Penguin Business Thought Leaders

To promote their authors Penguin regularly produce interviews/ podcasts covering a wide variety of subjects. At the moment they have a series of interviews posted on their website under the heading of "Business Thought Leaders", in which writers they describe as having "contrarian views" talk about how we should manage our careers.

The authors are:

Pamela Slim ("Escape from Cubicle Nation")
Seth Godin ("The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit and When to Stick")
Hugh McLeod ("Ignore Everybody")

Penguin Business Thought Leaders
.

100 Inspiring Videos for Leaders

Thomas Edison once said, "Genius is one-percent inspiration, ninety-nince percent perspiration", so what do you do when you're putting all the hard work in but that final 1% is eluding you? The Online College have put links to 100 inspiring videos for you to turn to when you need that final spark to bring something to fruition.

<

The videos are divided in to ten categories covering areas such as, "Changing the World", "Inspirational People" and "Staying Strong". The videos include talks, movies clips, short films, performance pieces, conversation and interviews.

Althogh nominally put together for leaders, there's enough here to inspire anyone.

100 Inspiring Videos for Leaders

Disclaimer: May not result in actual genius.
.

Leadership: Models, Frameworks & Theories

There are a lot of leadership models out there; Situational Leadership, Action Centred Leadership, Path-Goal Theory, Servant Leadership, etc. The following sites provide overviews of some of the common models you’re likely to come across.

Leadership Models (1)

Leadership Models (2)

To add some additional context (and building on Don Clark's work in the second link), here is a helpful article which takes and historical look at the development of the different types of theories of leadership; trait theories, behavioral theories, cognitive theories and transformational theories.

Historical context of Leadership theories

If tou're the type who likes to be able to refer to models and frameworks you may find this site useful. It's a huge list of the different types of frameworks that currently exist broken down in to fice categories; strategy models, change models, leadership models, decision-making models and communication models. A handy starting point if you come across a framework or theory that's unfamiliar to you.

List of models, theories and frameworks

Finally the generous people over at RapidBI have produced a series of free, unbranded PowerPoint slides which demonstrate a wide range of management models and theories.

RapidBI PowerPoint slides

Learning and listening

A couple of useful podcast for you.

The Project Management Podcast by Cornelius Fichtner. An informative resource for anyone who is interested in developing their project management skills.

And

Managers Tools by Mike Auzenne and Mark Horstman, a weekly business podcast focused on helping business professionals become more effective managers and leaders.

Both handy additions to your iTunes library.

Tribes

Seth Godin is an author and a leading voice on how to make your marketing more effective in the modern, digital, connected age. He's been described as 'the Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age'

His latest book, Tribes, looks at how you go about building a movement that people will want to follow:

"...to bring together a tribe of like-minded people and do amazing things. There are tribes everywhere, all of them hungry for connection, meaning and change. And yet, too many people ignore the opportunity to lead, because they are "sheepwalking" their way through their lives and work, too afraid to question whether their compliance is doing them (or their company) any good... if you have a passion for what you want to do and the drive to make it happen, there is a tribe of fellow employees, or customers, or investors, or readers, just waiting for you to connect them with each other and lead them where they want to go."

By way of a freebie, Seth has collaborated on a list of 100 tactics you can use to help build your Tribe.

100 Ways to Build your Tribe

He's also produced a free e-book on the subject of Tribes, a sort of wisdom of the crowds piece with stories and ideas from members of his Ning group. The link is on his regularly updated Blog.

Tribes e-book
.

Academic Earth

This is an interesting idea. Six of the top US colleges (Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, MIT, Princeton & Stanford) are making videos of their lectures available on the Academic Earth website. Now under normal circumstances getting access to learning material of this quality would require you to be a student at one of the colleges and all that entails, but Academic Earth have the goal to give “…everyone on Earth access to a world-class eduction.”

They state:

"We are building a user-friendly educational eco-system that will give internet users the ability to easily find, interact with, and learn from full video courses and lectures from the world’s leading scholars. Our goal is to bring the best content together in one place and create an environment in which that content is remarkably easy to use and where user contributions make existing content increasingly valuable.”

If you search under the “Entrepreneurship” section you’ll find all sorts of lectures on subjects that are really relevant to business today. I found material on leadership, coaching, finance, marketing, negotiation…. and loads more, all delivered by some of the top business names. People like Guy Kawasaki, Jerry Kaplan, Carly Fiorina, Trip Hawkins, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page will always have something interesting to say.

Naturally they also deliver more traditional academic subjects like biology, chemistry, English, physics, mathematics, etc.

Academic Earth has an ambitious goal, but I’ve always believed that this is exactly the sort of thing the internet ought to be utilised for. The capacity to deliver the very best learning materials to anyone in the world, for free and at their convenience is well within the capability of the system. All that’s needed is the content and the will of the content owners to allow that material to be distributed. Unfortunately at the moment there are some licencing issues which can affect a particular lecture if you don’t reside in a country that has permission to view it, but as far as I can tell that is the exception rather than the rule (and you could always use an anonymizer or proxy to hide your country of origin anyway).

There’s so much potential here. I really hope it achieves its ambition.

Alltop and Content Aggregation

I’m not 100% sure what to file this under, or how practical it is in reality, but Alltop just intrigues me so much. I can see it has potential but I can’t quite wrap my head around the best way to make use of it. Alltop is a content aggregator and the creators explain that:

“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. You may wonder how Alltop is different from a search engine. A search engine is good to answer a question like, “How many people live in China?” However, it has a much harder time answering the question, “What’s happening in China?” That’s the kind of question that we answer.

We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Our topics run from adoption to zoology with photography, food, science, religion, celebrities, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, Macintosh, and hundreds of other subjects along the way.

You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.”

For example the Alltop page on leadership give you a good idea of what to expect.

http://leadership.alltop.com/

On the downside it seems to be very US-centric, which is not necessarily a bad thing in the greater scheme of things but I do like to know what’s going on in the UK and European training arenas

I think this one has to sit and settle with me for a while to give me a chance to think through whether it is something that helps me or something that distracts me…. and on the subject of distraction take a look at http://humor.alltop.com/ if you want to lose an hour or so.

By the way, one of the creators of Alltop is Guy Kawasaki who is considered by a lot of people to be one of the top modern thinkers on the subject of Marketing. He writes a consistently interesting blog which can be found here.

Guy Kawasaki Blog