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News for November 2006
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 29 November 2006 |
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26 November 2006 |
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| Eight New Entries at The Authentic Organization |
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There are eight new entries this last week at The Authentic Organization. I hope the following titles will invite you to take a look and offer feedback if you have any: What are your Forbidden Questions?; Authenticity and Gratitude; Sounds like Work; Makers versus Consumers; The Experience of Being Known; Four Sources of Meaning at Work; The To Do Addiction -- Obsessing on the Unfinished; and Shared Vocabulary and Authenticity.
Posted: 11/26/06; 10:44:44 PM # |
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24 November 2006 |
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| Study Guides and Strategies |
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Joseph Frank Landsberger maintains a fabulous collection of Study Guides and Strategies, spanning fifteen broad topic areas: Preparing, Learning, Studying, Classroom participation, Learning with others, Project management, Reading skills, Preparing for Tests, Taking Tests, Writing Basics, Writing Types, and Research. There is some really high quality material here, with applications far beyond mere test taking.
Posted: 11/24/06; 7:58:37 PM # |
| The Sweet 16: Principles for Building a Successful Internet Business |
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John Audette's Principles for Building a Successful Internet Business are highly applicable to nonprofit online ventures. He goes into some detail about each of his sixteen principles: (1) Maintain Absolute Integrity, (2) Niche With Passion, (3) Put the Power of Inertia on Your Side, (4) Build In Scalability, (5) Keep It Lean, (6) Remarket, (7) Stay Humble - Maintain a Vertical Learning Curve, (8) Honor the Customer's Intelligence, (9) Communicate, Communicate, Communicate, (10) Yoda Says, "Give, Then Take", (11) Ideas Are Only Sparks, (12) Tangibilize, (13) Build a Three Legged Stool, (14) Build Community, (15) Respect the Power of the Index Finger, (16) Convert Liabilities Into Assets.
Posted: 11/24/06; 7:50:32 PM # |
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23 November 2006 |
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| What's Wrong with Software Patents? |
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I didn't grow up with Thanksgiving as a meaningful tradition, although we did celebrate it with a sort of awkward foreign effort, during the years in which we lived in the United States. However, I do like the idea of a day for celebrating abundance, given that we spend much of our lives organizing around scarcity. Of course, I see abundance as being based on what you can give away, whereas many act as though it's based on what you keep for yourself. All of this is just a preamble to Pieter Hintjens' article: What's Wrong with Software Patents? Patents are a tool for creating some artificial short term scarcity in order to promote long term abundance, but modern patents have lost that balance and in any case, are utterly misapplied when it comes to software. Have you checked to see if your vendors are giving thanks today for their right to own your business processes through patents?
Posted: 11/23/06; 5:57:03 PM # |
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20 November 2006 |
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| Relationships: The Basic Building Blocks of Life |
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If you know Margaret Wheatley's work, then you will understand why I'm a fan. Her paper entitled Relationships: The Basic Building Blocks of Life captures a critical insight: Organizational design, change, and leadership should use relationships between people as their fundamental object of study and work. Sadly, we tend to focus on tangible content, technologies, or individual people as our core objects.
Posted: 11/20/06; 11:12:03 PM # |
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18 November 2006 |
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| The Workshop Book |
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I was first exposed to structured methods of consensus decision making about thirty years ago. I have run staff meeting that way over the course of my leadership of several organizations. I've used methods developed by Quakers, political movements, and other communities of practice. The Technology of Participation methods of the Institute for Cultural Affairs are a fairly mature set of techniques that you can learn from a 2002 book by Brian Stanfield called The Workshop Book. It describes the general principles, specific tools and their application, the responsibilities of different roles, and the application of these methods to various sizes of groups. If you love the magic of turning diverse creative agendas into powerfully committed group action, then I highly recommend this book.
Posted: 11/18/06; 3:26:59 PM # |
| Alliances, Coalitions, and Partnerships |
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Joan Roberts is a terrifically clear-headed and visionary consultant from Toronto. Her book-- Alliances, Coalitions, and Partnerships -- is one of the best on the subject of collaboration that I have read. Her strengths include the practicality of her taxonomies and her head-on examination of the topic of power and control. She looks closely both at concrete models and systems of inter-organzational collaboration, as well as the tools and capacities needed with an organization, in order for it to succeed as a collaborator. We need these ideas if we, as a sector, are going to transition successfully into the era of networks.
Posted: 11/18/06; 3:11:23 PM # |
| Tools for Conviviality |
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I recently decided to reread Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich. It was written in 1973 and I read it for the first time in 1978. His vision of criteria for tools that empower people to be empowered producers rather than consumers of industrial production has some powerful tensions and synergies with contemporary themes of post-scarcity society in the age of the Net. This powerful work is worth revisiting.
Posted: 11/18/06; 3:06:00 PM # |
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16 November 2006 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Journal, November 2006 Edition |
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The November 2006 Edition of Nonprofit Online News Journal starts off with a couple of my articles on time, scarcity, failure and other themes of trust and authenticity in organizations. Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey have contributed a fantastic, in-depth exploration of online tools for political collaboration and action that have the potential to scale up to thousands if not millions of people. Lisa Petrides uses higher education as an environment for thinking about the human issues of knowledge management. The quicksheet outlines an action-learning oriented tool for safely Learning from Failure in your organization. (You can drop the word "failure" and just call it "learning", if the former is too volatile a word in your organization.) The 22 annotated resources are cataloged across two dozen categories and I reviewed eight books for this issue.
