Learning Leader

Bubble trouble on our web site

2009-11-04T16:12:04+00:00

Recently we began work on restructuring our course catalogue on our website. Part of this was to design a revised graphic navigation for the courses page. Using our mind map approach we publish the diagram shown here, where the use can click on the arrow in each branch bubble and get the list of course hyperlinks to that page.

This morning at our management team meeting we received comments from the office team that the writing in the bubbles was crude and fuzzy; they didn't like it.

We listen carefully to our colleagues, but they are not the most important group - you are. Do let me know what you views of this are by leaving a comment below. I'd really appreciate that.

How to do almost anything with Posterousl

2009-10-28T16:47:08+00:00

How to do almost anything with Posterous

23 comments
By Martin Bryant on August 13, 2009

Online sharing and blogging service Posterous has been getting a lot of attention recently. The development team is adding features regularly and it’s fast becoming the best way to share content with all your different social services while also keeping it all in one place too. The best bit is you can do it all via email.

With so many ways to use Posterous it can be difficult to keep track of them all. Here we’ll take you through everything you need to know about it and suggest a range of ways you can use it to make your online life easier.

The basics

Creating an account

Setting up your own Posterous blog is simple. There are no forms to fill in; you simply send an email to post@posterous.com. Whatever you put in this email becomes the first post for your new blog.

Once the email’s sent, a Posterous blog is set up for you and you’ll get an email straight back inviting you to create an account. This is completely optional; if you don’t create an account anything you send to Posterous from your email address will still be posted to your blog without you ever having to visit the admin panel.

There are advantages to creating an account though – if you want to choose a custom URL and site name you’ll have to go for it. What’s more, most of the features listed below are only available if you have an account. It’s free, so you’ve nothing to lose.

Preparing your posts

There are four ways to post content to Posterous. There’s a blog-style WYSIWYG editor on the site and you can send messages via SMS from your mobile phone, but the two most powerful ways are via email and via the Posterous Bookmarklet.

Via Email: When posting via email, the Subject line is the post’s title and any text or attached files also become part of the post, either embedded or as a download. The way Posterous handles media is seriously impressive. Images will display in the post, for example, while MP3s and videos are playable directly in the page. Even other files, such as PDFs and Word documents, are viewable directly from your blog. It will embed Google Maps as well – just paste the URL into your post.

Posterous accepts any formatting you’ve added to your email. Bold text is bold, links work perfectly and everything looks just as you intended. If you want more control, logging into your account gives you access to a traditional blog text editor with all the tools you’d expect at your fingertips.

You can add tags to posts by adding them to the Subject line in the format ((tag: The Next Web, guide, Posterous)).

Via the Bookmarklet: Alternatively, there’s the Posterous Bookmarklet. This sits in your browser’s bookmarks bar and allows you to select any text, video, music or photos you like from any web page and post it instantly.

Making Posterous work for you

Here are a few ideas for getting the most out of Posterous.

Use it as a blog

If you don’t need the plugins and customisation options of a mature blogging platform like Wordpress, Posterous can easily act as your blog. Being able to easily publish posts with rich media via email from anywhere makes it simple to run a blog without worrying about the admin side of blogging. You can even run it as a multi-author blog by allowing other people’s email addresses to be able to post to your account

If you want to move your existing blog to Posterous, that’s easy too. There’s a simple import option to get all your existing posts ported over. If you already have a domain name, that can be set to point at your Posterous account.

Use it to update your existing blog

If you can’t bring yourself to give up your existing blog, that’s okay. You can use Posterous to easily email posts in to your other blogs. All major blogging platforms are supported.

Use it to post anything almost anywhere

Beyond its easy blogging features, Posterous’ big selling point is that it can share anything via email to a wide range of services. Setting up the services you want to post to is a simple case of entering appropriate details on the Autopost page. Then, by simply sending a photo (for example) to post@posterous.com, or selecting it from a webpage via the Bookmarklet, it could be sent to Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and FriendFeed simultaneously, as well as to your Posterous blog. Any tags you added to your post would be picked up by services like Flickr too.

