Toluu

Go Big Always

Am I ok?November 13 2008

Am I ok?

I’ve gotten a ton of messages from really great people asking if I was ok. I’ve had a hundred or so messages on Facebook, Twitter, email and instant messaging asking why I’ve suddenly gone silent.

The reasons are painfully personal, but I thought I’d break the silence to let everyone know.

My wife and I are getting a divorce.

We met when she was 19 and I was 20. We’ve been together for 18 years. She’s a truly amazing person who I’ve spent 1/2 of my entire life with. She’s my best friend, a fantastic mother and woman. We have two amazing sons (age ten and eight) who we both adore. Ultimately, we’ve evolved into different people who need different things.

While we’ve done this whole process lovingly, it’s been unbelievably painful and disruptive. No doubt, the hardest time in my life. The best way to describe it is like a thousand small deaths (and some not so small). And I can’t even put words to how hard it was to fracture my son’s reality by telling them the news.

So am I ok?

No. I’m really not. I’m not completely myself yet. But I will be. This is hard and I’m grieving. As much as you hear about a ton of other people

What it takes to Go BigSeptember 30 2008

Bravery

Ultimately, Going Big means the courage to be brave. It’s hard enough for us to do in our personal lives and a million times harder at work. Companies are so highly matrixed and political that they make sticking your neck out nearly impossible. At least, shunned. No one wants to take the ball or stand out. Since no one is brave at work, most employees mimic lots of average and invisible employees.

Conceptualization

Big comes from big ideas and big dreams. Most people and companies don’t know how to recognize an idea.  It’s not anyone’s fault, we’re just not practiced at developing them. Most ideas don’t have a clear course. And charting new courses or knowing how to stop turning the same crank is not something companies genetically know how to do. Ideas need care. Anyone can kill a sapling but only those who can Go Big can grow them into trees.

Intuition

Instinct is amazingly human. It’s so immediate we often don’t give it a voice. At

18th Century TwitterSeptember 23 2008

A friend recently told me about the book Strange Red Cow, a collection old 18th and 19th century classified ads. You remember those? Folks eager to connect to other people through a small, defined amount of text? Basically, Twitter in print.

Finding what they’re looking for

In looking over all the missed connections in classifieds I was reminded how, for centuries, people have tried to share and connect. I remember reading over classifieds and wondering about the people who posted. Did they find what they were looking for? Did “he” ever find the woman who stood next to him in line? Now, every second on Twitter, people publish equally succinct posts which reach out to each other for help, to share, or to connect.

The cost of missed connections at work

In the workplace, it’s been known forever that the cost of missed connections costs companies millions of dollars in lost knowledge or missed expertise. Everyday thousands of employees miss the opportunity to find people who can make what they’re doing less redundant or more valuable. What’s the ROI of a fully networked, 100% connected workforce? What’s the valu

The big, fat “Enterprise Hole”September 17 2008

Before we talk about the hole

Let’s take a quick look at how technology has provided value so far. Boiled down and oversimplified, there are three stages.

1. Pink: You’ve saved time. Now all your paper and information is digital.
2. Blue: You’ve made your digital stuff accessible by other people. Think wiki or a file folder.
3. Green: Now that people have extra time and made everything centralized, you can step back and think about better ways to do things. 

You are somewhere in the blue egg

If connecting people together and/or sharing content centrally is innovative to you, you’re in the blue egg. It’s an innovative idea, but I’d argue it isn’t delivering valuable change to your core business yet. For that to happen, you have to to fill in the big, fat “Enterprise Hole” and connect the dots to the ways you do things now. 

The big, fat “Enterprise Hole”

Companies are execution machines. Remember when you got your first job? You were hell-bent on making a difference and changing the way things got done. You were filled with ideas. Problem was, the minute you looked for a place to deliver that value, you were shown your bo

Wall Street’s crash is good news for Social SoftwareSeptember 16 2008

Just like it was immediately following 9/11, Technology and Marketing spending will now be on the chopping block. Time to throw the ballast over. So why is that good news for social software?

1. With recession comes consolidation

Consolidation is not great news for point solutions but it’s fantastic for “all-in-one” products which can replace lots of point solutions. I.T. departments will begin audits of all the little apps that aren’t being used, gather their value in hard and soft costs and present it to management with recommendations for EA licenses and other consolidation.

2. The Analyst’s noise filters

Next month Forrester’s Wave Report and Gartner’s next Magic Quadrant will be released. This will provide yet more clarity. Some vendors will be on the list, some won’t but either way these reports will help the market know where to look for the value they’re trying to get out of less cost-effective to things like Microsoft Sharepoint or tons of little tools.

3. Marketing bu