Mark Holmgren

Societal and organizational pendulum swings are a metaphor for major change or transformation in thinking and action. They are in and of themselves neither good nor bad, postive nor negative. They tend to reflect as well as point to major trends. We all know the obvious ones:

• The swing from centralized to decentralized
• The swing from insourceing to outsourcing and more recently to crowdsourcing
• The swing from regulation to de-regulation
• The swing from heirachial structures to flat organizational design
• The swing from an industrial focus to knowledge or information focus and more recently the beginning of a swing to what is called the conceptual age (which is a focus on people, their skills, motivations, emotions, etc.)

Such shifts or swings are motivated by a complexity of factors and are meant, I believe, to offer a new emphasis on concepts and actions as opposed to totally replace the old with the new. The challenge...

Writing well involves so much more than putting words to paper. People write to communicate ideas and emotions to challenge and motivate people to action, to reinforce common beliefs or deconstruct perceptions. The intentions one brings to writing can be as varied as the number of words in a dictionary.

Business writing is no less a challenge than writing a piece of fiction or an article for a newspaper. In all cases, the writer aspires to write clearly, enhance understanding, inspire action, and lead the reader to a desired conclusion or reaction.

For example, writers of training materials want readers to learn how to do something the right way or the best way or the quickest way. The goal (i.e. the conclusion) is that the trainee will be able to perform the function or tasks that the training materials were created for in the first place.  The wrong words, bad organization, or incomplete messaging will result in poor training.

Writing marketing and...

A prospective client asked me to come talk with a few board members about how I think about transformative change and how I might help their organization work through some significant short-term and long-term challenges and aspirations.

There was a time – when I was oh so young — when I might have gone and talked about various models that could help them with change management or strategy development, but in these chaotic times I have no prescriptions or magic bullets to offer.

So I prepared a brief document that focused first on my perspective, attitudes, and mindset about transformational change. I thought these were more important to talk about to the client because they didn’t really expect a one size fits all model; I figured they wanted to engage a consultant who offers a way of seeing and being that fit their aspirations and culture.

Here are some highlights of what I spoke with them about:

1. People are the organization. Not...

Our work in social media strategy development and social media implementation has helped us come across a wide set of resources. This is just a small list of learning resources developed by Mark Holmgren and Brent MacKinnon that can help you understand certain applications as well as facilitate some strategic thinking within your organization. I hope it is helpful.

The Facebook Guide Book
http://mashable.com/guidebook/facebook/
This guide book provides training and resource in the following areas: Facebook 101, Managing your Facebook Wall, Facebook for Businesses (or organizations), using Facebook applications, and advanced uses of Facebook.

The Twitter Guide Book
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
This guide book provides a great introduction to key learnings like hashtags, retweets, how to build...