Interactive Austin is now over, and it was an interesting and eventful day — particularly for those of us who are local and did a decent job of spending the day doing some good networking. I don’t have a huge amount to write about it, because others have done a far better job, so here [ Read More ]
The former CMO of Jive Software, Sam Lawrence, spoke to a crowded room at Interactive Austin this morning. His message was on the lessons needed to specifically apply in order to make social media work in your business. How We Say What We Say One of the challenges social media evangelists face is based on [ Read More ]
This is something I’ve been thinking about more and more recently. The fact that we started off as a services company is what allowed us to get started and to avoid having to rely on outside funding. But it was transitioning to a product company that allowed us to grow and scale, and to ultimately [ Read More ]
Ask anyone who got into an internet-based business prior to 2000, and you’ll hear nostalgic “good old days” stories, the way my grandparents talk about ‘when Kennedy was President.’ It’s hysterical to hear, and it saddens me endlessly to think about how long ago that was, but it really was an exciting time — and [ Read More ]
People who did not meet me until at or around my 25th birthday would never believe it, but in school, I was the Queen of Slackers. Truly. School was too easy, too routine and I spent too long doing it to be able to breath new life into the experience. I could dodge classes, do [ Read More ]
I had a couple of discussions this week that got me thinking back to the early days of my career. Aside from leaving me feeling older than I care to think about, it did spark a pleasant memory or two that I’ve been mulling over since. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about how early career choices [ Read More ]
It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [ Read More ]
The last speaking quality I want to cover in my series on what makes a quality public speaker is the ability of a speaker to connect with their audience. There are thousands of ways to do this, and how a speaker goes about it will often be dictated by a combination of their content (as [ Read More ]
In my original blog post on this topic, the second quality I listed as being necessary in a great speaker is authenticity. Authenticity is difficult to quantify, but we know it when we see it. And when it comes to a speaker, it makes a huge difference in how we view what they say. A [ Read More ]
Last night I was reading a very interesting Harvard Business Review article by Umair Haque called Five Problems Venture Capitalists Should Have Solved (But Didn’t). Admittedly, I know very little about the world of venture capital (hence the reading), but this made me think of a panel I attended at SXSWi and he raised a [ Read More ]
I admit it: I am “an oratorical snob.” I have very high standards when it comes to what I like to hear and see from a speaker at an event or show. Having grown up in a small business-centric environment, public speaking is in my blood and I cut my teeth on motivational and business [ Read More ]
Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [ Read More ]