.

So there are just a few things missing from the new interface. I'm sure @stop and his group are already hard at work on the next iteration.

1. I would like to see a RT option here. This must have been an oversight, cause that's such a simple fix.

2. I would also really like Twitter to add a "-!" Report Abusive Account feature. Where I can fast-track pornsters and scammers to the dustbin of Twitter Hades. And in the Usability department, here's one more suggestion.

Maybe there would be a good case for a drop-down something like this:

View By List
  - 20 per page (default)
  - 50 per page (efficient)
  - 100 per page (uber user)

And for ultra.uber powerusers, there could be a TEXT LIST mode, with no pics. [That would be really fast, and I bet could relieve some of the server load on Twitter's cloud.]

Carry on @stop and company. Good work and if you need any further advice, feel free to ask. It's what I do, too.

Cheers,

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/twitter-good

The harsh-toned review from last night: Twitter UX Awakens: The NEW TWITTER Reviewed and Dissected for UX and

And the collection of Twitter Posts all in one place: The Twitter Way

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[As is often the case, I was inspired by a post elsewhere and as I was writing my comment, I realized I had much more to say on the subject. So here is my longer comment on an article on Wired called, "Dear Malcolm: Why So Threatened?"] I sat in on this years SXSW Interactive panel on the Death of MSM. There seemed to be three camps within the panelists and in the audience asking questions.

1. The MSM Writer: "All of this 'blogging' is really diluting the quality of the writing. I mean, MSM journalists have the degrees, they have fact checking departments, they have a standard to uphold." And they are losing their shirts.
2. The BLOGGER who believes in laissez-faire: "Let the giants die. The Old Gray Lady is losing money, so what. Let her adapt or perish."
3. The Internet Gen Upstart: "Fk'm. I write. I don't make a living at it, I do it because I am passionate. And then I work my day job."

The Huffington Post has done a fine job of not paying writers and basing giving the HuffPo lift to the writers to participate. So as a writer, we are on our own. It's a brave new "social media" world out there and you'd best sharpen your wit and look for your niche.

I keep getting asked, "How are you going to monetize your blog?" My answer, "By getting consulting work and possibly a better job than the one that just laid me off."

The papers won't die. Just as Rock didn't die. They will have to continue to evolve, be more agile, and embrace the "community manager" rather than "editor in chief." Long live MSM. MSM is Dead.

BTW: As a paper copy subscriber to the NYTimes (THUR - SUN) I can't tell you how happy I am on Thursday mornings when the thump on my driveway is double the normal local-only paper. Those two plastic bags, one blue one clear, hold the possibility of excitement, learning, drama, humor. Often I am let down by my overly imaginative projection. But mostly I just love the thrill of unwrapping the ATOMS of paper and getting the ink all over my fingers, keyboard, coffee mug. Yes, the newspapers must and are changing. Some will die. New one's will rise up in their place.

Just think, the "journalist" now has so many more outlets. More job opportunities. How you make your money from it, well... That's where you have to get creative.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/MSM-vs-Blog

Note: I would love your comments here. We can have a dialogue about this.

Also check out my collected Posts about using and abusing Twitter - The Twitter Way

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[Thinking how to frame a dialogue without overburdening the writing with punctuation and he said then I said, I'm going to use one color for my statements and another color for my friend's statements. Hopefully that will make it easy to read quickly.]

On Saturday night a good friend asked, "So what do you do?"

He was somewhat serious. And it got worse from there.

"You are the only friend I can think of who I have not given work referrals to. If I were to sum up what you do in one sentence what would I say?"

I tried a few ideas on him.

I am a Social Media Strategist. "Nah, you've got people like Brian Solis, Chris Brogan and Jeremiah Owyang doing that gig."

I can build communities. "Really? To what effect? To make money? To save money?"

I know how to guide companies to... "No. What's a guide? What does that get them?"

I can assemble the creative and technical teams to do social media projects. "Oh really? Like what kind of projects?"

Launching a B 2 B portal or a B 2 C portal. "What's social about that?"

Okay, so I know how to do online marketing programs. "Boooring. You and the other 100 companies in Austin. What's your value?"

I have these training sessions to teach businesses how to work within the various aspects of social media. "Great. What do you call that?"

Uh, the sessions? That's not very good is it? Hmm... "Not too good. I can't get a handle on that. When I have a client and they need what you do I can say... JMac he's the <insert cool name here>. And make the recommendation and you get the work."

