The piece includes this sentence:

With Twitter, no update can be longer than 140 characters, which, to give you a sense of that limit, is the precise length of this sentence.

It’s meant to be an example of how tough it might be to live in a 140-character box. My immediate response: that sentence is too long.

Later in the article, the list of people to follow comes along, and each one gets a name, a link, a sample Twitter update, and then between one and three paragraphs of description.

Again, I thought: too long. Just give me the list.

At first I thought this negative reaction to the article might have something to do with being corrupted by all this immediate-communication technology. I’ve been altered and can’t manage a sustained argument anymore. Fast food only, please. But I don’t think that’s true. (I know it’s not true. I write pieces that include sustained arguments and nuance for a living.)

Instead, I think it’s because, when I happened on the article, I was in burst-mode and wanted to grab information in bite-size chunks. However, since the article is not aimed at someone like me, but at a different kind of audience, there are certain conventions it must follow. It’s got to be sensitive to the reader.

The author of the piece is a Twitter user and presumably has similar sensibilities to other Twitter users. That is, shrt is gd. But, in essentially writing a travel piece, telling digital foreigners about a new land, the author admirably adopted the conventions and norms of his audience.

Interesting: In conveying the utility of Twitter, you’ve got to step completely out of its bounds.

Or just start using it and see what happens.

P.S. Bet u want list. Here:

1. @PRsarahevans — Sarah Evans, director of public relations at Elgin Community College
2. @jayrosen_nyu — Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University
3. @hrheingold — Howard Rheingold, a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley
4. @amandafrench — Amanda French, an assistant research scholar and digital-curriculum specialist at NYU
5. @academicdave — David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas
6. @dancohen — Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University
7. @paullev — Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University
8. @mcleod — Scott McLeod, an associate professor at Iowa State University and director of the university’s Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education
9. @mwesch — Michael L. Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University
10. @presidentgee — Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University

This segment focuses on the problem of waste:

As an independent consultant with no real apparatus to speak of (which is by design), it’s easy to spot expenditures in organizations that simply don’t need to be made. Nice conference rooms, class A office space, behemoth IT departments — often it seems to just accrete over time and become part of how the organization values itself.

But, these dollars don’t flow out to the mission, they get diverted into organization-building. Some amount of that, when done strategically and thoughtfully, is important. But at the same time, many expenditures don’t need to be made.

The trick is, as I say in the video, to think about how you would manage if you had only five years left before you disbanded. How would you pursue your mission then?

__________

These are the stories I am most interested in this morning:

• A recent very large order of memory chips from Apple has many in the tech world guessing what’s next. AAPL has ordered 100 million memory chips, each of which is one gigabyte of memory. Industry players say this will likely cause a shortage, and they are scratching their heads over what they could appear in. They do not appear to fit known product profiles. Lead rumor: a low-end iPhone.
• The president of Fiji has disbanded the entire government, including the judiciary, and will install a new one, backed by his defense minister and interim prime minister (who still has his job). On Thursday, the supreme court had ruled against the “interim PM” appointment. So they’re out. President Ratu Josefa Iloilo says a new government will be appointed shortly and will rule for five years.
• Director of the CIA Leon Panetta says the Company has closed all overseas secret prisons and has not detained anyone since he took office in February. The sites, which many say were torture shops, have never been officially disclosed but they are believed to be inThailand, Romania and Poland, along with other locations.
• Dave Arneson, a co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has died after a two-year battle with cancer. We will miss you, Dave. Thank  you for improving my high school days, and exercising my imagination.
• News flash: Karl Rove does not like Joe Biden. But calling him a “blowhard?” He’s a sitting vice president, dude. More graceful words, please. (Lest you think i am partisan, I would have said exactly the same thing if it were Cheney being talked about while in office. You don’t talk that way about those currently holding the office. Detest the policies, even detest the person, but do not disrespect the office.)

Thanks for reading.

Brad

This second challenge is (like all these pitfalls), not unique to nonprofits, but it does afflict many. That is the tendency to begin to confuse the health of the organization with the effective pursuit of the mission. In other words, the organization begins to believe that anything that’s good for it must by definition be good for the mission. I discuss that here:

This can be a real problem, because it really sneaks up on people. It can befall founder’s organizations, as the entrepreneurial itch that got the organization off the ground continues to flower.

One way to see this in your own organization is to pose this question, as a group: Say we did not exist. Why would someone need to invent us?

(Andrea Jarrell asks a version of this question with her clients.)

Next, and last in this series, is the problem of waste.

__________

These are the stories I am most interested in this morning:

• Hijacked Maersk ship: Crew safe but captain offered himself as hostage; U.S. warships on scene. Captain still held. Hillary Clinton condemns “scourge of piracy.”
• North Korea’s Kim Jong Il has been re-elected chairman of the National Defense Commission. According to the nation’s constitution, that makes him leader, as his dead father is “Eternal President.”
• Can Yahoo beat Facebook at its own game? Cindy Cotte Griffiths thinks maybe. Reasons: Business-friendly architecture; some better at-a-glance systems; AND . . . huge user base (many have joined Yahoo in order to stay connected to local PTA’s, etc.).
• Attorney General Holder replaced the Department of Justice ethics chief over complaints that the previous occupant, while thorough, moved to slow and was too secretive.
• Rasmussen survey says just a narrow margin of Americans say they prefer capitalism to socialism. 53% of adults prefer capitalism, 20% say socialism, 23% are “not sure.” But in December, 70% of Americans said they preferred “free market economy” to one “managed by the government.” Rasmussen thinks it may have to do with people not believing capitalism is really about free markets. My take: In the recent survey, “capitalism” and “socialism” are not defined, and there may be confusion about what the terms mean.

