Catching up on RSS feeds today I watched the promo for facebook places.

Independent of your take on location-sharing, you’ve got to agree, that Facebook nailed it in telling a totally non-technical story about their technology.  The short-commercial was a great way to sell technology without ever talking about technology.

Principles..

• They talked about learning
• They talked about connecting people with people
• They emphasized friends
• They showed how this integrates easily in everyday life
• They talked about sharing experiences

Because of this Facebook captured me with the ad.  It inspired me to make sure I’m communicating this kind of message upwards to my leaders and downwards with people who benefit from the tools we build.

Thoughts?

I was raised that in a group setting you should always raise your hand and wait until you are acknowleged before speaking.

This social norm no longer applies online.

You have lots of great insights to share, but I’ll never ask you about them unless you start talking.

You live between 3 timezones away from me and I only see you once a year. I can’t read your body language to see that you want to speak and give you permission, but I’ll read your feed everyday.

There are dozens of others who are willing to work together to refine your world changing ideas. Imagine what could happen if you connected.

You’ll understand yourself and your ideas better if start processing them out loud.

You have my permission, go for it, talk out loud. I’m listening.

So the new toy on the recent family vacation was, you guessed it, a tablet computer.

Within two minutes of arrival, one of my wife’s cousins bee-lined it towards me and happily announced he had just received a tablet as a going to university present (not bad, eh?!).

Later I quizzed him, “so will this be your computer at school?”

“Yup,” he replied.  ”I got the bluetooth keyboard as well.  My tablet will be like my laptop.  I’ll keep my laptop in my room and use it like a desktop.”

As I watched everyone poke around the tablet during the week I observed they mostly played games, checked Facebook, broadcasted YouTube videos or pulled it out to look up the phone number of the local pub that advertised 10 cent shrimp during happy hour.

If you’re trying to reach college students, watch out, the class of 2014 is expecting that they’ll see you on the tablet.

I try to spend about 20% of my time learning, researching, blogging, engaging and connecting with others. This means reading blogs, news, books, watching talks, playing with toys, leaving comments, brainstorming and dreaming. I try to lead out in initiating discussions in various collaborative spaces I’m a part of.

I have four main streams that I monitor systematically multiple times per day.

Twitter – for news and social
Google Reader – for blogs
Google Wave – for meeting notes and conversations (no longer relevant since it’s been discontinued)
Mail – a lot of feeds/notifications pour in here, not to mention collaboration with colleagues.  I have two Gmail accounts.  One for personal and one for work.  I make extensive use of filtering to automate a lot of the processing of my email.

The rest of my time would be doing the nuts and bolts of my job which mostly happens online since my team is virtual.

Some general principles I follow.

• Everything in the cloud. Very little of my work is dependent on me being logged into my own computer. It’s accessible from any web connection.
• I try to minimize context switching and only deal with one steam, application or task at a time. (I’m far from perfect at this.)
• I use the Inbox Zero framework and try not to live in my inbox.
• My team has an ongoing skype chat where we can get a hold of each other if needed (you can set skype to only notify you of certain text, or callsigns in our case), this eliminates email and can prevent unnecessary interruptions.
• I try and post two blog posts a week. I have a google doc of brainstorming ideas that I scribble things down in often.
• I treat and tweet high-value things max 7-9 times a day. “I’m going to the bank” is not high value.  I try and make sure I’m sharing a link or promoting a friend 80% of the time.
• I rely on search to find mail and articles which I tag in Google Reader or delicious if they are relevant
• I try and schedule time each day to keep up on streams. If I fall behind, I give myself a set amount of time, pick the most important sources to check first and when the time is up all the rest are marked as read.

How do you spend your time online?

This is the fifth in a series of posts on how I lead my team in avoiding email.

Note: This post is somewhat irrelevant since it was announed that development of Google Wave is being discontinued.  It was a sad day when I read it was being canned since it was a powerful tool.  None-the-less, here’s how we were using it.

Google Wave is very powerful for containing information around projects and on-going conversations.

When a project is at the idea stage, Wave is great for threading conversations and allowing for side conversations to spin-off inline.  I love that it would walk me through the order in which comments were made.  This saves a lot of time trying to piece together the flow of a conversation in your inbox.

It’s excellent for collaborating on documents.  Instead of emailing revisions back and forth everything is right in the wave and edits can be made in real time.  I wrote a report with multi-departmental team across four timezones using Wave.

I love Wave for capturing meeting minutes.  Because of the real-time typing it makes it easy for everyone in a team meeting to edit or massage a record of what’s happening.  Again, no need to email, everything is self contained right in the wave.

Attachments – so easy to embed right in a wave.  It handles all sorts of media.

Widgets – one of the ways I’ve seen wave used best was when working with a global team to come up with a brand for a product.  Wave allowed us to plugin widgets to enable voting.  No need to piece together feedback from emails, the wave widget facilitated voted with a single click.

There are thousands of uses for wave that move people into much better collaboration than email.  It was sad to see this product go.

This is the fourth in a series of posts on how I lead my team in avoiding email.

Another way we try and stay out of living in our inboxes in through the use of project collaboration software.  This has many advantages.

1. There is no need to send emails wondering about the status of projects.  All team members can just look at the tools and find out how things are progressing.

2. All tasks are specified such that everyone knows what they are supposed to do.  No rummaging through your inbox trying to find the meeting minutes or that email thread of touchups todo.  It’s all in the tools.

