Earl Mardle nails it. But so long as there is demand from insecure executives for rules they're supposed to follow, there will be gurus to provide them with exactly that.
"My kvetch about management gurus is that they observe patterns of behaviour in successful people,
enterprises etc and then convert them into rules which other, less
successful people or organisations are supposed to follow in order to
be successful.
[...] Instead of trying to get people to shoehorn themselves into some
executive straightjacket, we should be looking through our businesses
for people in the ranks who display the characteristics he talks about.
We should be encouraging and challenging and testing those people, just
as we do with athletes, pushing them to push their envelopes to see if
they can break through to become one of the "effective executives" and
making sure that when they do, we have given them plenty of reason to
be loyal, or at least grateful as they move on.
[...] Effective Executives are not a product that we can make, but an emergent property of correctly functioning organisations."
Right now submitting a post to a channel requires people to either fill in a form
on the channel page of their choice or send a TrackBack ping to the
channel. Both are simple, but still harder than they should. How about
adding a third option: simply link to the channel in your post. To make it easier, the top of each channel page could even provide some standard boilerplate chunk of the requisite HTML.
In order for this to work the ITE needs to watch the participating weblogs. It already watches for weblog updates,
so just let people register their blog or feed once and let the ITE
pick out the posts that link to it as they appear thereafter.
Note that this new option automagically generates visibility for the channels on participating blogs with
every post submitted; this is one of the key elements
that were missing for effective word-of-mouth propagation of awareness
of the Exchange. I'm kicking myself for having taken so long to find a simpler way.
Of course, along with ease of use comes more spam. I've been thinking about this too - more later.
