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Jack Welch – Straight From The Gut … Plus The Soft Stuff Matters

Srinivasan Raghavan has a post that captures some of his perspectives on Jack Welch’s book as well as a Q&A that Welch did at my alma mater. Apparently during the Q&A, Welch said:

"Business schools need to teach more organizational dynamics and human resources …"

I agree with placing additional value there. As I’ve mentioned before, things like negotiations courses and organizational design are way too underrated by students at business schools. To butress my point annecdotally, this Columbia MBA alum also weighs things like negotiations classes very high. Maybe we have skewed opinions having both done business development work, but I could still make a case for rating this type of "soft stuff" as important.

Also as captured by Srinivasan on the topic of career advice,

[Welch] also recommended taking risks. “Be adventuresome,” Welch said.
“You’ve got lots of years to be cautious.” Resiliency is a critical
attribute, he continued. “You’re going to get knocked off the horse at
least five times in the course of a career. Know you’re going to make
mistakes, be humbled by it, learn from it, and get back on the horse.
But don’t be frightened by it, don’t live in fear.”

Very coincidental that I ran into this passage. A prospective MBA student just posed a question to me today on my other blog as to whether I wish I could do something over in my career. In the comments section, I responded by closing with something to the effect of, "I wish I had taken more risks when I was younger."

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No More Dissing The Small Blog Companies – IBM Is In The Game

Slashdot points me to an InternetNews.com article and the fact that IBM has just introduced blog monitoring software today, called the Public Image Monitoring Solution:

IBM (Quote, Chart) today introduced new software that monitors and
analyzes blogs, wikis (define), news feeds,  consumer review sites,
newsgroups and other community-generated content to keep tabs on their
image.

Yes. You read it right. It reads "IBM". Blog stuff has moved into the enterprise software space it seems.

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New Whitepaper On Corporate Group Blogs

Earlier this year, 21Publish released a whitepaper on corporate blog intranets (PDF file). The paper may have been a little before its time, but then I posted an update here, which indicated that I was starting to see trench-level activity in the corporate intranet space.

Today, 21Publish is releasing a new whitepaper (PDF file) that I authored on corporate group blogging. Stefan has more to say about the topic of corporate group blogging here.

Like my prior presentation on blogging for non-profits (Powerpoint format and PDF format), the new corporate group blogging whitepaper is intended to be an introduction to those wanting to learn more about group blogging. For this paper, I’ve set the discussion context around a customer loyalty framework, which has some different effects in a group blog versus an individual blog context.

Given the recent survey by PR Week and Burson-Marsteller, I hope that people find the 21Publish whitepaper and presentation resources timely. The PR Week article reports two good stats that managers should be aware of:

  • About 59 percent of CEOs surveyed said they find Web logs, or blogs,
    useful for internal communications, while 47 percent see them as tools
    for communication with external audiences …
  • About 18 percent … say they plan to host a company blog over the next two years.

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Update (11/8/05): Niall Cook and Fredrik Wacka provide some commentary here and here on the subject of group blogging (btw – thanks for the coverage of 21Publish). I suppose I should clarify that the summary of benefits I provided early in the paper (of group blogging over individual blogging) seem to be tripping people up a bit. My fault. Since I address some of the detailed items of concern later in the paper, the message at the earlier point in the paper should have been even higher-level: that group blogs benefit from both concentration of information and a larger scope of linkages to a company brand. That is, the underlying arguments for group over individual blogs are opportunities for better scope and scale  – a concept similar to that discussed in core business/economics strategy frameworks. Not evey one can have the stature of individual bloggers like Robert Scoble, Seth Godin, or Steve Rubel – group blogs are an alternative.

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On My To Do List

Pandemic flu thing. Not sure what to do yet, but it is on my list. This thing is probably going to influence the equivalent of the home bomb shelter of the Cold War era.

Update (11/13/05): Scientific American article/cover story here.

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The AOL, Weblogs Inc., and Creative Weblogging Spat

If you like various parties naming people thieves, losers, and potential libelers, then you might want to check out these links.

AOL-Weblogs Inc. – here
Creative Weblogging – here
SiliconBeat – here
Other – here, here

Note Weblogs Inc. recently got together with AOL.

When I saw this stuff going around this weekend, I am glad I did not eat the eggs I purchased. I probably would have lost it …

Disclosure: I am a former Creative Weblogging author (The CIO Weblog). I am a hired gun of 21Publish, and 21Publish co-founder Stefan Wiskemann is also an investor in Creative Weblogging.

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Confused (Much Ado About Nothing)

This weekend I tried buying some eggs from a convenience store/pharmacy (like a CVS or Walgreens). It was a probably a first for me for buying eggs outside of a grocery store.

Some of the egg cartons were labelled "04 11 04" and the others were labelled "10 12 10".

I could not parse what this meant. It neither looked like an international date (e.g., day month year) nor a domestic date (e.g., month day year).

I figured I was just confused and so I went to ask the cashier.

Steve: I having a hard time determining the date of freshness on these eggs. Any ideas?

Cashier: Date?

Steve: Yeah. The side of this box has a stamp here, but it doesn’t look like a date stamp at all to me. I also looked inside to see if there was a stamp on the eggs … but nothing …

Cashier: Date? What kind of date would be on eggs? (blank look)

Steve: Hmmm. (squinting a bit while sizing up the cashier and deciding what to do ; long pause) …

In the end I got the "10 12 10" eggs. My rationale was that they would probably be healthier for my family than eggs from November 4, 2004. All said, we didn’t have eggs this weekend, and they are still sitting in our refrigerator.

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Reasons Why Toilet Paper Is Better Than Private Company Stock

In no particular order:

  • You can’t get toilet paper as income, but you can get private company stock as income and get taxed by the IRS at 34%.
  • You can pay less than a 35% premium for extra soft toilet paper, but calculating the preferred stock premium over common requires a PhD and ten venture capitalists to weigh in.
  • You can wash off toilet paper, but if you hold common stock you can get washed out.
  • You can get scented toilet paper, but the sniff test on common stock is harder.
  • Toilet paper is liquid and you can sell it on eBay, but you can’t find accredited investors to purchase your private company stock there, and you’d probably be the laughing stock of the world if you tried.

More on the predictability of toilet paper, from the Seinfeld episode where George Castanza is relating the discussion he had on a date:

George: We discussed toilet paper.

Jerry: Toilet paper?

George: Yeah, I told her how toilet paper hasn’t changed in my lifetime, and probably wouldn’t change in the next fifty thousand years and she was fascinated, fascinated!

Jerry: What are you talking about?

Elaine: Yeah.

Jerry: Toilet paper’s changed.

Elaine: Yeah.

Jerry: It’s softer.

Elaine: Softer.

Jerry: More sheets per roll

Elaine: Sheets.

Jerry: Comes in a wide variety of colors.

Elaine: Colors.

George: Ok, ok, fine! It’s changed, it’s not really the point. Anyway, I’m thinking of making a big move.

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