JD Lasica

JD Lasica is now friends with Patricia Kaehler

JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Bust The Silos: Opening Your Organization To Growth
by Hunter Hastings

read in September, 2010

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Jeff Saperstein and I co-organized the Traveling Geeks trip to London in July 2009, where he described the new book he was working on with co-author Hunter Hastings, Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth. As someone who work...more

JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead
by Charlene Li (Goodreads Author)

read in May, 2010

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e first thing to understand about Charlene Li’s smart new book “Open Leadership” is that this is not a call to arms for top management to deploy a loosey-goosey, feel-good strategy of giving up complete control of your management structu...more e first thing to understand about Charlene Li’s smart new book “Open Leadership” is that this is not a call to arms for top management to deploy a loosey-goosey, feel-good strategy of giving up complete control of your management structure. Nor is it yet another business book about effective corporate leadership techniques.

Instead, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead is about how to reinvent companies (as they must be) for the age of social media. It’s filled with smart, practical strategic advice — not only for company CEOs but for middle managers, social marketers and change-makers at all levels of an organization — about how to set out a vision, how to overcome internal barriers and how to navigate a brand through these turbulent waters.

Like “Groundswell” before it, “Open Leadership” (336 pages) brims with anecdotes and real-word examples of how companies are making the transition to the conversational era. (The publication date is May 24; Charlene gave me an advance copy of the book at SxSW.)

Charlene lays out her premise early on: That businesses require its executives to adopt an “open leadership” style of management in place of the command-and-control paradigm in place at most large companies. “Face it — you’re not in control and probably never really were,” she writes. “You need to let go of the need to be in control.” As she explains, you aren’t really giving up control — “you are shifting it to someone else that you have confidence in.”

In other words, openness (and letting go) is just the first step in Open Leadership. But it needs to be matched by an equal commitment to provide a structured, integrated framework in which an openness strategy can succeed.

The book begins with the telling example of United Airlines’ boneheaded reaction to a customers’ complaint about its baggage handlers damaging his guitar. (I recently interviewed musician Dave Carroll about it and will post it here soon.) The resulting negative publicity spawned by Dave’s United Breaks Guitars series on YouTube surely cost the airline millions and a damaged reputation that has not yet been repaired.

While those of us who run social media agencies will no doubt be familiar with much of the terrain Charlene covers throughout — Dell’s IdeaStorm, Best Buy, Starbucks, Comcast, Motrin Moms — every reader should come away with at least a handful of stories that provide tangible evidence of the transformative effects of social media and open leadership across departments — customer support, product development, marketing, PR, HR — and across sectors.

Charlene gets down in the weeds in the section mapping out “New metrics for new relationships,” including measurements on calculating “the New Customer Lifetime Value,” which goes well beyond looking at just the ROI of a campaign. She cautions against “dashboard delirium” syndrome, where companies measure KPIs (key performance indicators) just because they can.

The book is filled with such smart, no-nonsense actionable insights. So if your company is still not very clueful about the social media revolution’s effects on business, buy a copy for your boss.(less)

JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars

The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change
by Beth Kanter

read in September, 2010

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For anyone connected to the nonprofit world, Beth Kanter should be a familiar name. In "The Networked Nonprofit," she and the equally adept Allison Fine approach the daunting task of trying to get notoriously conservative and slow-mov...more For anyone connected to the nonprofit world, Beth Kanter should be a familiar name. In "The Networked Nonprofit," she and the equally adept Allison Fine approach the daunting task of trying to get notoriously conservative and slow-moving nonprofit organizations to embrace the tenets of the social media revolution. They do so as friendly guides, never scolding or talking down but pointing to the now unmistakable evidence that opening up and engaging with your stakeholders is the only way to go.

