Douglas Pollei – Movin' Ahead

I loved the post by my friend Douglas Pollei back in November…the one he called BookStack, where he shared a pile of books he was diving into. By the way, he just did a cool post about how today’s marketers need whole-brain, strategic thinking skills to stay on top of their game.

Here is the pile I got through in 2007. I typically have four books going at one time, so it takes me a while to finish.

From the bottom to the top:
1) Your Inner CEO, Allan Cox (also find him doing great things on Facebook)

This is an inspiring, hands and mind-on book that lets you redefine who you want to be. Allan blends modern psychology and his CEO training experience. He’s really doing a great job connecting with people, getting people involved and showing how to use social media. Bravo!

2) The New Influencers, Paul Gillin

A must read that is quick, filled with mistakes and good things people and companies have done using social media. This book can help many marketers and communications pros get up to speed and off and running with social media.

3) Quantum Leap Thinking, James J. Mapes

I really enjoyed this book. It’s nice to stop and think about how you look at things, how your mind consumes the world. This can help open up perspectives by redefining limits with quick, meaningful leap ahead thinking.

4) We are Smarter than Me, Barry Libert & Jon Spector and Thousands of Contributors
The wisdom of crowds is tightly described in this nifty book. This is one of those huge concepts (like long tale) that are at the core of social media, social networking and how people are communicating better, faster and more openly than ever.

5) The Cluetrain Manifesto, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
Many of my friends read this years ago, but it light me up and made me laugh out loud through several plane rides. Most of all, it got me fired up about getting to what matters by being real and honest. Irreverent. Timeless yet of our times.

6) Blink, Malcolm Gladwell
This is mind boggling. It might be telling us all what we already know, subconsciously…pre-reflexively. Think statics is tough? You actually bust our elementary functions, statics and algebra in a blink of the eye whenever you make a snap judgment or life-saving move.

7) Purple Cow, Seth Godin
I finally got to this book several years after it came out, but its as fresh as a warm latte. Seth is a succint storyteller who took off his rose colored glasses long ago and his truly helping marketing and communications pros cut the crap and focus on doing wonderful things. This is about breaking the status quo. It’s about the need for focusing on smaller, more meaningful audiences with something truly valuable. Cookie cutter won’t cut it for everyone anymore. I read this while visiting small towns in Calabria, southern Italy this winter. I believe that each little town is living what Seth is talking about. Each town is getting back to their heritage, their dialect, their crafts and celebrating their specialty foods and songs. It makes them special, and stand out from other neighboring towns.

8) Meatball Sundae, Seth Godin (standing, left)
Picked this up in Berkeley at Cody’s Bookstore and it’s yummy. I’m still flipping through it, but this is Seth Godin taking ideamaking to the next level — what not to do, so that you can see how to free yourself to make the right combinations. To use the right combination of traits from the left AND right sides of your brain.

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Tags: SethGodin, Malcolm Gladwell, Cluetrain Manifesto, James Mapes, Paul Gillin, Allan Cox, Douglas Pollei

I had the pleasure of meeting Douglas Pollei at Intel headquarters the second week in November, just days before taking my sabbatical. We had a great talk about the state of corporate social media (can you say that?) that ended when we looked around and saw the once-buzzing cafetteria empty.

Douglas keeps a cool blog by night and for his day job he’s the VP of Internet Strategy and Corporate Development for IKANO Communications Inc., a portfolio company of Insight Venture Partners in New York. In other words, he’s a social media brother of another mother singing that same song about opening up, connecting and creating new opportunities.

We met through Forrester Research’s Jeremiah Owyang, who personally invited Douglas to check out the September Social Media: Friend or Foe of IT panel at the Intel Developer Forum. We exchanged emails — he even politely kept in contact after a very late response I sent after IDF — then during a business trip to Silicon Valley he saved some time for us to meet. If he were a vendor, I’d have respectfully declined, but the chance to explore accomplishments and conflicts about social media? No way would I miss a chance! Here are some highlights from our talk, as Douglas posted on his blog:

* Intel is seeking to involve more employees in the conversations with outside world. These employees must be not only observers but active contributors in the conversations, otherwise they don’t fully understand and move with the current. The IDF is a great example of the beginnings of this reach out and I believe it will continue to be.

* The intersection of the control and openness mindset creates conflicts in organizations. The true goal is to find the human intersections and how to understand, internalize, and communicate these findings going forward.

* Enterprises can create boundaries of communication, like a walled garden. Some areas are open and others are closed. The key is to organically let those with a voice contribute and potentially elevate these individuals to a higher status of job authority with regard to new media tools (social media, video, audio, etc..). When employees don’t reach out, it is comparable to being at the party and not talking to anyone but expecting value from it. You must mingle to be inspired and know the true and unscripted pulse.

* There will be many who will oppose these types of movements in a large organization but as they join in and see the value, many C’s including CEOs will be endorsers of the openness to know where to take the company, and how to raise stockholder value through innovation.

* VCs, private equity firms, and serial entrepreneurs are continually developing new media solutions that enterprises can adopt to enhance the communications with all channels of their business. Knowing the tech scouts who can see these in advance and know which products will win (and work) will be key to enterprises. Jobs descriptions in these areas are not currently on the enterprise org chart and so it is hard for many to understand their value. It is like telling someone to see a house built when only a floor plan exists.

We agreed to keep our conversation moving ahead. In fact, one thing we talked about was how I believe Intel has some wonderful stories to tell. Stories that are still coming together but will help directly connect Intel technology and innovation with social computing — from personal to commercial to developers and beyond. Intel’s new processor technologies can help people and businesses really get the most from Web 2.0, which seems to be growing and becoming more meaningful to everyone. Well, on the day Intel introduced it’s new Penryn chips — those featuring re-engineered, smaller, energy efficient, faster 45nm transistors — Intel CEO did it! Speaking at Oracle Open World, Intel CEO Paul Otellini (from ZDNet blog by Dan Faber):

“The enterprise is not immune from consumer trends,” Otellini said. Connectivity 24×7 and the need to socialize networks, as in Facebook, are key demands inside and outside the workplace going forward. “As this happens you need to think about how to rearchitect the infrastructure inside your businesses,” he added.

Otellini concluded that the “future in this sense is not very far away. The highly collaborative, interactive global social network is nearly upon us.”

It’s not a prophetic vision, but Otellini wants to make sure the Oracle crowd divines that Intel should be a core part of the rearchitecting of their businesses.

This is something many other companies are doing, or can be doing to help show how they’re relevant in making Web 2.0 and social computing more amazing and useful everyday.

Until we meet again, here is another topic we explored: Corporation being more human and actively finding their way in places like Facebook. This weekend I came across the Harvard Business Review’s “Why your company needs to be on Facebook.” Its was posted on November 9, 2007 by Charlene Li is a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Cluetrain Manifesto? There’s no turning back. There’s moving ahead, integrating, being smart, providing reason and value every step of the way…never without passion and zeal for helping and connecting with others.

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