EvolvingWorld » Business

Kindle Books becoming more and more popular

tomh — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:55:35 +0000

We’ve noticed over the last few months an interesting trend – sales of our Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley book have substantially shifted from the hardback version to the Kindle version. When we started out, we’d only occasionally sell a copy on the Kindle, and almost all the sales were of the printed version; by now though the Kindle version is outselling the hardback by 3:1 ! I admit I really like using the Kindle software myself. I find it nice that I can transparently pass books between my laptop, the iphone and the ipad. And I have a real problem that all my bookshelves are overstuffed – I just don’t have more room in the house for books. So it makes a lot of sense to get electronic books, particularly for books that aren’t primarily visual. Art books are still different, but for most things, the electronic versions are great! Also, Amazon has made the terms for the author a lot more compelling, offering royalties at the same level as the printed book (it used to be a much worse deal) and they’ve added UK distribution as well. The book is actually starting to sell abroad too, which is nice. It’s actually a lot of fun to see ongoing interest in the fruit of our two years labor.

If you haven’t gotten one yet, the Kindle version of Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley is available for only $11.99 in the US edition, and £8.04 in the UK edition. Everything you ever wanted to know about running a hitech organization, and then some!

Interstices by Mark Moulton

tomh — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 04:50:55 +0000

Excellent Leader is really pleased to announce the publication of Interstices, the collected poems of Mark Moulton. Mark’s really an amazing guy – a talented artist and poet, an expert in the growth, management and financing of non-profit organizations, an expert in sustainable development, a successful contractor and manager (he built up Habitat for Humanity in San Mateo from scratch!). I really enjoy working with him, and it’s been a pleasure to publish this book. The poems are amazing – both in sound, thought and depth of feeling. I hope you’ll all enjoy reading them as much as I have!

Notes on social networking as a marketing tool

tomh — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 04:49:14 +0000

Commonwealth Club meetings are never ending source of interesting ideas. This time I went to a session on the use of social networking by InForum group, hosted by Sarah Lacy. It focused on practical ideas for small businesses. Some interesting points that came out of were:

Make Google be priority #1
- Make sure google can crawl your pages, that they have reasonable links
- alt tags – good, too much flash – bad
- potentially have different urls for different topics that act as landing pads
- Use google webmaster tools
Use Twitter saved searches and google alerts to discover who’s talking about you and what they’re saying
- If you see opportunities to engage people do it in a human, constructive way that builds dialog
- monitor interesting keywords
have multiple presences on different services, but bring people back to your main destination
facebook vanity names work better for things people search for than things they already know
facebook fan pages and groups are of somewhat limited utility
Facebook is at its best for publicizing events. In general social networking is good for this because it expands the signal outwards.
- Also consider other such sites as eventbrite, upcoming, going,etc.
- eventbrite is good because it lets you manage the list, and you get a better estimate of who’s coming. with facebook < 40% of those invite show up
you don’t necessarily have to entertain, but you need to be interesting, bring out some emotion
With twitter don’t misuse @reply – better to respond in some other medium like email
It all takes patience, but if you can get dialog going among the users, it will generate lots of leads

Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley now on the Kindle

tomh — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:14:48 +0000

Do you want to read our book on a Kindle or on an iPhone? We’ve got Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley available from Amazon now in Kindle format. It was a lot of work to figure out how to render it correctly, but we did it. Check it out!

Strategic Planning Processes

tomh — Mon, 04 May 2009 03:48:13 +0000

I’m currently organizing and running a strategic planning process. It’s a fun experience because while I’ve participated in many such sessions, it’s the first time I’ve gotten to plan and facilitate it all myself. Normally for such a thing one hires a consultant of some kind; except in this case that’s my role. So I looked around for some tools. I had been very impresses by the Personal Compass tool from The Grove which is an application of strategic planning techniques to personal life. Later I attended the Turning The Tide conference which was facilitated by Grove. I was impressed that their folks could actually produce their lovely graphics on the fly listening to the conversation. This led me to investigate them further, and I discovered a marvelous tool called the Stategic Visioning Agenda Planning Kit . This is truly a good deal. You get a set of cards which completely captures their entire planning methodology. Each card represents one step in their process, with instructions on the back. Some steps describe an agenda, some an activity, some a representation of one step. It’s great fun to look at, and it really fires up your imagination in planning a good flow for the meeting. It’s also great for collaboration because you can share the cards with others, and work together on it. In the meantime we’ve been running our meetings and so far it’s been a great experience. I highly recommend these tools to anyone doing this kind of work.