Putting yourself out there with little-l leadership
Yes, it has been several months, but it is time to get back to blogging from time to time. This post's topic is putting yourself out there, a key component of small-l leadership.
In a large organization that lacks strong centralization like the University, there is a lot of opportunity for small-l leadership. In fact, there are many more opportunities than the official leadership opportunities at the University. The challenging part is finding the right opportunity and deciding to take the risk of putting yourself out there. I'll use myself as an example.
This Week in Startups Episode #13
I've listened to This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte for quite a long time now, and part of the draw of his show is that he attracts pretty engaging and interesting guests to come onto his show. One of those guests that has made multiple appearances has been Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo.com. Mahalo.com is not his first startup though, and he has started a weekly podcast of his own called This Week in Startups (or TWiST). I happened to notice that Jason was about to start the live broadcast of Episode #13 and decided to give it a listen since I have been working hard on my own startup project in my free time.
A crowdsourcing project: bySwarm.com
After reading Jeff Howe's book on crowdsourcing, I was driven to look hard for a new project to get started. Combining Tribes, Here Comes Everybody, and Crowdsourcing, my creative urges were working full time thinking of potential applications for all of these concepts. After debating various possibilities, I finally stumbled upon one that I felt would be something enjoyable as well as empowering. The idea was to create an entire setting for a non-electronic role-playing game complete with history, geography, people, places, and things. There was even a domain ready for me to use create this using the community aka the crowd aka the swarm: bySwarm.com.
Review: Here Comes Everybody
After Sally Jackson mentioned Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody", I thought it would be a book that hit upon my interests. It did that and more. There have been a lot of books about leadership, and there have been a lot of books about the changes that the Internet has brought to society. Shirky's book really took the analysis and the thinking to the next level by examining how people have organized without having an organization. Through the use of multiple examples, he illustrates how society has been changing. It is especially effective how he finds examples of people who organized without paradigm changing technology and how they organized after a new technology came into use.