With Autopost to Twitter enabled, it’s easy to use Posterous as an alternative to Twitpic. Many desktop Twitter clients, including Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop, support posting images via Posterous with the added benefit of them going wherever else you’re set up to autopost to.

Of course, sometimes you might only want to post something to one service instead of many. An video might be worth tweeting about but you might not want it on your Youtube account. To handle this, the Bookmarklet has the option to exclude services, while you can specify services you wish to post to via email using different email addresses.

To only post to Twitter, you’d use twitter@posterous.com, for example. To send to a number, but not all, of your services you can use the format twitter+youtube+vimeo@posterous.com to just send to those services. If you have a number of similar accounts, but only want to post to one, that’s covered too. If you have three different blogs but only want to post a picture of a swan to the one called ‘Birdwatching’, you could do that by emailing #birdwatching@posterous.com

To send the picture to only the Birdwatching blog and your Flickr account, you’d use flickr+#birdwatching@posterous.com

Use it to work as a group in private

By setting your Posterous blog as Private and allowing colleagues to post to it, you can use it as a private working environment. Co-workers can use it to email in ideas, images, audio and video for their colleagues to access anywhere and work with. With email subscriptions available, each post can be received by every member of the group without them ever having to log in.

Use it as a podcasting platform

Podcasts can often be difficult to set up. Finding the right host for your audio and uploading each podcast can take a lot of valuable time. With Posterous it’s possible to subscribe to any users’ RSS feed within Apple iTunes. Any audio files you post are then made available as downloadable podcasts.

It can’t get much easier than recording your podcast and sending it as an email attachment. It’s almost certainly the easiest way there is to dip your toe in the world of publishing audio online. The URL you need to subscribe to in iTunes is itpc://YOURUSERNAME.posterous.com/rss

Use it as a ‘Web Scrapbook’

The Bookmarklet makes it really easy to keep a record of things you like from around the web in one place. For example, graphic designers could keep examples of others’ work on their blog (either publicly or privately) as inspiration for the future. Researchers could keep useful articles all in one place. The ability to crosspost these clippings to your Delicious bookmarks adds even more value to this idea.

Keep track of who’s visiting your Posterous blog

Google Analytics is fully supported by Posterous. Just set up a Google Analytics account then head to your account’s set up page to get started.

Conclusion

Posterous is a flexible tool that is developing fast. Customisations via themes and premium features for those willing to pay are among the improvements planned for the future.

This post has given you some of the best examples of what can be achieved with Posterous. Have we missed anything? Are you using it in an innovative way? Let us know by leaving a comment.

You might also be interested in:

Posterous adds autoposting to Picasa, Vimeo, Delicious, Friendfeed, YouTube and more.
How to drive traffic to your own site, social networks and climb up Google rankings with ONE bookmarklet
Posterous’ new iPhone app could make citizen journalism and lifestreaming the norm

Tags: blogging, How to, posterous

--> Martin Bryant Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester
Martin Bryant is based in Manchester, UK. A co-founder of the city's monthly Social Media Cafe events and award-winning blogger, he is Digital Content Editor for Marketing Manchester. His main interests are developments in the social web that relate to the mobile and music industries. Twitter, Blog, FriendFeed

via thenextweb.com

My sons, Antony (in this blog- http://www.antonymayfield.com/2009/10/03/the-powerful-presence-popping-potential-of-posterous/) Robin, are both adopters of posterous.

Posted via web from Patrick's posterous

Good Change: Relentless or Rhythmical?

