Swami's weekly Book list :Open Leadership by Charlene Li and other books news week

In my New Year Resolution is a desire to read more books this year. I am a firm believer that you keep learning through out your life and books are a great way to learn.

Swami's weekly Book list :

1. Open Leadership
 Charlene Li (Hardcover - May 24, 2010) I have a review below and the Amazon reviews of Open Leadership have some good view points
2. Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother  Amy Chua (Hardcover - Jan 11, 2011)  - Amy had written an article in the Wall Street Journal  and I saw a tweet and posted it on Facebook "Applies to many Asian cultures RT @jacolineloewen: WSJ.com - Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior . http://on.wsj.com/gJPP44 " and see the comments here http://www.facebook.com/shashib/posts/145722972150067. The Washington Post Sunday had a review " Mom just wants you to be happy - and perfect
3. Your Social Media Roadmap Beth Schillaci (Paperback - Nov 30, 2010) I have to read this before my colleagues Susan Wade or Lisa Byrne read this and write a review first . This book is Beth Schillaci and I had the good fortune of writing the foreward.
4. Rework Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson (Hardcover - Mar 9, 2010) I read this book over the holidays  and  tweeted about "You don't create a culture - it happens - Rework @jasonfried @dhh"  I got a response from Jason Friend himself.http://goo.gl/3xQqf
5. Washington Post had a list of 3 books this week on Decluttering
• Live More Want Less
 Mary Carlomagno (Paperback - Jan 1, 2011)
• The 100 thing Challenge How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My …
  Dave Bruno (Paperback - Jan 1, 2011)
• Lighten Up: Love what you have, Have what you need , Be happy with less

Open Leadership by Charlene Li

Usually during the holiday season you would expect to be curled up in the sofa reading a dreamy novel and I chose Charlene Li’s Open Leadership and it was a wise choice.

The book is geared to the C level yet you get thoughtful insights into how to think or incent the Corporate executive committee to think about Openness in relation to social technologies. Open leadership  like any leadership should inspire more than control at the same time the book gives examples of implementation from the US Navy ( my heart missed a beat when I heard the US Navy had taken a few bloggers on board the USS Nimitz) to companies like the  Cisco, SolarWinds, Gore-tex, Mozilla and others.

Some of the ways of giving up control in the book begin with Charlene Li’s Ten Open Elements :

Information Sharing

1.       Explaining – how to share at the same time beware of risks of information leakage

2.       Updating – Communicating the mission of the organization in the best possible terms frequently

3.       Conversing – putting communities and collaboration with work.

4.       Open Mic – encouraging participation with no pre conditions in creating content and conversations

5.       CrowdSourcing -  Solving a specific problem together

6.       Platforms – open API’s like Twitter

Decision making

7.       Centralized – Commiting an atmosphere where information sharing flows up and down the decision making levels

8.       Democratic –  Narrrowing down the decision making choice and putting it to vote

9.       Self-managing - Allowing employees to self-manage their own decision

10.   Distributed – Cisco is a great examples here of setting up councils and boards to shift decision making down several levels

Charlene Li Talks about dialog and starting conversations and we are succeeding with the Network Solutions’ Facebookpage < http://facebook.com/networksolutions ) in the same way as the Kohls’ example in the book.

I would recommend it for reading even if your company already has a well established new communication strategy.