Business Insight Zone

My work is about making connections:

• between ideas and ideas,
• between people and ideas,
• between people and people.

With the onset of this new year, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this work better across the board. With this post, I’m issuing an open invitation to YOU to help me do this better on this blog. The invitation is fairly detailed, so please read on — I can really use your help, whether this is your first visit to this blog or your 500th.

(And by the way, as I read back through this, the high level of first-person makes me a little uncomfortable. I don’t mind talking about myself, but this is on the extreme end for me. So if this IS your first time here, please bear with me — it’s meant to help me be of better service to YOU.)

Connecting Ideas with Ideas

Whether I’m writing here, giving a talk to a group, or chatting with a friend, connecting one idea to another drives and inspires me. I’m fascinated by the way concepts and facts and events interact with one another — if it weren’t so, graduate school wouldn’t hold the appeal that it does for me.

I like to think that this fascination prompts my best topical material here, for example when I’ve tried to connect the social upheaval of the German Reformation to the social and business and technological upheaval of the social-media revolution now underway. In 2009, I want to make more of these connections around the idea of excellence across scales — that is, the way that ideas like deliberate practice can guide our labors at every level from the individual all the way up to the entire enterprise.

Now, how can I do this better? What connections would YOU like me to make — or attempt to make?

Connecting People with Ideas

This is why I write this blog. Sure, the egghead in me would pursue some of these ideas out of sheer intellectual interest, but that kind of abstract thinking only motivates me to a certain extent. The reason I share all of these ideas here is so that YOU can benefit from them, whether that means reshaping your whole way of doing things, or just arming you to dive back into your work with some useful pointers that will make the work go smoother.

What’s even better is when YOU connect me to YOUR ideas. When I read comment threads like this one, I get stoked, both about the ideas bouncing back in forth in them, and by the fact that people I’ve never met in person have found my work useful enough to respond with this kind of thought. And not-just-by-the-way: sometimes the most compelling thoughts are contained in a comment that’s one sentence long, so please don’t hesitate to put in your two cents just because it’s two cents instead of twenty.

Now, I’d love to get comments like that on every post, but to do that, I need to write more posts that are more useful to more people. How would you suggest I do that?

• More shorter posts help? Longer ones?
• More pictures? Less?
• More charts and diagrams?
• Video? Audio?
• Polls?
• Interviews?

What can I do to connect YOU to more ideas in ways that are useful to YOU?

Connecting People with People

The blogs I like best end up hosting great conversations in their comment threads, and one of my goals for this year is to elicit more of those conversations in the comment threads here. This blog has some great regular readers/commenters, and I want you to get to know them and to benefit from their insights as much as I do. Any suggestions you can make for fostering that kind of discussion will be gratefully received.

So that’s the narrow application to this blog. More broadly, it will be obvious that I’ve been thinking a lot about the social media and how we use them to do business. My own job here at Hoover’s has expanded to cover more social-media functions. (No announcements on that front just now, but please stay tuned as we continue to take deliberate steps in this direction.)

[slight commercial detour]

From my perspective, my own mission of making connections ties in well with Hoover’s mission as a company to provide business insight: connecting information with other information in ways that are accurate and relevant; connecting businesspeople with that information so that they can do their jobs better; and enabling people to find other people so that all of them can benefit from doing business better. With our company and industry records, our search tools, and so on, we pride ourselves on offering a level of insight that helps our users be more successful. The format on this blog is quite different from, say, our up-to-date listing of officers for Company X, but I hope the underlying idea resonates.

[/slight commercial detour]

Grading My Own Work for 2008

Foremost on my mind is gratitude for having this venue and for making connections with and for the great readers here. I look at posts like this one and this one and think to myself, “Walker, you were on to something there.”

That said, I’d love for the readership of this blog up to now to be a blip compared to its readership three months and six months and a year from now. To do that, the blog should be that much more useful to its readers — to its community — to YOU. And here’s where we get to the wiring in the picture at the top of the post.

I want to rewire this blog so that it SERVES you better — to keep all the good parts, discard the rest, and make the whole thing sing for you. There are only a few blogs that I keep on my must-always-read list: I want THIS blog to be on that list for you.

In a follow-up post, I’ll talk about some of the themes I intend to pursue to make this blog more useful to you. But for now, the floor is open:

If you could wave the magic wand, what would YOU have this blog be?

~

Photo by the great Cory Doctorow, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Category: Blog housekeeping