How about a Virtual Chief Social Media Officer? "That's great. That's it. That's what <name of local dude> does. That's his job. Yeah, that's good. Nobody else is doing that. A VCSMO!"

Now I just have to figure out how to tell that story and put the "value" in that proposition. And educate my friend and my potential clients on what a Social Media Officer does, virtual or full-time. So I'm building the DECK on it. Maybe I'll do the book, the podcast and the video presentation on it.

Here is the hero slide of my presentation What Is A Social Media Strategist. Once I get that nailed I can move on to showing the ROI on social media projects that I've been involved in and how that success can and will translate into similar success for YOUR COMPANY.

I will share the entire presentation when it is done. But until then here is my tenant of what I do, or what a Social Media Strategist does:

1. The social media strategist must assume many roles during the course of a given project.
2. The project often needs to be presented/sold/green-lighted by several levels within the spans and layers of a company.
3. Being a master of process and agile methodologies helps a lot in driving projects forward in these multi-team environments.
4. And finally the social media lead has to maintain a supportive attitude across all of the teams that come in contact with various parts of the project. Because one naysayer can ruin the entire program. And you never know where or when that negative leverage might rear it's ugly head.

It is a lot to navigate. And depending on the size of the company the leadership or lack of leadership can get quite complex. But that is the task of the social media strategist at any level. Stealthy and effective, the winning social media ninja can move projects through the darkness and opposition forces to achieve victory. Victory with or without the support of the entire cast of characters involved in the process, but victory (launch) nonetheless.

@jmacofearth (socialmedianinja.net)
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/socialmedianinja

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[Tim Walker posted the following question. Can genius and social media go together? on his What I've Learned So Far. And in my infinite cheekiness I could not resist an answer. And in my own self-aggrandizement I could not stop at the mere comment, I have to turn the idea into an entire post. So much for 140 characters! So here is a crosspost that might grow beyond the initial discussion with Tim's blog.]

Is posting an answer a form of braggadocio? I am no genius. I am constantly working on patience.

That said, the social media system is inherently interruptive in nature. Twitter being the most insistent model, blink and you'll miss the entire conversation. But is that a bad thing?

So today a study revealed that 10% of Tweeters produce 90% of the Tweets. They can't all be geniuses, and they most certainly would be doing something other than tweeting if they were geniuses.

So... Social media is wonderful within limits. It is important for your sanity to put a bounding box around the influence and interruptions you are willing to tolerate from Twitter, email, IM, blog commenting and such.

Here's a pop quiz, gather up all of your 140 character messages for the last month and put them in a document. Delete all RT's and conversational @ messages and ask: Now, what is the percentage of genius on the page of what YOU created? Original wisdom? Wit? Or shite?

It is increasingly important to turn off the social media interruptions when you are trying to create something of value. Unless your value is in the form of 90 second sound bites, I would suggest you focus your genius on the longer form. How about the genius of Blog commenting, or actually writing the full blog post?

Still genius is everywhere among us. Some geniuses focus their intelligence more effectively than others. And even us sub-geniuses can learn to be more efficient and effective by putting what mental resources we have on the task of posing or answering questions. And that activity leads to a better possibility of creating something of value in the dialogue between us.

[end of blog comment]

Okay Mr. Mac, good idea. So do it. First I used Tweetake to download my last 1,002 tweets into a csv.

And then pulling them into Excel I deleted all blip.fms, RTs, and conversation specific @s to come up with my original content, for better or worse, it's all I got.

And so, from 1002 total tweets I have 347 tweets where I actually created original content. (35% content) The other types of content break down like this:

• RT: 243 (24%)
• @s: 158 (16%)
• Blips: 223 (22%) "listening to" (I disconnected my blip.fm from my twitter stream a week ago, thinking these were not really high-value tweets, fun being a Tweet-Jay, but not really what I'm about)
• Liked/Fav'd: 31 (0.03%)

And let’s see, any genius in there… uh… Well, here are my top 6, self-selected.

