Links for May 8 2011

• Looking for Liquids, or Losing Sight of What Matters by Steve Boese on Fistful of Talent

  Quote: If you spend time, energy, focus, and rewards looking for liquids (or your organization’s equivalent, like counting PTO hours, monitoring dress codes, or ensuring butts are in seats), well, you will develop a expert staff, a fine-tuned organizational culture, and a high-functioning ‘liquid finding’ capability across the organization.

• A Better Business Doctrine – Part 1: Assholes are bad for business by Olivier Blanchard on The BrandBuilder Blog

  Quote: The customer-facing organization with the least amount of assholes wins.

• Seeing the truth when it might be invisible by Seth Godin

  Quote: Eight things you’ve probably never seen with your own eyes: Buzz Aldrin, the US debt, multi-generational evolution of mammals, an atom of hydrogen, Google’s search algorithm, the inside of a nuclear power plant, a whale and the way your body digests a cookie. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, nor does it mean you can’t find a way to make them useful.

• Is Cloud the ultimate Shadow IT? by Christian Verstraete on Enterprise CIO Forum

  Quote: …to avoid shadow IT, CIO’s should find ways to improve their service and provide the business with what they need.

• You vs. The Data: When to Stop Optimizing and Start Thinking By Jeff Gothelf on KISSMetrics

  Quote: At some point, the numbers stop mattering…

• Write what you do not know by Christopher S. Penn on Awaken Your Superhero

  Quote: How do you write what you don’t know? Research. Investigate. Explore. Adventure. Find a direction and set sail for it, taking along all of your audience on the quest to new lands. A good number of them will go along with you because frankly, if you’ve only written what you know and you’re into re-runs (or worse, re-runs of re-runs rehashed), they’re looking for a new adventure too.

• Be an Optimist Without Being a Fool by Heidi Grant Halvorson on The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

  Quote: …to be successful, you need to understand the vital difference between believing you will succeed, and believing you will succeed easily. Put another way, it’s the difference between being a realistic optimist and an unrealistic optimist.

• A Content Strategy Maturity Model by Christine Thompson on Musings

  Quote: Tak­ing the bull by the horns, I’ve begun to cre­ate a con­tent strat­egy matu­rity model (shown below). My intent in doing so is to offer a frame­work that guides B2B mar­keters toward a more holis­tic con­tent dis­ci­pline — one that offers real poten­tial to deliver pos­i­tive ROMI (return on mar­ket­ing invest­ment) on a last­ing basis.