Travel is great for a variety of reasons. While there are drawbacks like the lost time and time away from home, you also get to experience new things, and often get caught up on reading. My last shoot was on location in Seattle for about four days so I finished reading two books on the trip: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
and Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
. Turns out I worked with Clay Shirky, the author of the latter book, and the perspective on social media in the book is spot on. We’ve been leveraging a lot of social media including our Facebook group, twitter account, and of course this blog. One of the most resonant learnings from Good to Great was the idea that you first need to get the right people on your bus, and the wrong people off, and how critical the right people are. It sounds so common sense and it is, but so many companies hold on to underperformers and stick with things longer than they need. The best part was that almost all of the traits the good to great companies had, we have and/or are cultivating so we feel like we’re on the right path!
