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 ]
20/20 Hindsight – Getting Your Start in a Startup
Posted on Apr - 23 - 200920/20 Hindsight – How Early Career Choices Can Set the Stage
Posted on Apr - 22 - 2009I 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 ]
Why Agile Isn't Just for Development
Posted on Apr - 21 - 2009It’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 ]
Organizational Design 2.0 – Technology, Change & Organizational Structure
Posted on Apr - 13 - 2009Over 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 ]
Social Design for a Virtual Organization
Posted on Apr - 13 - 2009At South by Southwest, Brazen Careerist author and CEO Penelope Trunk was quite emphatic that, when starting a new business, having a geographically distributed team is rarely possible. She said this on her panel, as well as again when we spoke in person. She was a strong advocate of the notion that, for the first [ Read More ]
Enterprise 2.0 Discussion at Web 2.0 Expo
Posted on Apr - 12 - 2009At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, we recorded a short video on the happenings in the Enterprise 2.0 space, the activity at the event, and the upcoming local event (local to me, anyway) here in Austin at the end of the month: Interactive Austin 09. The video is posted and, as always, while I [ Read More ]
The 1st Birthday of a Unique Corporate Blog – The Connection Cafe
Posted on Mar - 30 - 2009A year ago, Austin-based Convio launched a company blog: Connection Cafe. Unlike so many other company blogs, Convio decided to take a slightly different approach with the hope of gaining slightly different results. While many organizations opt for a CEO blog — particularly companies with in-demand CEO’s, like Convio’s Gene Austin — or a blog [ Read More ]
Amazon, Google & Microsoft Discuss Cloud Computing at SXSW
Posted on Mar - 17 - 2009Representatives from Google, Microsoft and Amazon gathered for a panel at SXSW to discuss the value, the future and the changes in cloud computing.
Matt Cutts from Google Announces Friend Connect API at PubCon South
Posted on Mar - 12 - 2009Matt Cutts from the Google Webspam Team announced the launch of Google’s Friend Connect API during his keynote speech this morning at PubCon South in Austin. The official announcement will be posted by Google later this morning, but Matt took took the opportunity to share the good news with the PubCon crowd during his remarks. [ Read More ]
Live from PubCon South: Fireside Chat with Chris Brogan and Guy Kawasaki
Posted on Mar - 11 - 2009While normally the idea of a “fireside chat” in Austin, Texas would be a little warm, today’s unusually chilly weather brought all new appeal to the idea. So, in honor of the rainy weather and the keynote title, Chris Brogan obliged by pulling up a fireplace video on his laptop, and placing it on the [ Read More ]
Three Questions to Ask (& Answer!) Before Starting a Customer Blog
Posted on Mar - 05 - 2009In a recent conversation with a friend, we were discussing corporate blogging efforts to engage existing customers. After reading Joshua-Michele Ross‘ post recently, on the Wells Fargo/Wachovia merger blog, I was excited to see yet one more company prepare to engage customers in this forum. That is, until we started talking in more detail. It [ Read More ]
The Difference Between ‘An Opportunist’ and ‘A Great Brand’
Posted on Feb - 19 - 2009There may be no more pervasive and unsavory cliché about lawyers than ‘the ambulance chaser.’ The lawyer who follows an emergency medical team to the scene of an accident for the express purpose of leeching off the pain and misery of others – for the less-than-noble reason of making money – is generally regarded as [ Read More ]