Thanks for reading.

Brad

The first pitfall is “inwardness,” as I discuss here:

This is not a new idea. Indeed, one of the drivers of the whole strategic planning movement of the late 1960′s was the notion that businesses needed to begin looking outward rather than planning based only on their internal goals.

More recently, my friend and colleague Rich Harwood has had a lot to say about the problem of inwardness among civic institutions, and much of his work involves getting organizations to turn outward. I highly recommend Rich’s report, The Organization-First Approach, written with John Creighton, that goes in-depth into this problem.

(This issue was also at the root of an interesting project we worked on together last year.)

Next up, the problem that faces all too many nonprofits: when organizations confuse their mission with their existence, and begin to believe that whatever is good for the organization must by definition be good for the mission.

__________

These are the stories I am most interested in today:

• The U.S. power grid has been extensively mapped and compromised with leave-behind software. Says Dennis Blair, national intelligence director:  “A number of nations, including Russia and China, can disrupt elements of the U.S. information infrastructure.”
• YouTube sensation Fred passed the 1,000,000 subscriber mark yesterday. He is the first user to do that.
• Lawmakers sometimes follow the letter, not the spirit of the new earmark disclosure rule. While some are upfront on their web pages, others seem to hide earmarks behind catch-all pages like “other” and “legislation.”
• Researchers predict 12 named storms for the 2009 season. This is fewer than in 2008, which had 16. Colorado State University’s hurricane forecast team says six will be hurricanes, with two expected to be major. First name of the year: Ana.
• Kal Penn, who plays Kutner on the House cast, was killed off, to lead White House Office of Public Liaison. Penn, who is the second half of Harold and Kumar, says he is seeking “that balance between the arts and public service.” (Friend Kate Walsh pointed this out.)

Thanks for reading,

Brad

I’d always wondered about Tip’s. It was a large barbershop with two chairs, behind an expanse of glass. I rarely saw anyone in it. There was often a person — whom I assumed was Tip — sitting on the bench opposite the barbershop, sometime resting, sometimes reading.

Over the years (I’ve been going to Dayton for a long time now), I developed a profile in my head. I imagined the barbershop used to have been quite busy, as gentlemen coming into one of the business hubs of the Midwest needed a quick trim on the way to or from their meetings. But as tastes changed and so did the times, I imagine the shop saw less and less activity.

The faster the world spun, the slower the shop might have seemed to.

It turns out that the closing was not a  negative thing for Tip. Turns out he’s Clair Tipton. He retired after 35 years.

But when I saw the “closed,” sign, I felt a twinge of nostalgia for something I’d never known. I regretted never having gotten my hair cut at Tip’s.

Funny how you don’t know you’ll miss something, often, until it’s gone.

The truth is, people have been arguing about the difference between strategy and tactics for centuries and there is no concrete consensus on the difference. Most people have an overall sense that strategy relates to “bigger” things and tactics more to “small” things. Many others think strategy is somehow better than tactics when it comes to planning.

And, more often, one will hear someone in the workplace telling someone else to think or act “strategically” — when what they really mean is “be smarter.”

Like the term “leadership,” it is a shorthand for a larger idea — but for most people this idea is ill-defined.

This debate came back to me when I saw an argument at e.politics about whether Twitter is a “strategy” or a “tactic.”

I learned strategic planning from one of the people who helped develop our modern understanding of it. While strategic planning has changed many times since it was first elaborated in the late 60′s, this definition from my mentor always sticks with me:

“Strategy is a decisive allocation of resources.”

In other words, a strategy is something that, if you pursue it, other avenues are foreclosed. Many different tactics, on the other hand, could be used in the pursuit of a particular strategy.

In most cases, I’ve found that the answer to this question depends on the size of the theater. What is a tactic when looked at from one level can be a strategy at another level.

As an example, a company might have a strategy to use social media as its primary marketing communications tool. It would use various tactics to achieve that: blog comments, Facebook pages, Twitter, and so forth.

However, depending on the size of the theater you are looking at, a tactic can become a strategy. Just thinking about the fictitious company’s “social media” strategy, imagine the marketing department that is charged with implementing this. The fact that the overall thrust is social media will now be a given, just a parameter. The strategic decisions at this level really will center on which tool to use and how strongly to bet on it.

Since its use exploded in the late 1990′s, the email Inbox had dominated and controlled most professional people’s lives. It is a never-ending to-do list, created by other people who send a constant flow of messages that arrive on the screen and just sit there, waiting for action. Some are important; others are trivial. The Inbox makes no distinction. It just grows.

But with the advent of social network status updates and “feeds,” there’s a new avenue for new information and messages. And, for things that are not urgent and do not require action, it is far superior to the Inbox.

The Stream is just a constant flow of updates from those whom we have deemed important enough to follow. For some, it’s a large number and for others it is small. Into this Stream, our connections post their thoughts, interesting links, observations, jokes, more links, quick comments back and forth, news not critical but of use, and more. In other words: much of what now clogs your Inbox.

The difference is that, with the Stream, if you miss something it’s not a huge deal. The whole point is that you can miss something.

(There’s more after this video, keep reading:)

Think of it this way: It’s an Inbox with a time limit.

This implies that, as people become more comfortable with the Stream, they will begin to use it more effectively for work.

• When you are sharing something, if it is interesting but not critical, add it to the Stream (by sharing on Facebook or Twitter, for instance).
• Don’t get upset if someone misses something you put in the Stream.
• Try to reserve emails to people’s Inboxes for things you really need them to see or act on.
• Some other rules . . . that we have not even thought of yet, and that will emerge as people use the Stream more and more.

As we all embed these ideas in our workflow, our day-to-day life can perhaps lose some of its anxiety!