Quote: Rather than delude yourself into thinking you’re going to change an entire company, be smart. Start with focused, achievable goals and programs. Think small.

Quote: The lesson: People are happy to pay for things that work well. Never be afraid to put a price on something. If you pour your heart into something and make it great, sell it. For real money. Even if there are free options, even if the market is flooded with free. People will pay for things they love.

Quote: Just as previous technology and business shifts have changed the role of the CIO, the new, more consumer-oriented business models of the social revolution will favor a new breed of business and technology leader. These leaders will have to navigate myriad converging and disruptive technologies, align new initiatives to both business value and technology feasibility, and identify strategies to leverage existing investments to fund innovation.

Quote: Too often we in the IT department are seen as being out of touch by other people within the business and make strange decisions where we do IT for the sake of IT are often at the heart of it. This doesn’t mean that you don’t experiment to learn if something has value, but does everybody really need the latest iPad to figure out if it has a business benefit? Technology is great but it is an enabler to make lives better for Customers and profits for the business. We need to and must want to use our technology, process and people skills to make better products and generate wealth for our investors.

Quote: It’s one thing to possess knowledge, but it’s quite another thing to leverage it. Leaders who don’t understand the value of distributable and actionable knowledge not only limit opportunities, but they’re also building huge contingent operating liabilities. One of great challenges for any leader is to break down cultural tendencies that foster silo-centric thought patterns. Savvy leaders understand that controlling knowledge diminishes value, while releasing knowledge creates value

Quote: Here’s the sequence. Show up a lot. Have conversations. Relationships will develop and the odds for success will improve

Quote: Everything begins with a thought. Without thought there is no action. The idea of the action normally occurs to you before you execute it. Then your action begets a result. And the result normally stimulates a new desire or thought. Without action, there is no “new thought”. We’ll acquire similar thoughts…because thinking does beget more thinking. But we would continue to think “the same”. It’s the action that brings exploration, growth, development to our circle.

Quote: Far too frequently we find that our clients struggle to generate new ideas because their problem scope or problem definition is too narrow or too rigid. The scope then keeps the team cycling through the same issues and same ideas, and doesn’t allow any new thinking or ideas.

Quote: “I don’t think about the things I have to do, I think about the things I can do to make my men successful.” There’s a lot of other things that one could say about servant leadership, but if you’re looking for a brief definition of how it works, I don’t think you can do much better than what Tomlin said. Does servant leadership guarantee you win every game? No, of course not. Does it make a positive difference? I think it does.

Quote: With remote teams, we must know how to communicate effectively if we want to build long-term trust in our working relationships. We can do this by increasing our efforts in expressing our enthusiasm at the start of the project, keeping messages in a positive tone, staying focused on the task, and establishing a regular pattern of communication.

Quote: Fortunately, the world is filled with unreasonable people. Unfortunately, you need to compete with them.

Quote: I will challenge readers here to something similar, “I will admit the importance of measuring ROI if you will admit that sometimes it doesn’t make sense to invest the time and money into figuring out what the ROI is, the question is, when is that sometimes?”

Quote: Social software adoption requires collaboration. Collaboration requires transparency. You can do all the change management and attend all the conference break-out sessions you want, but you won’t get adoption until you deliver transparency and agency.

Quote: Patience and perseverance. You must have both. Together, and at the same time. In this world I’ve learned that there are very few quick fixes, despite what you might hear from marketers. That cream that will get rid of wrinkles in two weeks or the diet that will help us lose 20 pounds in two weeks are fairy tales. So it is with most good outcomes – they often take more time than we’d like, requiring you to have a calm demeanor and firm determination.

Quote: 2011 will be the year of rapidly increasing social monetisation – at least attempts are being, and will be made

Quote: The article includes a slew of other valuable tips and information – including why Day 100 is so critical and how CIOs can become a key player in identifying potential acquisition targets as their M&A skills improve. For instance, the article notes that in companies with a flexible, streamline approached to IT, it’s easier to ascertain which deals are a good beat and which are not.

Quote: …firms that improve the customer experience, not just in purchasing but in all aspects of the customer’s engagement with your product, service or company will benefit.  Increasingly, people are seeking more than a purchase.  They are seeking a relationship with a brand or a company and expect to be engaged and rewarded by the relationship.

