If You Want To Blog And Have Starting Trouble, Try Quora

My friend and colleague @Chirag_Mehta introduced Quora to me and explained that it is reverse blogging. I asked him what that means and he explained that rather than pick topics to write on, a person can look at the questions people are asking and write detailed answers, almost like a blog post, in areas where they have expertise and credibility. For example, Reed hastings the CEO of NetFlix answers questions about NetFlix strategy and financials. He is  obviously a credible source and people pay attention.

Since then I have suggested Quora to some colleagues who wanted to start writing on the topics where they have expertise. They like it. Give it a try. Quora.com

Enterprise 2.0 Books For General Managers and Human Capital Management Researchers

For the past couple of years I have been focusing on the next generation workplace. My goal was to find out on how the new generation of employees, new technologies that make connecting and sharing easy, will change enterprise software and people behavior in the workplace. I found these books valuable and decide to share the wealth.  The authors are a blend of seminal thinkers, radical practitioners and consultants. Did I miss anything?

Reading for general managers
Andrew McAfee - Researcher, Academic
Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges

Charlene Li - Analyst, Consultant

Book: Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies

My takeaway: This was the first book I read that covered the Web 2.0 topic in a comprehensive manner.

Josh Bernoff
Empowered : Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business

My Take Away: Consumers are empowered. The only way you can meet their needs is to empower your employees using Enterprise 2.0 tools. A good guide for business and people leaders.

Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead
My takeaway: The way an organizations leadership behaves needs to change to adapt to the new generation of people and tools.


Morten Hansen's book, "Collaboration"
Recommended by @movito
My takeaway: The book focuses on the economic value of collaboration. 


Reading for designers and users of people management systems
Richard H Thaler and Cass R Sunstein - Academics
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
My takeway: I understood how choice architecture by designers of systems can influence people.


Nicholas A Christakis and James H. Fowler  - Academics
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives
My takeway: I understood the power of connections and how they affect our lives. The strength of weak links was a good lesson.


Clay Shirky - Academic
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
My takeaway: I understood why there is a sudden surge in people's urge to creating rather than just consume.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations


Seth Godin - Thinker, Marketer
Tribes: We need you to lead us
Linchpin : Are You Indispensable?
My takeaway : In todays world, the factory needs the worker more than how much the worker needs the factory.


Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson - Entrepreneurs, Radical Thinkers
Rework
My takeaway: A small number of companies are disrupting traditional thinking about hiring, managing and retaining workers. 37 Signals is a company to watch. 


Dennis Shiffman
The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture


Don Tapscott - Researcher, Consultant
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything


Learning, Performance Management and Succession
Jay Cross - Thinker, Researcher, ConsultantInformal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance 
My takeaway : Conversation is the best learning technology. Learning systems should enable conversation.


Ram Charan - Thinker, Academic, Consultant
Leaders at All Levels: Deepening Your Talent Pool to Solve the Succession Crisis
My takeaway : Apprenticeship is the key to succession planning and dialog among leaders is the key to talent management. Not a system that tries to automate talent management.


Daniel Pink
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
My takeaway: Higher financial incentives do not improve performance in 'cognitive' tasks.


Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations
Network Challenge : Strategy Profit And Risk In An Interlinked World

Demographics and Millennial Generation

• Keeping The Millennials: Why Companies Are Losing Billions in Turnover to This Generation- and What to Do About It
• The Age Curve: How to Profit from the Coming Demographic Storm
• Growing Up Digital : The Rise of the Net Generation
• Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World

Marketing and Customer Relationship Management
These book are not directly related to people management. But they are a good read to understand trends in the consumer world.

• Engage: The Complete Guide for Brands and Businesses to Build, Cultivate, and Measure Success in the New Web
• The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture
• Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business

Building Social Web Applications

I am referring to the book "Building Social Web Applications a lot in the past few days.

The book gives a good mental framework for designing social web applications. I have jotted down some key points that caught my eye.

Chapter 9

• Every social application has a simple core. A profile, a social network and some form of group communication tool.

Chapter 12 : Talks about community structures.

• There are 3 types of communities. Publisher led, interest led and product led. In an enterprise setting, I think there will be publisher led and interest led communities. Publisher led communities are people who gather around a published artifact. Interested led communities are people who gather around a topic.

Chapter 13 : Organizing Your Site for Navigation, Search and Activity

• Tags can be used as a filter. Tags can be used as a search term. For example, clicking on a tag can narrow the focus to topics tagged with a particular tag. Clicking on a tag can also broaden the conversation by pulling up all the people and artifacts tagged with a particular team. 
• Tags Create Navigation: Tags create a people generated taxonomy without any over classification. Meaning emerges from the frequency of usage. People apply tags largely for their own benefit to allow them to retrieve content later. Tagging might look messy. But tags solve a lot of problems. They provide labels for content. They offer new means of navigation and search. They devolve the classification issue to the person best suited to do it - the person who created it or the person who is consuming it.
• Connecting Content Through People: Profile pages can act as connectors to other content. Content can take a viewer to a person's profile page.
• Search :Search by Person on your application should present an interface for activity based on the relationship between the searcher and the person returned in the search results. Show the relationship between people and offer a means to create a relationship.