To frame these questions I want you to think about different parts of your life: could be work, home, volunteer or hobby. In any one (or all) of these parts of your life where do you find yourself – or someone just like you – showing leadership. Particularly when they aren’t in a traditional leadership role (like a manager, elected official, etc.).

1) How do view the idea of a non-traditional leader?

2) What is one example of leadership from a non-traditional position of power that you have experienced?

3) May I follow up with you about your answers?

Thanks ahead of time to those of you willing to participate!

Right now businesses are taking advantage of this information as a way of luring new customers and rewarding loyal customers. One Facebook friend posted:

Attentive businesses will use this information to their advantage in this way. I think that’s great. There is a problem though – many people are very leery of using a location based application that gives away their position so freely. In fact one enterprising organization – Please Rob Me - is using its cynicism about location based tech to invite would be criminals to watch for when you are away from home.

So what would I look for in a next generation of something like Foursquare? Well, why not put the ownness on businesses to accurately map their location using GPS co-ordinates. By doing this you, as an individual, could sign up for this type of service and just by having your phone enabled the application could pick up on what business you were patronizing. By using an anonymous id businesses could instead push rewards to you instead of waiting for you to announce yourself. Keeping with the anonymous id the application could inform other users of how many people are currently at any given location. This doesn’t mean you would have to make everyone anonymous; like how the applications work now you could allow people to share more of their personal location information if they choose too. The key however is that the anonymity option would still allow businesses and users to connect without a direct, transparent relationship.

I believe these tweaks would greatly open up the use of location based applications to a broader user base. What do you think?

The topic was basically about making your offline presence (particularly as an organization) much more responsive and flexible to the needs of your supporters and community – the way it is with your online presence. Here are the slides:

Growing up I watched a lot of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood (watch here) and I’ve always had a love for the show and the man behind that show, Fred Rogers. The thing about this show and the man himself is that he wasn’t interested in teaching people what actions specifically are “wrong” and what actions specifically are “right” – he instead nurtured an understanding of how our actions affect others and how our feelings have an effect on our own self.

I’ve been thinking a lot about anger lately, about how quick we as a culture are to get angry and point fingers and choose sides; I’ve been witness to where that leads – we all are. Crisis after crisis because we aren’t satisfied to let cooler heads prevail.

Well, today in my RSS feed I found this nugget courtesy of Coudal Partners: it is Fred Rogers testifying before Congress about PBS funding. Listen not just to the words he has chosen but to the calmness of his delivery. He doesn’t need to get his ire up because his words reflect the deeper honesty of his being.

I’m grateful for the chance to continue to learn from Mr. Rogers, no matter what age I am. If you haven’t seen the video take the 6 minutes to watch it and really let the ideas settle into your mind.

When maintaining your position becomes your only focus it is time to question if where you are is where you should be.

Just something to ponder on this snowy winter day.

Every network has a hub and that can mean either a person or a place. Hubs aren’t usually the coolest person or place that you know, instead hubs are (almost by definition) the most connected and often the most inviting people or places.

In order to be a hub you have to be open to accepting diverse connections. You have to see how those individual connections interweave like connecting social dots. A hub is almost always a generalist of sorts; the hub doesn’t get too bogged down in details because the hub is always looking for opportunities to connect those dots that will produce the important details.

By making these connections the hub can create it’s own power of influence. Some people and places are all about being specialists; that is how they earn their social power. An office building specializes in providing office space and derives its power from the perception that it is about serious business. A nuclear scientist derives their social power from the perception that they know a great deal about nuclear processes. But do those things have to be specialists to succeed? Do they actually have to rely on those skills to have influence and create brilliant new possibilities?

No. Of course not. What if that nuclear scientist is the one who knows how to network two other, more brilliant scientists together (maybe they aren’t even both in the same field); and perhaps that nuclear scientist knows of investors who want to bring the resulting brilliant idea to market.

Power of influence is only limited by the sphere of connections we open ourselves up to. So what role fits for you? Are you a hub or a specialist; or, are you finding a way to be both?

Interested in learning how to become a connector in the online social world? Contact Andrew Miller Consulting today for a free brainstorming session.

Join me on Saturday, February 20, 2010 for a great free conference at the Ohio State University – Digital Media in a Social World (the whole conference is both Friday and Saturday):

Andrew Miller
Bridging the Gap Between Traditional Offline Engagement and Online Social Networking
Does your organization have a split personality? Is your audience getting mixed messages between how you interact online versus offline? Learn how bridging the gap between your traditional audience engagement and your online social networking efforts will provide a stronger foundation of supporters and greater innovation.

I had the pleasure of hosting this event with Phil Cass, Hazel and Chuck Morrow-Jones and Rick Livingston. The turnout for the event was great with about 30 participants including a couple of Oberlin students and a Boston area writer who is interested in covering the Columbus movement in an upcoming book that she is publishing with Meg Wheatley.

The event took place at the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture which is one of my favorite facilities in Columbus.

Our event flowed through a check-in, two rounds of open space, a set of knowledge cafes and completed with a group breathe check-out. You are welcome to browse through some photographs of the event by clicking the thumbnails below.

Below is a video of Phil Cass talking briefly about leading through connectivity:

Below are the harvest sheet summaries: