Look at the people you work for (i.e. bosses and clients): do you aspire to be like them? What examples are they setting? What lessons are you learning from them?

How about the people working for you (i.e. employees, vendors, suppliers): what can you learn from them? What lessons are they learning from you?

What are you learning from your interactions with your partners, consultants and advisers?

Are you learning the right lessons from the people you work with?

Finding the right employees and partners is a core competence for any viable, sustainable business: and at the same time, finding the right people to work with is a core competence for any successful person.

To Find Good, Underrated People, De-Emphasize Popular Filters:

If you want to find a smart person who has time to be your friend, try to find a bad self-promoter. The popular filter, at least in business, is in favor of charismatic personalities and clever marketers. Find the brilliant mind who’s a so-so marketer and revel in her availability.

Be careful of who you work for:

Your boss and your job determine not only what you do all day, but what you learn and who you interact with.

… If you want to become the kind of person that any company would kill to have as an employee, you need to be the kind of employee that’s really picky about who you align with.

Why You Need To Hire Employees With Strong Personal Brands:

The problem with many organizations is that they don’t value personal brand builders enough.

… In the future, the brands that succeed will be the ones who employ the people who have the most social capital. Your next hire should be someone who not only has the right skills, but also a rapidly growing personal brand. The success your business can have in the social media era may depend on it.

Even more important than finding the right people, though, is learning how to work with them. Navigating our web of personal and professional relationships will quickly become a core competence in an economy based on a more personal, collaborative and distributed system of value creation.

Basically:

• Get very good at picking the right people to work with
• Get very good at working passively and actively with a large number of people on a variety of distributed tasks.

Instead of building a company, build an ecosystem.

The Schedule Grid at BarCampDC2 | Washington, DC, USA | Oct 2008

After beCamp, SocialDevCamp, Startup Weekend and BarCampRDU, I figured I knew what to expect from BarCampDC2 this past weekend in Washington, DC.

Thus, in the spirit of learning new things, I decided to go to the presentations and discussions that I knew very little about: Political community-building using social media (Shireen Mitchell and Jill Foster), C-SPAN’s Debate Hub, web education (Jeff Brown), design (Samantha Warren), iPhone development (Dave Troy) and geo-tagged data mapping. It was fun to get outside my little corner of the world and participate in discussions where I didn’t understand all the issues, know the references and get the inside jokes.

Even better, it was good to get the chance to meet and talk to people that I usually only interact with online. BarCamp is an interesting experience, and after having gone to a couple I’m curious: I know BarCamps have expanded to other countries and industries, but how does the experience differ, how does the interaction and organization model work in other cultures and countries, how well do the events “work” in other industries? Any stories to share?

More about BarCampDC2:

• What is a BarCamp?
• Details about BarCampDC2, held at the Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University.
• Photos: everyone’s photos on Flickr.
• The conversation on Twitter. [Updated 10/20 for multiple hashtags]

The true long-lasting impact of the Internet will be in how we harness the power of the web to transform how we make decisions in the physical world.

Instead of just focusing on how to improve our online lives, the far greater potential is in combining online and offline interactions. The power of the web is how we can structure, measure, analyze and evaluate the massive amount of data we continually create to guide our decisions in real-time.

In the physical world, however, we invariably face a lengthy lag between when data is created and when it is used in a decision. We constantly make decisions using incomplete information because we have no choice; collecting more data is often too expensive, too difficult or simply not possible. Thus we create heuristics, stereotypes, rules of thumb and other methods for making decisions in environments we do not fully understand.

While collecting more data does not always lead to better decisions, technology is creating unparalleled opportunities for us to use larger amounts of up-to-date data to make quicker decisions. We are beginning to see web technologies address larger opportunities in navigating the physical world using dynamic, real-time, structured data in addition to our more typical use of the web to access static, dated data (e.g. restaurants, bars and driving directions).

For example, SFpark is an experiment in using web technology to help people find open parking spaces throughout the city using sensors embedded in the pavement to detect used and vacant parking spaces. From The Economist:

The SFpark project will begin early in 2009 with a new network of pavement sensors in 6,000 of San Francisco’s metered parking spaces and 11,500 of its off-street car parks and garages. These sensors will detect when a space is taken and relay that information to a central database. From there, information about vacant parking spots will pass to drivers in several ways. The most basic will be through a network of road signs that will indicate areas with parking places. Eventually, however, officials want to provide web and mobile phone services that display the availability of parking block by block on a colour-coded map, much like the traffic maps now offered by Google.

… Tod Dykstra, [Streetline Networks'] chief executive, hopes eventually to create networks that monitor other bits of a city’s infrastructure too, including traffic flows, street lamps and water mains.

While it may seem like a relatively small matter, searching for parking spaces imposes huge costs on the infrastructure, environment and productivity of the city and its residents.

In a world where it is an order of magnitude easier, cheaper and faster to collect and process data for making decisions, how do our “rules of thumb” and traditional heuristics change?

The Board at BarCampRDU | Raleigh, NC, USA | Aug 2008

After going to RTP Startup Weekend a couple weeks ago, another Saturday in Raleigh, NC at BarCampRDU seemed like a great idea. In the end there was some interesting sessions on technical and business topics, but I had a better time meeting some really interesting people: enjoyed all the conversations and looking forward to more in the future.

Thanks to organizers Wayne Sutton and Dave Johnson…

More about BarCampRDU:

• What is a BarCamp?
• Details about BarCampRDU and the blog
• Photos: mine on Flickr, and everyone’s on Flickr
• The conversation on Twitter

(A temporary respite from venture capital and micro-entrepreneurship. We’ll return to the topic soon.)

How does traditional targeted direct marketing work?

(click on the drawing for a large, legible version) *

Traditional targeted direct marketing is based on the premise that marketers can control differentiated information and messaging presented to segmented groups of individuals.

• The traditional method works well in a business and social environment where information is obscured, where companies can control messaging to groups of people and where people cannot easily share information between groups.
• If the marketer is wrong in one part of the “person + product + marketing message” equation, the pitch fails. Companies optimize to the system to develop the best answers to this equation.
• Marketing creates the brand by “talking” and controlling the information flow between the company and people.

How is direct marketing changing?

(click on the drawing for a large, legible version)

In an environment where marketers’ ability to dictate the person + marketing message + product equation decreases, the marketing and product approach needs to shift to leverage shifting flows of information.

• In a business and social environment where information flows outside of the normal direct marketing firewalls and companies cannot control the messaging to segmented customer bases, the traditional approach begins to break down.
• The equation becomes a little more fluid and variable as the range of inputs and answers increase drastically.
• Traditional targeted direct marketing still exists; but to a lesser extent, focusing on specific segments or products as dictated by best practices, lessons from the marketplace and corporate initiatives.
• But since companies can no longer control the flow of information as consumers can talk between groups on the same scale as companies, controlling the message becomes an unrealistic goal.
• Therefore the desire to control the message leads to high customer acquisition costs as the traditional channels used to control the message become increasingly ineffective.
• What can still be controlled? Product becomes more important than marketing. Product builds the brand.
• Marketing shifts from positioning to reinforcing.

How can marketers adapt to this new environment?

• The opportunity of “alternative media”, social media, “alternative channels” et. al. is to integrate with traditional media, not replace.
• To understand how to adapt to the new environment, focus on the fundamental shifts in the flow of information; the shifts have rebalanced the efficiency and effectiveness between the various traditional and newer marketing strategies and tactics.
• Marketers still have to understand the intended customer base and the product value proposition to create great marketing strategies. Expose oneself to the new tactics and possibilities of alternative media, but remain focused on creating strategies that achieve the primary marketing goals and objectives. Choosing a particular tactic without first understanding the fit in the strategy and its goals neglects fundamental marketing best practices.
• It’s not an “either/or” decision between traditional and alternative media: the answer is “both”.
• But at the same time, get comfortable with spending less money, not more.**

Direct marketing is dead!

Long live direct marketing!

—

* I know my handwriting is chicken-scratch at best. I hope it’s legible…
** Insight by Ethan Bauley.