2009-10-19T12:50:50+01:00

As a continue to read (and value) John Kotter's latest book, A Sense of Urgency, there is a growing dis-ease that I must set out here. As I noted in an earlier post, Kotter makes a distinction between a true sense of urgency with a false sense of urgency and with complacency. But he goes on to describe this desired state a permanent dynamic:

'It is often believed that people cannot maintain a high sense of urgency over a prolonged period of time, without burnout. Yet with all the alertness, initiative and speed, true urgency doesn't produce dangerous levels of stress, at lest partially because it motivates people to relentlessly look for ways to rid themselves of chores that add little value to their organizations but clog their calendars and slow down needed action. People who are determined to move and win, now, simply do not waste time or add stress by engaging in irrelevant or business-as-usual activities.' (p.9)'

Professor Kotter, you anticipate my objection. It reminds me of another quote, this time from Tom Watson, Founder of IBM:

"IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would like when it was finally done. You might say that I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream - my vision - was in place.

“The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company that looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done. The third reason that IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture in place of how IBM would look when the dream was in place, and how such a company would have to act, I then realised that unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there. In other words, I realised that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one. From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day, we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and at the start of the following day, we set out to make up the difference. Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business. We didn't do business at IBM, we built one."

But I am still sceptical about living this level of urgency as a business lifestyle. Jim Loehr & Tony Schwartz in The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time, Is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal , and Dr Jack Groppel in The Corporate Athlete: How to Achieve Maximal Performance in Business and Life , have brought research on improving athletic performance to the business arena. All human systems operate on a stress and recovery cycle. What Loehr, Groppel, et al.
have shown is that by introducing proper, regular disciplines ('rituals') that slightly stress more but allow a rhythm of recovery, individual performance can improve in measurable terms by as much as 20%.

Now, if this is true for individuals, could this also hold true for teams and organisations? I think there may be some carry-through into project or organisational performance. Indeed, I have come across organisations where there have been deliberate practices of planning shorter, high-stress project life cycle bursts, but then following that with a step-down into useful, but restorative recovery patterns of work.

As a Christian I draw on the Jewish tradition of Shabbat ('Sabbath') as one of my spiritual disciplines (rituals), and I can testify to the restorative nature of this practice. Among other things, it breaks the 'Tyranny of the Urgent', as Charles Hummel called it, and helps me to get my head above the weeds and remember what is truly important. It's more than a mere cliche to say that life is a marathon and not a sprint.

So, yes, working on truly urgent/important work as a tempo is energising, but I suspect it is even more productive when it is not chronic, but mixed with cycles of recovery.

A False Sense of Urgency

2009-10-16T16:07:13+01:00

I’m enjoying John Kotter’s latest book, ‘A Sense of Urgency’. For those who know Kotter’s work and his 8-step change model, they will recognise this as the first step in his model.

Kotter suggests that a lot of change initiatives fail at this first step: either the sense of urgency is not high enough, or complacency has not been reduced. Immediately I began to think in terms of Lewin’s force field analysis (see
diagram).

However, he goes further and explores the idea of a false sense of urgency: frenetic activity that is unfocussed and unaligned with strategic issues. I recognise this. I’ve seen this. To my shame, I’ve done this.

In recent years we have seen the rise of portfolio management, and responses to supporting this has been a Portfolio Office as part, perhaps, of a P3O system of support and assurance. One of the keys to practising effective management of a change portfolio is strategic alignment: making sure all the projects and programmes tell, contribute to the war effort as expressed in the organisation’s strategy. If they don’t it simply produces a lot of motion without movement, a lot of busyness without any real and lasting benefit.

I was schooled in Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People where in the Habit 'Put First Things First', Covey develops a strong distinction between the 'Urgent' and the 'Important', arguing that many confuse the two. In the 7 Habits analysis we engage with two types of 'Urgent': the non-Important (perhaps other people's important) and the Important Urgent. It seems to me that what John Kotter is describing a false sense of urgency is, in Covey's terms, the Unimportant Urgent, but almost at an organisational level.

So who defines what is 'important' within the organisation. Leaders do. This is a fundamental job of leadership. Leaders clarify meaning, explain what is important to everyone they seek to influence.

I’m getting too old for aimless thrashing about. Now I need to use my energy and the energy of the organisation as a whole wisely. As a leader, I need to make it tell. So I appreciate Kotter's analysis of a false sense of urgency and how to identify the real thing.