1. Can we all just quit calling it SOCIAL MEDIA already. And let's not talk about TWITTER either... Gosh, we're boring ourselves. #gosh
2. DEAR TWITTER, Please oh please oh please let me follow ONE MORE PERSON! Seriously if I forget them I'll never find them again. Thank You. (responding to hitting the "you can follow no more people at this time" error)
3. So, putting some dumb character before the @ now let's other peeps see my @s to folks they don't know. UG! #TwitterFail
4. So... What if someone really were readin all this stuff we're tweeting, I mean, really, like in the DB forever! Would I be more quiet? Nah!
5. blip killed my browser - damn I was almost finished with a GTD post (heh heh - that's ironic) Damn, must focus on task at hand. #gtd
6. Amazing how some tweeps you follow, who have been silent for months, suddenly begin to Tweet their heads off. Welcome to the PARTAAAY!

Nope. But not ONE ADVERTISEMENT and NOT ONE GHOST TWEET. That's right, NOT ONE!

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/my-tweet-makup

What I Believe:

• Friends, Tweeps, Links and Groups: Placing Value On Community and Friendship
• Fire Everything! - Twitter Facebook LinkedIN Convergence - What’s Okay What’s Not
• OPEN LETTER TO Guy Kawasakisan - Return to the Way Mr. Kawasaki, Before It’s Too Late For Us All!
• Uber.la’s 1-2-3 Guide To Twitter: GETTING REAL with TWITTER

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But where that person's efforts are going is probably the ADs. (I'm not saying the ADs are good, I'm just saying they are not working on the UX and UI of Facebook.) Because they keep making changes to things that WERE previously working and they mess it up. [And of course the ultimate irony, is I am going to post and promote this on Facebook itself. Betcha $100 I don't hear a word from any of Zuckerburgs folks. I didn't last time... Heh heh. Perhaps they're working on it and don't want to tip their hand. Perhaps!]

The biggest MISS for me lately has been the "friends" status views. How do you get back to seeing the updates and not the "what they updated?" Okay, so Facebook has added Lists. Great, but they suck. Here is my view of my "close"list. Why oh why aren't they showing me the latest status update from my "close" friends?

A friend recently opined, "It's clear that the people work ON Facebook don't actually USE Facebook or they would not make such stupid changes." Well put.

Okay and here's All Friends. Same problem. I am clicking on "FRIENDS" to see their status, not to see if or how many lists they are part of. This is just BAD BAD BAD. UX FAIL.

But still the #1 UX FAIL on Facebook today is,

... drum roll from wipeout please ...

The "Recently Updated" Friends Status page and guess what. Not a single STATUS is available.

You can see what parts of FB they updated but not the updates. It's this kind of shoddy UI and UX that makes me less and less likely to open Facebook at all. With recent API loving twittertools like Seesmic Desktop, Twirl and Tweetdeck, you may never have to open your Facebook page again. Unless of course you like the games or you want to browse someone's photos.

Does this kind of BAD DESIGN make anyone else MAD? It's like following a HUMMER in rush hour traffic. WHAT'S THE POINT! #@!&*?

@jmacofearth

permalink to uber.la: http://bit.ly/facebook-UI-2

Related Links:

• A Facebook UI Exploration - Simplify Simplify Simplify
  
• Cloud Fail - Is The Fail Whale Coming to a Cloud Computing Platform Near You?
  
• Facebook Groups for Flair or Networking? - Is There Anybody In There
  
• A new Facebook Phishing Scam - FBStarter.com - Where’s Boris?
  

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[In a quick interview with Steve Ballmer, the NYTimes shed some light on corporate culture and problems with innovation and meetings. Here are a couple of things he said that triggered further ideas for me.]

SB: "I race too much. My brain races too much, so even if I’ve listened to everything somebody said, unless you show that you’ve digested it, people don’t think they are being well heard. Sometimes you really don’t hear because you’re racing. It’s just the way my brain works. My brain is just chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. And so, if you really want to get the best out of people, you have to really hear them and they have to feel like they’ve been really heard."

Comment: I suffer from this malady some times myself. Type A mode is 'gitturdun gitturdun gitturdun' I want to cut to the chase and understand what is being asked of me. And sometimes the "listening" is as important as the action item. I can say with confidence that in family discussions with kids and spouse, that the "listening" is the MOST IMPORTANT part.

SB on the old way of doing meetings: "You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call “the long and winding road.” You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion"

Comment: Yep, I think this is what people expect from a "meeting." And corporate culture expects two types of presentations.

Presentation Type 1: FYI - we are telling you this and getting you up to speed - we are NOT asking for feedback or input.

