Written by Alora on February 10, 2010 – 10:37 am
Entrepreneur-turned-VC, Mark Suster, recently posted an article on his blog, Both Sides of the Table, highlighting what he considers to be the essential qualities of entrepreneurship. At the heart of his post is a very, very simple philosophy: entrepreneurs just do it. For some people, this is easy. Moving ahead, pulling the trigger, motivating people [...]
Written by Alora on April 21, 2009 – 11:41 am
It’s been years since the evangelism for Agile development started truly gaining momentum. Super sexy buzzphrases phrases like “reduce time to market,” “improved ROI,” and “lower development costs” have all been invoked to support the case for adopting an Agile methodology over the old-school Waterfall approach. The fact is, most experienced professionals have lived through [...]
Written by Alora on April 18, 2009 – 10:50 am
The last speaking quality I want to cover in my series on what makes a quality public speaker is the ability of a speaker to connect with their audience. There are thousands of ways to do this, and how a speaker goes about it will often be dictated by a combination of their content (as [...]
Written by Alora on April 17, 2009 – 3:38 pm
In my original blog post on this topic, the second quality I listed as being necessary in a great speaker is authenticity. Authenticity is difficult to quantify, but we know it when we see it. And when it comes to a speaker, it makes a huge difference in how we view what they say. A [...]
Written by Alora on April 15, 2009 – 7:03 pm
As noted in my previous blog post on this topic, the first quality I believe is necessary in a great speaker is for them to be educational in some way. In my recent bout of conferences, I have seen speakers who fall all over the quality spectrum, but the ones that were truly good ensured [...]
Written by Alora on April 14, 2009 – 3:31 pm
I admit it: I am “an oratorical snob.” I have very high standards when it comes to what I like to hear and see from a speaker at an event or show. Having grown up in a small business-centric environment, public speaking is in my blood and I cut my teeth on motivational and business [...]
Written by Alora on April 13, 2009 – 4:16 pm
Over the past few months, I’ve been more closely aligning myself with the Enterprise 2.0 community of professionals. Though I have been in technology for my entire career, and in Web 2.0 for at least part of that time, and implementing Enterprise 2.0 solutions quite extensively in recent years, I had not previously made a [...]
Written by Alora on March 30, 2009 – 9:23 pm
A year ago, Austin-based Convio launched a company blog: Connection Cafe. Unlike so many other company blogs, Convio decided to take a slightly different approach with the hope of gaining slightly different results. While many organizations opt for a CEO blog — particularly companies with in-demand CEO’s, like Convio’s Gene Austin — or a blog [...]
Written by Alora on March 5, 2009 – 1:11 am
In a recent conversation with a friend, we were discussing corporate blogging efforts to engage existing customers. After reading Joshua-Michele Ross‘ post recently, on the Wells Fargo/Wachovia merger blog, I was excited to see yet one more company prepare to engage customers in this forum. That is, until we started talking in more detail. It [...]
Written by Alora on January 9, 2009 – 5:49 pm
Throughout my career I have held roles with all kinds of titles, but in the end, at my core, I am a project manager. That is how I see myself and how I tend to identify, no matter what my formal title. And it’s for a very, very simple reason: there is one constant in [...]