Fine (who hosts the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s podcast on social good) and Kanter offer many of the same words of advice to nonprofits that I’ve done as a partner at Socialbrite.org, beginning with the importance of starting with objectives, creating strategies and tactics to get you there and worrying about the tools and gadgets last. (By the way, did you know that the nonprofit sector employs about 12.9 million people, or 9.7 percent of the U.S. economy?)

Even if you don’t work in a nonprofit, there’s lots to absorb in this book. For instance, the authors lay out the different kinds of crowdsourcing — collective intelligence of crowd wisdom; crowd creation; crowd voting and crowd funding — and explain how each can be used to good effect. (One nit: It’s not the “1–10-100 rule,” as the authors describe it on page 123; it’s the 90–9-1 rule that applies to a typical group of 100 people.)

You’ll find plenty of real-world examples of where nonprofits used social media to good advantage. The Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity, nudged forward by a young research associate, began a listening effort, set up a Twitter account and began a genuine conversation with supporters. Over a six-month period, “They were listening and talking to people on many channels, including using an RSS reader to scan the Web for relevant blog posts, and finding and interviewing young people on Facebook as part of the Index data collection. They developed case studies for the annual report that involved more youngt people, and they discovered new avenues for sharing results with people they weren’t reaching before.”

Again and again we see examples of how nonprofits that take down the fortress and embrace this brave new world help to move the needle for their organizations’ missions. “The Networked Nonprofit” is the perfect guide to navigate this fast-changing landscape.(less)

JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky

read in July, 2010

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Clay Shirky is a master at bringing meaning to the startling cultural and technological changes whirling through our lives. In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provided context the revolution that is turning passive office workers into...more Clay Shirky is a master at bringing meaning to the startling cultural and technological changes whirling through our lives. In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provided context the revolution that is turning passive office workers into take-charge designers of their businesses’ corporate destinies. In his follow-up, Cognitive Surplus, he probes a bit deeper into what is propelling forward our individual creativity and the impulse to share and contribute to a collective output — what he calls “cognitive surplus” (a term not likely to roll off the tongues of the young people leading the charge).

The book starts off powerfully with a fascinating look at the Gin Craze of 1720s London. Who knew that historical parallels could be drawn between that era and our own times? (“The sitcom has been our gin,” Shirky tells us, skirting Steven Johnson’s arguments that television series have become increasingly smart.) “The harnessing of our cognitive surplus allows people to behave in increasingly generous, public, and social ways, relative to their old status as consumers and couch potatoes,” he writes What’s changed is that “now we have the tools at our disposal,” an astonishing array of “flexible, cheap, and inclusive media” and platforms that offer us “opportunities to do all sorts of things we once didn’t do.” (Side note: I wrote about the personal media revolution in my 2005 book Darknet.)

Shirky includes some amazing stories about the power of the new social tools — for instance, he talked about the Pink Chaddi Facebook campaign on stage at Personal Democracy Forum in June. I wish the book had given a more thorough look at some of the ground-breaking uses of social media for social good, the crowdsourcing phenomenon, review sharing sites and the burgeoning collaborative approaches to building online communities rather than leading us down the now familiar terrain of fan fiction and file sharing. Still, the bottom line is this: “Cognitive Surplus” is a must-read for anyone interested in the causes and underpinnings of the changes that have turned the mediasphere on its head and empowered the digital generation to bypass traditional institutions and create a DIY approach to culture and communication.(less)

JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World
by David Kirkpatrick

read in August, 2010

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David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is two books in one: a surprisingly riveting narrative tale of the early days of “the facebook” from its launch at Harvard, viral growth at campuses across the nation and move to Silicon Valley (c...more David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is two books in one: a surprisingly riveting narrative tale of the early days of “the facebook” from its launch at Harvard, viral growth at campuses across the nation and move to Silicon Valley (coming to a movie screen to you on Oct. 1: The Social Network); and a sobering assessment of how Facebook is changing our culture, from attitudes about privacy to the long-term effects of transparency and over-sharing. The book was my favorite summer read and deserved a better fate than the review it received in the New York Times.

