Social Networking

LinkedIn is not the only on-line network, but for business and career connections it is the best. So, why am I still getting so much resistance?

In discussions that played out over several months, a prospective client for a LinkedIn profile told me in our last conversation that he was not yet convinced that this was a good venue for him (his prospects are CEOs of private companies in the $5-$20 million arena), but he would ask a few of his peers and if they recommended it, he would hire me to optimize his profile. He would call me the following week.

I never heard from him again.

So, for him, and for others with the same mindset, go to Amazon and buy a copy of “Let's Connect: Using LinkedIn to get ahead at work”, by Ajay Jain. An easy read and the perfect primer for people who deep-down know they need to be active in at least one social network but are unsure of how to go about it.

Early Friday Afternoon . . .

Do you ever experience an early Friday afternoon when you tell yourself: "Enough - the work week is over!"?

I'm having such a day today. I finished one installment of a project for a client in New York and should get started on a project for a European client, but . . . enough! It will wait till Monday.

Wherever you are in the world . . ., happy week-end! :-)

Gordon MacKenzie, a Genius of our Time

Gordon MacKenzie was a man who did not fit his time: an artist, a genius, making a living in a structured corporate environment. As his book, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, tells us, his employer, Hallmark Cards, did not favor ideas that the hierarchy did not see meshing with corporate productivity goals.

He made it work for himself, as the company’s “Creative Paradox”, up to a point. Then he retired and began traveling around the country, speaking, in high-energy, marvelous performances, to audiences about maintaining creativity in bureaucratic environments. Then he died.

Yesterday, arriving early for a typical “girlfriends’ luncheon”, I had a copy of Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” in my bag -- I always have something to read with me, as I am more often early for a meeting than late or on time -- and whose name did I see when I turned to page 68? Gordon MacKenzie’s!

Such memories, immediately! I met, interviewed and had dinner with Gordon MacKenzie when he was in Atlanta for a workshop in, I think, 1999, and attended his what can only be called “performance”. Truly a genius!

His book is still in print. Buy it. Also Dan Pink’s book, and absorb both of them over the holiday season. Then go back to your work environment in January with the confirmation that you arrived in this life with a rolled canvas under our arm and that it is up to you – not anybody else – to paint your masterpiece.