Twitter is remarkable. Follow us.  I ignored it too long thinking it was not scalable or professionally relevant.  My strategic business thinking is obviously sometimes my biggest handicap.  I was wrong, it scales the entire globe. It is both personal, i keep up with kids and grandkids, and professional,  I connect and communicate with like minded thinkers around the world.  Short story first.  A new friend on twitter Dinesh connected me to some wonderful TV footage on the Economist of an interview with Jaya Kumar, the Chief Marketing Officer of one of our clients, FritoLay, and Tony Hsieh,  CEO of Zappos.com talking about trust, transparency, high trust culture and specifically the Speed of Trust.  This is something that in the “old days” in the late 80′s early 90′s when we launched the 7 Habits book would have slipped through our fingers and not been shared with as broad and committed of an audience.  This conversation would not have been transparent to me so that I could engage it, leverage it and share it.  I also now have the opportunity and intend to acknowledge and thank Jaya for it. 

Another new friend in Denmark gave me tips on what to see on my upcoming trip to Amsterdam.   Another did the same in London.

The longer story that comes to mind is the significance of the realization of the transcendent potential of the world wide web so eloquently described by Christopher Locke at the turn of the century (the 21st century that is) in 2000 in his book the cluetrain manifesto:

“More important, all of us are finding our voices once again.  Learning how to talk to one another.  Slowly recovering from a near fatal brush with zombification after watching Night of the Living Sponsor reruns all of our lives.  Inside, Outside, there’s a conversation going on today that wasn’t happening at all 5 years ago (95) and hasn’t been very much in evidence since the Industrial Revolution began.  Now, spanning the planet via Internet and World Wide Web, this conversation is so vast, so multifaceted, that trying to figure what it is about is futile.  It’s about a billion years of pent-up hopes and fears and dreams coded in serpentine double helixes, the collective flashback deja vu of our strange perplexing species.  Something ancient, elemental, sacred, something very very funny that’s broken loose in the pipes and wires of the 21st century.  There are millions of threads in this conversation, but at the beginning and end of each one is a human being… This fervid desire for the Web bespeaks a longing so intense that it can only be understood as spiritual.  A longing indicates something is missing in our lives.  What is missing is the sound of the human voice.  The spiritual lure of the Web is the promise of the return of voice.“ 

Twitter is clearly a giant leap forward in that direction.

The Globe and Mail is considered Canada’s national paper with over 1 million readers.  Stephen was interviewed by Sarah Boesveld last week and his remarks appeared in today’s Globe and Mail in an article entitled Ambiguity Anxiety.   Stephen had this to say about the pressure on trust in the current crisis when managers are secretive: ”They tend to be done without very much openness, without very much transparency – people in rooms all day long behind closed doors. And when they emerge, managers dish out spin and don’t give employees the straight goods,” he says.

I finally got an Amazon Kindle 2 and must say so far it has exceeded my expectations.  The ability to word search all your books alone is worth the ride.  The Speed of Trust is available in a Kindle version and searching that on the fly has proved very useful.  It holds 1500 books which beats the 500 or so that crowd my office.  You can take notes but it definitely is not as intuitive as a pen and highlighter but I am getting used to it.  It feels miraculous to not carry the 3 to 4 books I usually end up traveling with and you can easily read several at a time as it picks up where you left off so it is simple to read several books simultaneously.  The digital paper is also surprisingly easy to read even in sunlight.  While off, the Kindle displays delightful pencil sketches of authors.  It rotates randomly and one day it displayed the definition of Kindle: light or set fire, arouse or inspire (an emotion or feeling), become impassioned or exited.  I can not yet say that my Kindle has impassioned me but you can say it has re-kindled my goal to meet the challenge that Dr. Stephen R. Covey gave to me years ago: to read a book a week.   Most years I have not hit that goal but I have a couple of years past and I will say that his challenge has dramatically increased the number of books I have read in the last 22 years and that is a HABIT worth having.  Maybe it is The 9th Habit!