Kirkpatrick spends considerable time painting a portrait of the somewhat impish college student Mark Zuckerberg, his maturation into a world-class, farsighted and shrewd CEO, his fascinating dance with the Washington Post as Facebook’s principal investor before turning to a more traditional investment firm, and the utter mayhem of growing a company from zero to a user base of a half billion in six short years.

Kirkpatrick correctly identifies the inflection points — and Silicon Valley penchant for iterating and turning on a dime — that led to Facebook’s astonishing success, particularly Zuckerberg’s decision to open up Facebook to outside developers and his focus on long-term ubiquity rather than short-term profits. I loved the little vignettes about the unforeseen consequences of the Facebook team’s actions. For instance, after Facebook’s code jockeys threw the switch and opened the platform to outside apps, the founders of iLike “drove around Silicon Valley borrowing servers from various tech companies so they could handle the load.” Within two days, 400,000 people had downloaded the iLike application.

The author spends a little bit too much time on accounts of the company’s valuation and negotiations with Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer that came to naught. But he hits the nail on the head when he identifies Google, not Microsoft, as the biggest challenger to Facebook’s supremacy in the tech world and wonders if Google’s “information-organizing” algorithm-driven business model can stand up to Facebook’s people-powered paradigm. “The Facebook Effect” shines a light on how far we’ve traveled these past six years, how fast things have changed and how we need to examine with scrutiny the changes that are being foisted on us whether we like it or not.(less)

JD Lasica added

Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods
by Shel Israel

read in August, 2009

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JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
by Jeff Howe

read in January, 2009

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JD Lasica added

A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future
by Daniel H. Pink (Goodreads Author)

read in August, 2009

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JD Lasica added

Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business
by Erik Qualman (Goodreads Author)

read in August, 2009

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JD Lasica is now friends with Patricia Kaehler
10 hours, 29 min ago · like
JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars Bust The Silos: Opening Your Organization To Growth by Hunter Hastings read in September, 2010	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Jeff Saperstein and I co-organized the Traveling Geeks trip to London in July 2009, where he described the new book he was working on with co-author Hunter Hastings, Bust the Silos: Opening Your Organization for Growth. As someone who work...more
Sep 18, 2010 11:26pm · see review
JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li (Goodreads Author) read in May, 2010	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
e first thing to understand about Charlene Li’s smart new book “Open Leadership” is that this is not a call to arms for top management to deploy a loosey-goosey, feel-good strategy of giving up complete control of your management structu...more
Sep 18, 2010 11:22pm · see review
JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars The Networked Nonprofit: Connecting with Social Media to Drive Change by Beth Kanter read in September, 2010	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
For anyone connected to the nonprofit world, Beth Kanter should be a familiar name. In "The Networked Nonprofit," she and the equally adept Allison Fine approach the daunting task of trying to get notoriously conservative and slow-mov...more
Sep 18, 2010 11:18pm · see review
JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky read in July, 2010	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Clay Shirky is a master at bringing meaning to the startling cultural and technological changes whirling through our lives. In Here Comes Everybody, Shirky provided context the revolution that is turning passive office workers into...more
Sep 13, 2010 12:45am · see review
JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick read in August, 2010	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
David Kirkpatrick’s The Facebook Effect is two books in one: a surprisingly riveting narrative tale of the early days of “the facebook” from its launch at Harvard, viral growth at campuses across the nation and move to Silicon Valley (c...more
Sep 13, 2010 12:42am · see review
JD Lasica added Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel read in August, 2009	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Aug 23, 2009 09:00pm
JD Lasica rated a book 4 of 5 stars Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe read in January, 2009	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Aug 23, 2009 08:57pm
JD Lasica added A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel H. Pink (Goodreads Author) read in August, 2009	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Aug 23, 2009 08:49pm
JD Lasica added Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business by Erik Qualman (Goodreads Author) read in August, 2009	Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Aug 23, 2009 08:38pm

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