I’ll write more on this book shortly.

Job vacancy: Salesperson

2009-10-15T11:30:12+01:00

We have a vacancy here at pearcemayfield: a salesperson based at Wantage, Oxfordshire, UK, selling our world class business services and products in change through programmes and projects. If:

you understand that last sentence :)
you have experience in selling, and
you live nearby

this might be for you. If so, please contact us or call 01235 227254 for details.

Please, no comments on this one, and no agencies - if you contact us we definitely won't be using you!

Go configure! #PRINCE2

2009-10-14T20:34:50+01:00

Yesterday I was briefing an audience of project managers on the recent changes in the PRINCE2 Refresh. I was at pains to stress the sleekness of the new version, how it had been stripped down, how the number of processes has been reduced from 8 to 7, and so on.

Then I went too far. At least for one member of the audience. I said that the Components (now called 'Governance Themes') had also been reduced to 7 by losing the chapter on Configuration Management.

It was then that I spotted this gentlemen, visibly discomforted by this. I'd left him with the impression that PRINCE2 no longer advocated care and control over a project's growing assets (aka 'Configuration Management'). I immediately attempted to correct this misunderstanding; PRINCE2 now treated this topic within the Change Chapter (formerly 'Change Control').

This didn't satisfy him. For this gentleman configuration management was a vital part of best practice project management and therefore deserves the visibility of its own chapter in any project management method. Indeed, the original PRINCE method (1989-1996) has its very own volume, albeit a thin one!

Well, I agreed with his concern, but only up to a point. However, I disagreed with his conclusion about visibility. When we understand what configuration management is - a clear versioning and control of all assets, combined sets of assets, control over the assembly of components into a coherent configuration, being able to manage stable releases, to track back, and to be able to roll back to previous configuration states - when we understand all this, then my point is: surely this is a general management discipline, and is not particular to projects. For example, delegation is an absolutely crucial management discipline in applying PRINCE2 well; yet it doesn't merit its own chapter in a book about how to manage projects well. This is immediately obvious because delegation is a generic management skill, not the exclusive preserve of project managers. So it is with configuration management.

So should project teams practise good configuration management in the volatile world of fast-moving projects? Of course they should. But then this is a normal discipline of business.

A passion for the subject

2009-10-10T16:00:26+01:00

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to lead a three-day Principles of Change Management Foundation course. I very much enjoyed it.

Afterward my lead client sent me a very complimentary email including this comment:

" I appreciated very much that there's a lot to put over and engage the group with and that 3 days is a long trek for a sole trainer..."

I appreciate the email. I am 57 (soon to turn 58), so I'm no spring chicken. However, there were four things that helped me call on sufficient energy to serve this excellent group:

I'm keenly aware that my colleagues do this week in, week out, and to a very high and consistent standard. I am always mindful that I must not let the side down.
I do work out. That's important. I've learned I can't keep up high levels of energy unless I've built up reserves through physical exercise. By God's grace I'll continue to exercise; it improves the quality of my life, not just of my work, significantly.
I cared about the delegates this week. They are fine people, trying to forge good out of sometimes chaotic and brutalising forces of change. This change leadership stuff really matters, and can help them.
I love the subject. I believe in leaders shaping change. Best practice change leadership resonates with me ... and sometimes convicts me. It convicts me whenever I am teaching something and I realise that I haven't been living it in leading pearcemayfield; it make me want to go back and make amends, to lead better.

I thrilled that this course will shortly be upgraded to practitioner level. John Edmonds and Andrew Rock are working on taking this programme to a new level. If you are interested in being kept informed of this, let us know.

Timing Training

2009-09-22T08:47:24+01:00

There's nothing more useless than gratuitous education.

My son, Robin, was a delegate last week on our PRINCE2 for Practitioners course. It was fascinating getting feedback from his whole experience. He found the course intense but rewarding; a sense-making of much of the chaos and jumble that made up his previous experience on projects.

