Derailed [Book Review]

by Justin Levy on January 23, 2010

Most of the business books that are published focus on teaching you what you can do to improve your sales, marketing, customer retention, productivity or a number of other business-related goals.  The case studies in these books typically highlight role models of the concepts being described and then have actionable tips that you can follow to achieve similar results.

Well, Derailed (affiliate link) by Tim Irwin takes the exact opposite perspective but that’s what makes the book so great.  Derailed reviews the decisions, personalities and eventual derailments of six high-profile leaders.  Irwin finds that:

deficits in authenticity, humility, self-management, and courage become more dangerous as we take on more leadership, and can cause us to ignore glaring signals that might otherwise save us from catastrophic demise

It is from these derailments that Irwin puts together a list of five lessons can we can all implement into our lives to avoid current or future failures in leadership if we’re currently in an executive position or seek to obtain a position in the future.

Catch more of my review in this quick video review.  If you can’t see the video, you can grab it over on YouTube.

Note: Apparently there was some background noise from my washing machine, or who knows what.  Sorry for the little annoying hum.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DodZDAx8sEI[/youtube]

Have you read the book?  What were your thoughts on it?

Disclosure: This book was provided as a review copy.

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Sharing Content in Another Stream

by Justin Levy on January 21, 2010

On a daily basis I will generally run through between 400-800+ feeds.  Of those, I share the top posts, usually around 30 or so, that I think will be useful for you.  Realizing that a majority of you don’t follow my Google Reader feed or may use a different feed reader, I wanted to provide another option for you to access those articles.

Sure, I push my Google Reader shared items through FriendFeed and I share a handful of posts daily through my Twitter account.  But, seeing that the majority of my community hangs out in Twitter more often than most other services, I wanted to be able to share with you through there.  Therefore, similar to what Louis Gray (@lgshareditems), Robert Scoble (@scoblemedia) and Chris Brogan (@broganmedia) have done, I have created a new handle on Twitter: @jlevymedia.  This will be, as Chris calls it, a pure stream of the content that I share or produce from around the interwebs.

Besides trying to provide you with, what you will hopefully find as a resource, what I like about having this Twitter account is that it allows me track all of the links that I share through Google Reader in Bit.ly.

While this might not be totally useful as of yet, it will still help me to gauge whether or not the info that I share is useful to you.  As time goes on I will tweak what based on feedback and stats such as Bit.ly clicks, retweets and more.

If you think it will be of interest to you, I hope that you’ll come join me over on @jlevymedia.

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Coca-Cola’s Happiness Machine

January 20, 2010

Imagine if you walked up to a vending machine, dropped in a couple dollars, made your selection and a soda popped out.  Seems completely normal, right?  Now, what if another soda came out. Possibly the computer on the fritz but kinda cool, huh?  But, what if it kept spitting out soda after soda, started pouring [...]

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Email or RSS: Which Do You Prefer

January 13, 2010

In a recent survey of their customers HubSpot found that their customers preferred to subscribe to blogs via email subscription nearly 12 times more than their preference for RSS.  HubSpot serves mostly small and medium businesses in a cross-section of verticals.  Therefore, the results are not surprising.  In doing educational seminars and speaking to a [...]

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Reply to Facebook Comments via Email

January 12, 2010

Today Facebook launched the ability to reply to comments (status updates, photos, videos, and Wall posts) via email.
While this isn’t a major platform upgrade, it would appear that it will drive more engagement with Facebook.  This will occur for 3 main reasons:

Many of us live in our email therefore we’re likely to respond faster to [...]

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Coca-Cola Adopts New Social Media Policies

January 12, 2010

Coca-Cola has updated their social media policies (or principles, as Coca-Cola is calling them).  Guess what? The policies are only 3 pages in length.  Yep, that’s it. 3 pages.  One of the largest brands in the world that sells into 200 countries with dozens of products and billions of dollars in revenue has figured out [...]

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Are You Subscribed Yet?

January 11, 2010

I really appreciate all of the meaningful conversations that we have in the comments of this website, on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and the other ways that we find to connect online.  But, I realize that for some of you, you simply click through or you’ve arrived here from a search engine.  If so, it [...]

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My CES Gear Bag and Advice

January 6, 2010

So, I’m here in Las Vegas gearing up for the start of CES 2010 tomorrow.  Since this is my 2nd year attending CES, I wanted to share with you some advice as well as what I’ll be carrying in my gear bag to help keep me connected without creating unnecessary weight.
If you can’t view this [...]

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Gone Mobile

January 5, 2010

You can now access a mobile version of [justinrlevy.com] when you use a touch mobile device such as an iPhone or Droid.  Previously this blog had utilized the Carrington theme to create a mobile version of the site.  But, I just switched over to WPtouch to create a fuller experience.  Carrington had many of the [...]

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Social Media Jungle at CES

January 4, 2010

Are you getting ready to make the yearly trek to Las Vegas to check out all things electronics at CES?  If you are, you should consider attending the Social Media Jungle being hosted by Jeff Pulver.  I’ve had the opportunity to speak at a few of the Social Media Jungle events that Jeff has put [...]

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