Posted: 11/16/06; 5:22:35 PM # |
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14 November 2006 |
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12 November 2006 |
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| Branding for Nonprofits |
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The subtitle of DK Holland's book Branding for Nonprofits is "Developing Identity with Integrity". I believe that integrity is central to civil society and as a consequence, I found this compelling. Although I think she overemphasizes the end goal of visual design and underemphasizes the role of experience and relationships in communicating an organization's character, it's also true that organization's see the visual identity as the driving product goal and thus this books meets a very important need. This book will help you use the "tyranny of the tangible" (as I call it) to focus everyone's attention on key questions about who your organization is and what you stand for. I highly recommend it.
Posted: 11/12/06; 9:07:17 PM # |
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10 November 2006 |
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| Tropes of the Times |
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Today, I have the pleasure of announcing Tropes of the Times, the second weblog affiliated with Nonprofit Online News. In its role as the “Paper of Record” for the United States, the New York Times helps develop, reflect, and reinforce the mainstream ideologies and the thinking of our times. Tropes of the Times is a commentary on both the paper and those ideas, with some license to stray beyond when particularly outraged. It's written by my friend and mentor Phil Bereano, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, on the National Board of the American Civil Liberties Union, a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, and a recognized expert on the social and ethical dimensions of technology. It's a delight to be offering Phil's voice in this medium and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
Posted: 11/10/06; 4:03:29 PM # |
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8 November 2006 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Blogging Survey |
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There are some questions I've been wanting to ask my readers for a long time. I'm interested in you as a contributor of ideas and resources, just as much as I'm interested in serving that role. We're coming up on ten years since I started this blog, which most people have read by email, and since then, blogs have become a medium of some interest to the sector. It's in that timely context that I ask you to spend just a moment completing this survey: The Gilbert Center Blogging Survey.
Posted: 11/8/06; 6:03:04 PM # |
| Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire |
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I'm neck deep in projects today, or else I would say more about the U.S. election and its potential for repairing some of the damage to civil society done by the Bush administration (or at least, slowing some of it down). We will see. In the meantime, I recommend you read Tom Engelhardt's Plebiscite on an Outlaw Empire.
Posted: 11/8/06; 5:56:10 PM # |
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4 November 2006 |
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| Listening to Silence |
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Asher Bey's latest post at The Guru's Handbook is worth a special mention. Listening to Silence starts with a recommendation to teachers of all kinds to listen to your students and then proceeds to the reality that this often means listening to silence. As someone who has in the past often rushed to fill that silence, I am pleased to have the chance to relearn that lesson.
Posted: 11/4/06; 11:54:27 PM # |
| Beware the Hubris-Nemesis Complex: A Concept for Leadership Analysis |
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David Ronfeldt's 1994 paper entitled Beware the Hubris-Nemesis Complex (60 page PDF) is available in full online from the Rand Corporation. One core of this concept is that a leader's greatest mistakes will happen within the area of their greatest competence. The current political expressions of this are almost too obvious to mention and I certainly have examples from my own life, but I would be most interested in how funders approach this issue in civil society.
Posted: 11/4/06; 11:46:00 PM # |
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3 November 2006 |
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| Quiet Revolution |
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For a number of years now, I've been voicing the occasional warning about the erosion of the enablers of civil society in the U.S. Now the Alliance for Justice has put out Quiet Revolution, a free 22 minute documentary exploring the twenty five year strategic assault on all aspects of civil society by the right wing movement that more or less runs the country right now. It's encouraging to see a coalition like the Alliance come together around this, but it's still a tiny thing compared to what is needed in response. Watch the documentary and pass it on.
Posted: 11/3/06; 4:53:52 PM # |
| Executive Transitions Guide |
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GrantCraft does such great work. Their most recent publication is an Executive Transitions Guide (overview page for 24 page PDF). The book is specifically for grantmakers and therefor emphasizes the funder's role in leadership transitions in organizations they support. I like the way this guide makes the grantmaker a partner with the organization, doing what it does well and being supportive of the organization for the rest. My favorite section was the one page review of "What Grantees Wish Grant Makers Knew".
Posted: 11/3/06; 4:53:42 PM # |
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2 November 2006 |
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| N-TEN Webinars |
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I don't know if you've notices, but the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network is producing a whole lot of webinars these days, many of them in collaboration with Idealware. They are the standard telephone call and web based slide show model, lasting ninety minutes. The current topics range from open source content management to choosing an enewsletter tool.
Posted: 11/2/06; 4:58:10 PM # |
| A Teachable Moment? |
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In an article at Voices in Wartime, Andrew Himes tells a story that spans two generations of war and resistance, and explores how we can bridge our cultural and political divides through dialogue. He wonders if now, in the wreckage of the Iraq War, we have reached A Teachable Moment.
Posted: 11/2/06; 4:57:58 PM # |
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1 November 2006 |
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| Online Seminar: Nonprofit Blogging Strategies |
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In the course of finishing Communication Centered Technology Planning, I was thinking a lot about the strategic role of weblogs. As you probably know, it's really easy to start a weblog these days. There are hundreds of blog services and software packages that will host your blog and dozens of workshops and experts that will show you how to use them. But most strategic thinking about them seems to take the form of anecdotes or examples of their use. I want to help remedy that problem with a new seminar: Nonprofit Blogging Strategies: Leveraging the Best of Old and New Channels will be held online on Dec. 8 & 15, 2006. We're offering a free copy ($60 otherwise) of Communication Centered Technology Planning if you register before Nov. 10th.
Posted: 11/1/06; 6:58:43 PM # |
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