Our conversation turned to his readiness for such training. Robin reflected that a few years ago he would simply have not brought enough reference points from his own experience to understand the relevance of much of PRINCE2.

To paraphrase the Bard - 'There is a tide in the affairs of men which, when trained at the ebb, leads on to fortune.' There is such a thing as premature training, gratuitous training, which is far less valuable, pointless even, than when training is timed to build upon some pertinent experience.

Perhaps good training is like telling a joke well: its very much to do with timing.

New P3O Practitioner Qualification

2009-09-21T10:42:51+01:00

The mysteriously-named P3O (which stands for 'Portfolio, Programme and Project Management Offices') is the most recent new branch of best management practice guidance to emerge from the UK Government's Office of Government Commerce (OGC). OGC is also responsible for commissioning PRINCE2, MSP and M_o_R.

The point is that P3O has been generating quite a number of growing enthusiasts since its launch about 12 months ago. We have already helped several organisations use this management framework to improve their delivery of programmes and projects.

Over the last year we have welcomed quite a broad church of delegates: some were senior managers directly involved in shaping and implementing strategy, others were logistical support people in project offices. This led to a few interesting challenges in designing and delivering a learning experience that engaged everyone, but without exception every P3O Foundation course we have run has stimulated and stretched everyone involved.

We launched our P3O training to the only syllabus and qualification available at the time - Foundation level. The Foundation paper is a set of multiple-choice questions testing one's knowledge of the P3O guide. Our experience has been that nearly all of our delegates really appreciate what P3O has to offer, but the Foundation exam? Well, they find it slightly 'under-whelming'. People want to go deeper and apply it.

On Friday I and few other training leaders were invited by APM Group to be briefed on the new P3O Practitioner qualification. If you have taken a PRINCE2 or MSP Practitioner exam recently you will be familiar with the format: a realistic scenario against which questions explore the application the framework, as well as testing one's evaluation against P3O work done by people within the scenario.

We sat two papers, the first as a 'warm up', and we sat the second knowing that we had score 66% or more to qualify. (No pressure, then!) The exam paper has 7 question categories, with 10 questions within each. We found the questions varied in difficulty and covered all the syllabus areas, as well as testing us on application at the portfolio level, as well as at the programme and project levels. We were given two hours (2 1/4 hours normally) and I found this more than adequate - I had half an hour left to spare.

On the basis of this, we will be designing and launching a combined P3O Foundation and Practitioner course shortly - probably a public course for December or January. My initial thoughts are that this combined course will be about 4 days duration - but don't hold me to that!

If you would like to be kept notified of course for this Practitioner level exam, please register your interest here.

How the Mighty have fallen: stories, research and the power of questions

2009-09-01T20:16:31+01:00

I've begun reading Jim Collins' latest book, How the Mighty Fall: and Why Some Companies Never Give In, bought on my recent trip to Chicago. He begins the book with a story about leading a seminar at West Point to a group that included not just leaders from the military but also from commerce and the third sector. He uses this story to set the scene for his book.

This is one of the two reasons I like Collins' writing. He is a story-teller. He contextualises the points he makes and the stats he presents as part of stories.

The second reason is that he is an excellent researcher. I once heard him say at a previous Leadership Summit that. 'all great research starts with a great question.'

The question that spawned this book is, "Why did great companies decline and what are the warning signs of decline?" (I suppose that's two questions...)

As a top-flight professor he is is used to posing great questions among seminars of students. In places like Harvard, Stanford, Oxford and Cambridge asking probing questions is a primary mode of teaching.

It seems to me that every great trainer and coach comes armed with .... no, not PowerPoint slides :) ... but great questions, questions that challenge and stretch students, to look a little deeper, to look for patterns in the data, to grow their own hypotheses, before being given some prefabricated model.Asking good questions, questions that provoke reflection and pertinent enquiry, helps a student bridge from their own experience and constructs of that experience to breakthrough insights.

Ask an impertinent question and you are on the way to a pertinent answer. (Jacob Bronowski)