Quote: Most aspiring entrepreneurs spend their waking hours trying to prove that their idea for a new business can work.  They quickly gather some cursory industry data and talk with people already working in the industry with one thought in mind:  “What can I uncover that will validate my desire to open this business?”  They selectively only pay attention to information that reaffirms their desire to get the business open as soon as possible.  As a result, they fail to uncover information that may not paint such a rosy picture about the viability of the business idea.

Quote: To be successful and own your social conversation, in addition to thinking socially, you need to also figure out how you’re going to get your organization to be in it for the long haul. You want to do that, because that’s where you need to be for your investment to be worthwhile.

Quote: You have heard these words sitting in the audience or perhaps you have spoken them when you have the floor. Either way the message behind these six words is clear. I am here. This is what I want to say. I do not really care about what you hear.

Quote: One of the characteristics of great companies is that they actively learn from others. But to be successful at doing this requires more than just identifying and borrowing best practices; it also requires adaptation to your culture and full adoption by your leadership. Without paying attention to these two steps, it is unlikely that best practices will actually be put into practice.

Quote: We now live in a society that verges on a digital tipping point that wraps and integrates our lives with the Web and it is no longer considered a luxury but a necessity in our modern lifestyle.

A great article showing the folly of focusing on one ‘answer’

Quote: What really gets my Italian blood boiling is this incessant need by police chiefs or sheriffs to find something wrong in their officers’ action in spite of the righteous use of force. It seems that some brass, just to appease the media or other anti-police factions out there who believe that the law enforcement community should be relegated to a “visible” force presence only, look for anything to bang the officer on. Here are a few examples.

Quote: Rip the band-aid off and put your business on hold for a week, a month, or maybe even two months. Do all the work you have to do to heal up what’s broken, fix what needs fixing and get your whole business set and ready for the next level.

Quote: Business networking, in my opinion, is one of the keys to getting to employment security (instead of job security). With a large group of people in different companies as part of your network of support – and your support for them – you can find out about job opportunities and even have someone from your business network inside the company to recommend you for the job.

Quote: The people who successfully start independent businesses (franchises, I think are a different thing) do it because we have no real choice in the matter. The voice in our heads won’t shut up until we discover if we’re right, if we can do it, if we can make something happen. This is an art, our art, and to leave it bottled up is a crime.

Quote: At $5.2-billion Iridium was one of the largest, boldest and audacious startup bets ever made. Conceived in 1987 by Motorola and spun out in 1990 as a separate company, Iridium planned to build a mobile telephone system that would work anywhere on earth. It would cover every city, town and square inch of the earth from ships in the middle of the Arctic Ocean to the jungles of Africa to the remote mountain peaks of the Himalayas. And Iridium would do this without building a single cell tower.

Quote: In a recent presentation, Lew Cirne, CEO of application performance management vendor New Relic (it’s an anagram), revealed the company now has 5,000 customers and just one sales rep. That’s astonishing. Cirne points out that there’s a new class of customers for whom “there is no reason whatsoever for application performance management to be sold by a direct sales force.” If you’re building a cloud-based application on top of a standard Ruby, .Net or Java stack, much of the complexity has been factored out already, enabling a much simpler self-service sales model.

Quote: So it actually all comes down to this – my prospects and clients need to understand when the “right” time for innovation is. After all, what we usually hear from executives is that “this isn’t the right time” for innovation. Not that they don’t want innovation, or don’t need innovation, or that innovation is too risky or expensive. No, the usual response is that this simply isn’t the “right” time.

Quote: I have always believed that you are more likely to accomplish big goals if you declare them publicly. My rationale has been that this creates the accountability you need to follow-through. But now I am not so sure.

Quote: What if we asked how much is your brand worth to a fan, instead? Not so much in terms of what you can make people do. More about what people are inspired and attracted to be as a result of their association with a brand, use of a product or a service.

Quote: Effective leadership focuses on doing a few things right. Trying to do too much is a recipe for failure.

Quote: Rob Gardner wrote a great post last week about launching a wide content publishing strategy.  He says, “with the ascension of meaningful social content dissemination across networks… it is now more important than ever for marketers…to strategically refocus their attitudes and philosophies toward content in a big way.