Cleaning out the (digital) filing cabinet

Published 2013-09-27

At home I have an entire drawer of a filing cabinet devoted to articles and essays that I printed out from websites or pulled out of magazines. As such, clipping services like Evernote and article storage software like Instapaper and Read It Later (now called Pocket) are the greatest thing ever. And for a habitual hoarder of words and ideas like myself, the worst thing ever.

And so I should probably get down to the job of linking to some of these things that I've been holding on to in Evernote, etc. with the idea of someday offering thoughts about others' thoughts.

via Charlie Kindel: Don't Make Your Team Say No To You

I'm an idea guy. Ideas come to me a mile a minute. At that point in my career I didn't realize how disruptive it was to my team that I was spouting these ideas to the team while they were executing on the current plan. In my head, I was just talking about potentialities for the future; by telling the team about all the cool things we could do in the future, I was showing "vision".

What I found out later, when talking to people who had been on that team, was they viewed me as a "randomizer" they needed to control. In other words, the team spent time and energy MANAGING THE MANAGER. I forced them, regularly, to say "No" to ME.

If you are a leader of an early-stage venture, you need to figure out a way to "vent" your ideas that has NO impact on your team. Here are some tactics I've used and seen others use that might help you do this.

via Erik Paulson: The next AppleTV, and the future of newspapers

At their core, local TV news and newspapers are fundamentally reporters. However, I believe that it would be easier for a newspaper staff to put together the content for a TV broadcast than a TV station could put together the content for an issue of a newspaper.

via Mark Surman: Mozillians as inventors

Admittedly, we don't know how to do this at scale yet. The recent MoJo learning lab reached only 60 people, and was too closely tied to whether one became a fellow or not. But we did catch a glimpse of what might be possible through MoJo events and discussions that happened trough the challenge cycle. The idea of inventing new web things for the newsroom galvanized people, got them sharing ideas. It had people teaching and mentoring each other even if they didn't know it.