A Technical Manager's Perspective

Management and Leadership Blogs and Books

In the last six months, the majority of my posts have been about Technology and not about management, so I wanted to share a great management resource with you.

Lisa Haneberg is a Leadership Consultant and Author and someone that I have been reading for a while. She is currently working on her 10th book, and has three or four different blogs. 

One of the cool things that she does is give away free offerings of some of her books and writings in the form of PDF's. One of the books is called 100 Helpful Tips for Great Managers which can be found with three other offerings on Lisa's e-books and artilces page, and is well worth the time to download and check out.

Lisa also authors and edits a Management Craft blog, and I wanted to point out one posts that I can really relate to called Why Managers Fail. In this post Lisa points out the 5 top reasons why Managers loose their jobs and one line that really hit home with me ..

"Management, by it's very nature, is a people-centric job"

If you read the post and Lisa's blogs and books, you will realize why building relationships and trust is key to being a good manager.

Technorati Tags: Management,Leadership,blog

Smart Phones and New iPhone

 

After waiting over 3 weeks, I finally picked up my new iPhone, and I love it. The 3g connectivity is great when it is available, and it works great from home, ok from work, was excellent in Kittery Me today but nonexistent in Kennebunkport Me.

What I really like is the wireless connectivity which is easy to setup and very reliable. Both my home and work wireless networks are setup and pulling up Google or any other Internet service is quick and easy. When wireless is not available, I rely on the AT&T 3G network or their EDGE network. When wireless is not available and 3G is available, then connectivity has been great.

I am able to read both my MIT email and my personal email using IMAP and it is very reliable. I have been investigating mobile sites from the iPhone, but most of the popular mobile sites are big corporate entitles, with very static content that reminds me of older Web 1.0 sites. MIT has a nice site called m.mit.edu which is very functional, and somewhat dynamic.

I see all of the phone manufacturers and network providers offering 3G, wireless access, and mobile applications in the future. This will make accessing the Internet from your phone as easy as accessing the Internet from your desktop. As more folks start using smart phones, and take advantage of their functionality, then enterprise managers will realize this trend, and see the need to develop mobile web resources to their enterprise.

If you are in a role where staying connected is very important, then you should consider a smart phone (iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian Device, Windows Mobile). Smart phone technology and functionality is only going to get better, and as more Enterprises realize this then, Enterprise level applications and functionality will become available on your mobile device.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,smart phone

OpenWeb Foundation

On July 24th at the O'REILLY Open Source Convention OSCON, David Recordon announced the formation of the Open Web Foundation which is an ....

"attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications. Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification."

                                                            from the OpenWeb Foundation

Here is David's presentation which includes audio where David explains the OpenWeb Foundation:

| View | Upload your own

This makes a lot of sense. There is a definite movement to collaborative community driven software development as opposed to big company proprietary development, and the web is the perfect infrastructure for this.

Along comes the OpenWeb Foundation with some structure and experience at Open Source community driven software development, and they can help new projects with the Licensing and Structure issues and let the community focus on software development.

Technorati Tags: openweb,open source,social web