Disappearing in the digital age
If you have about 15 minutes to read this you should, it was a great piece on how someone tried to walk away and start a new life (as an experiment) and how the community was challenged to help find him.
Of course those that do this for real wouldn’t likely gather the attention and sophisticated audience that would organize around tracking them down, but it does help to understand how people are able to disappear from their life and start over. The challenge was put out to catch Evan within a month to claim a $5k prize, which helped to motivate catching him. In real life I expect most that do this don’t have a reward and you can only imagine the police force having few resources to keep up a search.
Evan in this piece makes a few intentional mistakes to help motivate the search, but it still took a wide network of people to uncover his new home. I wonder if he would have been caught it he truly had done all he could to avoid it.
Hire thoroughbreds
I love this blog entry by Scott Berkun and have tried to follow very similar principles in my own management style
A healthy, confident, well-adjusted manager knows their job is to do three things:
- Hire thoroughbreds, point them at the finish line, and get out of their way unless they ask for help
- Coach, teach, encourage and position ordinary horses to maximize their potential and approximate thoroughbreds in some of their work.
- Fire those who can never do the work needed without your constant involvement to make room for those who can.
It just seems so much easier when you have a strong team of direct reports that both respects the challenges in delivery and understands that you are there to help but shouldn’t need to be there to hold their hand.
It reminds me of another quote:
You can accomplish anything you want in life provided you don’t mind who gets the credit. [Harry S. Truman]
Lots following our Tweets
I came across another blog post on Technology Evangelist that sent me over to Twitterholic and the following graphic:
Interesting mix in the top 100 – with many 1 way conversations mixed in among the more typical conversational users. Also good to see that CNN creeps into the top 10.