3. Accountability.  There’s no hiding on how things are doing.

4. All information about a project is centralized.  The communication, the dates, the milestones, the tasks, the documents.  It’s all in one place.  This avoids needing to get information from someone’s inbox who’s not available, a lost hard drive or files from a terminated team member.

5. It allows for people to quickly jump into a project.  All I need to do is invite someone to the project collaboration tool and they have access and context for everything in the project.  No painfully treading through your inbox and hard drive trying to get everyone the project documents and communication.

6. It provides threaded communication.  Email is not by default threaded unless you use a client like Gmail.  It’s very handy to have a clear view of the thread of a conversation.

7. It’s web-based.  Everything is accessible wherever there is an internet connection.  I don’t need to have my computer with me to get at documents or communication I might need.

My team uses two main tools.
A. ClockingIT for the software development arm of my team but it has a wide variety of application.  (If you are CCC staff I can invite you to an internal version).
B. GCX Project for leadership and general team collaboration.

What ways does your team use project collaboration software to avoid email?

This is the third in a series of posts on how I lead my team in avoiding email.

We have a group Skype chat window that runs all the time.  Whenever team members are working and not in a meeting they are expected to “be in the room”.

This is effective for our team that is spread across four timezones in many ways.

1. If you have a quick question for a teammate, you can ask them.
ex. “@jr Were you able to send the national leaders the report on metrics?”

2. If you have a general question anyone “in the room” might be able to answer it quickly.  It takes the guessing out of who to send an email to.
ex. “@all Does anyone know know where to find the policy about wellness days?”

3. It makes calling impromptu meetings efficient.
ex. “@joshw do you have five minutes to talk about x?” (if yes, we start a video call)

4. It helps the team be more social and acts as a water cooler of sorts.

5. If you’re out of the office, you can quickly scan a days worth or weeks worth of chats to see what was going on or if anyone was trying to connect with you.

6. It allows you to ask teammates for help and give them the freedom to respond when convenient, but without the added overhead of creating an email thread.

Mechanics of how my team does this…

A. Notifications.  You can set skype to only notify you when certain words appear in a chat window.  For example, I am only notified when the words, “@all, @russ, @rm” appear in the group chat window.  Metaphorically, this allows me to listen for knocks at my door, but still be able to look out the window to see what’s going on.

B. Call signs.  Each team member has a call sign to reduce on the number of characters you need to type and also to allow for efficient use of notifications.

Note: Team members have trained and disciplined themselves to learn to work without the chat window becoming a distraction that prevents productive work.  Team members may go offline for extended period to work on projects/tasks.  They simply tell everyone else they are.  We have also created an expectation that if you are busy, you are not obligated to respond to someone’s bid for your assistance or input.  You simply respond at a good breaking point or when it’s convenient for you.

Questions?  How do you use messaging to eliminate email on your team?

So yesterday I sat on the edge of a dock on a beautiful lake in Northern Ontario. The roar of my siblings enjoying wakeboarding filled the lake.  I was on vacation with my family, but was seated, laptop open, feet dangling in the water, trying to attract whatever I could of the nearest cellular signal.

With my mobile internet stick attached to my laptop I had found the perfect spot to get one bar of service.  As I was catching up on my Google Buzz, I noticed a friend from Orlando had re-tweeted a mutual Singaporean friend’s tweet about Ken Blanchard’s “Leading at a Higher Level” available *free* for a limited time for Amazon Kindle.

I clicked the link and was re-directed to Amazon where I clicked the 1-click purchase option and was informed that the book had now been delivered to my Kindle.

Just a few years ago, none of this was possible or didn’t even exist.  Think about it.

• I’m surfing the web on my laptop from a connection via a SIM card.
• My computing device is small enough (and battery powered) to sit in my lap on a dock.
• I’m tracking with my friends in the US and Asia.
• There’s a social network inside my inbox.
• No one paid my friends to promote Blanchard or the Kindle.
• My friends were actually posting to a different social network (one that I wasn’t tracking with while on vacation) but their recommendation still made it into one of my streams.
• I can buy things (in this case free) with the press of one button.
• I buying things with one interface, that will be consumed with another (actually, I’ll be able to consume the book with my laptop, phone, tablet and Kindle).

The world is now very small and it’s definitely mobile.  If you don’t think the world has changed, just join me on the dock next time I’m on vacation.

Yesterday I had dinner with a colleague who was a scope of reaching students on over 100 campuses in one of the world’s largest (non North American) cities.

I asked her, “what technological accelerators would help you in your ministry?”

Her answer, “get all our visual tools (videos, cards, pamphlets, stories) onto mobile devices.” She talked about how a significant percentage of students in her city had internet enabled phones and used them to pass around all sorts of content in their dormitories.

Talk about a huge opportunity for helping students reach other students in getting your message out!

What are you hearing about scalable ways to get your message out to students globally?

[Photo courtesy of http://www.istockphoto.com/DomenicoGelermo]

Two recent articles have really got me thinking about effective ways to work with teams at formulating strategy.

The Theory of the Case

My Eureka Moment with Strategy

The articles emphasize getting team members to agree on what would need to be true in order to move towards a strategy or proposed vision.  In this way, a lot of subjective banter, politicking, fear and other things can be set aside for objective evaluation and discussion of a proposal.

I often find there are many underlying assumptions that aren’t understood or grasped when someone proposes or disagrees with a strategy or tactic.  Being highly intuitive, I think I can get frustrated with others when they “just don’t get it” or I have trouble explaining the implications of how I see the world.

I’m excited to try this method of working at formulating strategy as I think it might be able to help get at core issues in strategy formulation and leave behind baggage that so often permeates meetings.