What was I thinking? Old Draft Posts

I’m cleaning out my WordPress and came across a bunch of half written draft posts from when I was much more active in writing this blog. I don’t want to just delete them and lose the thought forever. So here are the partial thoughts for posterity.

  • Managing your Middle 70% – Inspired by Jack Welch’s book. Of course you reward the top 20% of your employees, and you should be managing out your bottom 10%, but what are you doing with the “middle 70%” – are you helping them become better performers – are you setting up an environment where they are striving to be in the top 20% (and not just content where they are). If so, the whole organization does well.
  • Blogging is too hard – Inspired by how difficult it is was to set up a blog in your own style and voice. Searching for templates, getting a host, etc. At the time Blogger & TypePad were the only hosted solutions and I thought they were far too inflexible. Congrats to Matt & the WordPress.com gang, I think they’ve solved this for real. (funny, I just noticed that their tagline is “Blogging is too hard”. I guess great minds…
  • I want a RSS reader feature to ignore posts of a certain Tag – the post only said “Guy Kawasaki’s feed always has those flim loops. make them stop please!”. I still want this feature in My Yahoo and Google Reader (“give me all feed items EXCEPT those tagged _____”)
  • Billionaires Making Millionaires – A bit of a greedy post idea – What if Sergei/Larry or Jerry/Dave gave up $1 billion of their net worth up to their first 2,000 employees. At the height of their paper wealth, they wouldn’t even notice the loss (what’s 11B vs. 12B each) but 2,000 people would be guaranteed millionaires. Even better, give $1M to anyone who didn’t have enough options to get there on their own. I know lots of yahoos and googlers (in the 1000th-2000th employee range) that contributed more than earlier folks who are millionaires. Wouldn’t it be great to see that wealth better distributed. Ditto on wall street.
  • Web 2.0 in the “Enterprise”: what works – This was an almost completed post. I wish I posted it. About 10 12 years ago, I worked for an enterprise software startup. I talked to tons of corporations who felt this pain: “person in department A knows the best way to solve a customer problem, person in department B doesn’t know about it, gets stuck and tells the customer the wrong thing”. This costs companies in dollars, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction. We tried to solve it with personalized search. The part I never finished was talking about Cameron Marlow’s work at Yahoo called Tagsona – it could be the ultimate solution to the Enterprise 2.0 problem. It was an employee directory with tags. People tagged others with the projects they worked on, and what they have knowledge about. Need a MySQL expert, browse that tag and find them all. Also was some fun/frivoulous “brown hair”, “old school”, “bmw driver”, etc. We almost worked on commercializing this at Yahoo. I wish we had, someone should.
  • Thanks for letting me share. Have you cleaning out your “I should blog about that” folder lately?

    4 thoughts on “What was I thinking? Old Draft Posts”

      1. Agreed, I’d really love that as a built in feature. One issue, though, I’m not sure that many people’s RSS feed containing their tags or categories. So this may be one of those that we’ll never see. (or some totally different solution to highlighting the best posts will arrive)

    1. tagsona – i also wish there was something similar to install internally. there is a business in it, even after years. maybe yammer or other company will build and integrate it into their corporate microblogging service…

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