Presentation Type 2: Working Session - the presentation is to outline the situation and solicit input. Action items may or may not be assigned during these meetings.

SB on the new style of meeting at MS: "I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus."

Comment: Agility sets in when the meeting is a follow up on the presentation. Two things have to happen in this scenario:

1. The presentation has to be good enough for the executive to read it without the presenter standing by. The case must be stated clearly and supported with facts and data.

2. The agenda for the meeting must be expressed before the meeting is accepted. Without an agenda the "focus" of the meeting can be lost. If I get an agenda well ahead of time, I have time to read the materials and bring any supportive documents I would like to add to the discussion.

Now you can see how presentation TYPE 1, is less supported by this model. Because the winding presentation and "discovery" process will happen BEFORE the meeting takes place. The great part about this is 100% of the "meeting" then is about interaction and collaboration. Again, those may not be the objective of the FYI presentation. But if you just want to present to me, just send me the deck. I'll let you know if I have any questions. Otherwise, I'll stay out of the way and you can proceed.

It often seems like that is the goal of the Type 1: FYI meeting. Here's what we're doing, we just wanted to let you know, please don't interject or slow us down. Now I believe there is a huge difference between nay-sayers or as Bob Pearson used to call them "anti-bodies" and healthy discussion. But in the corporate world, perhaps your role is not ON the immediate team, and you are being given a courtesy "update" on the progress and direction of the project.

There is a slight catch-22 that causes Type-1 presentations to be less effective. Inside the corporate team, especially if you are being given a presentation by a different group, the tendency is to go with the flow and not be an anti-body. So you listen and you say nothing. The problem is, in some cases, your silence is taken as approval and acceptance.

I remember a team call with one of my managers who said, "You were on the call, why didn't you speak up?" So you speak up and risk being an anti-body or worse a loose cannon. Or you comply and send an email to the presenter or team after the presentation. Or, the most common path, because it does not directly affect your work you hold your tongue.

In the "hold your tongue" scenario, the only problem is, you have to hold your tongue outside the meeting as well. So many corporate silo wars come from the "unsaid objections" that are voiced outside proper channels. The buzz or back channel can and will hurt you if you speak dissension. So you are stuck. And often the best course of action is to observe. If you are not asked for participation, if you are not invited to the Type-2 presentations, then your role has been defined by the presenting team as one of FYI. It might not make you happy, but if you're not involved, trying to get involved can be a dangerous move.

Here are a few more nuggets distilled from Steve Ballmer's interview.

SB on job candidates: "I try to figure out sort of a combination of I.Q. and passion. I just ask somebody to tell me what they’ve done that they are really proud of and tell me about it. And if it’s something you are proud of, you should be able to answer any question I can come up with, at least at a level that would satisfy my interest. I ought to be able to see your passion. It might be quiet passion; it might be bubbly passion. But I should be able to sense that you are one of those people who just sort of throws themselves into things."

Comment: In speaking to a friend this morning about a "side project that is taking up part of his valuable Sunday morning" I asked him, "Is this a passion project or a payola project?" He said, "Well, it started as the latter and has sort of moved into the passion thing." My response sort of shed light on my perspective. "Passion is one of those things you can't fake or manufacture. You either have it or you don't."

SB on skills and qualifications he's interested in: "But compared to 10 years ago, technology is more complex, products and services span people’s lives in new ways, and our business is much more global. So it’s more important that people can think outside the confines of their individual expertise and their product group and connect the dots between technologies, customer needs and markets in new ways."

SB on challenging aspects of his job: "Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. So I can get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles when progress doesn’t match my expectations."

SB on global business challenges: "At the same time, the need to be more efficient drives us all toward sharper focus on what is important and what can truly move the needle in terms of meeting customer needs and taking market share. Of course, we need to be innovative, but we also need to be efficient."

SB gives his choice advice: "My dad worked for Ford for 30 years. When I was a kid, he’d say: “If you’re going to do a job, do a job. If you’re not going to do a job, don’t do a job.” What he meant was, if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do."

SB on leadership: "I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things."

Comment: So combining thought leadership AND action is the key. But back to the top of the discussion, sometimes you also need to LISTEN. Get out of the rush rush part and listen. Then you can understand the type of presentation you have been invited to and from there you get to define and refine your response.

@jmacofearth
permalink to uber.la post: http://bit.ly/agile-leadership

Corner Office column from the New York Times on Steve Ballmer.

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