The Success Ebook…Synergy Extreme
I’ve been impressed by just how welcoming and helpful the blogging community has been over these past couple months. Not long ago, I was trying to make sense of this “new” medium with a management consultant’s eye. The result was a road map to personal development blogs, which led to me meeting several helpful bloggers. Now as contributor to this Success Ebook project, I feel like I’m officially “on the inside.”
What’s much more interesting than my warm fuzzies, however, is this powerful example of teamwork in which small contributions aggregate into something fantastic.
It started when Jonny Gibaud over at The Life Thing asked 30 bloggers to answer two questions: 1) What is success? 2) How do you achieve it? We also had the opportunity to make a 500×500 pixel square to artistically communicate this. Individually, I thought my square was nifty, but nothing to write home about. But when you compile them all in a pretty package, the book provides a fascinating set of perspectives that gets the reader thinking down a path: “Indeed, what is success? Which perspectives really moved me? Which ones did I think were lame? Why? What does that say about what I value?” The result can be some cool introspective insights. Check it out!
Selfishly, I also enjoy the good exposure coming from a relatively small investment of time. The contributors are quietly reaping some great little benefits:
- It’s fun to be in good company with people we respect and like to read.
- Because we’re all part of the book, everyone who’s intrigued by the book will be exposed to all 30 contributors. Furthermore, when those who are impressed by the collaboration blog about it, every contributor benefits from the Ebook’s readership.
- On the Ebook we’re all linked back to our respective blogs. Who doesn’t love a good inbound link?
- We now have our names listed in new places which means they can turn up in another favorable place when Googled. In other words, Googling (Jonny Gibaud, Alec Satin, Alex Unleash Reality, Armen Shirvanian, Ashley Ambirge, Austin Evarts, Brenton Gieser, Brian D. Armstrong, Brian Papa, Bud Hennekes, Carlos Miceli, Cody McKibben, Colin Wright, David Turnbull, Derek Baron, Gordie Rogers, Greg Rollett, Henri Junttila, Jennifer Smith, Jun Loayza, Lisis Blackston, Matt Cheuvront, Oscar Del Ben, Pete Mockaitis, Raam Dev, Scott Young, Sid Savara, or Stephen Mills) might send you here!
Talk about a win-win-win! This teamwork theme of combining tiny tidbits into something much greater also plays out in many other useful ways. A common example is aggregating numerous survey responses to generate insights completely unobtainable from extended interviews with a few people. One of my favorite authors, John C. Maxwell, employed crowdsourcing in writing his forthcoming book. Finally, the book The Wisdom of Crowds has plenty of extra fascinating possibilities. What else comes to mind?
The Success EBook sounds interesting! I’ll have to check it out. I, too, really like John Maxwell….the little “101″ books are good reads, as is “The 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader.” I think that it’s good for people in general to learn leadership qualities even if they’re not in an active leadership position or don’t think of themselves as leaders…you never know when you might have to step up! Taking a leadership class in college is also very valuable…I took one at Hopkins my senior year, and it was a blast and probably the most fun class ever, plus we all learned a lot.
I’ve also added your book to my Amazon Wish List…I’m looking forward to reading it in the near future!
I was considering how this philosophy guides to our legislative system….the minor ‘contributions’ of many, amassed to create a single ‘organic’ policy. The theory is that only the most worthy will pass the scrutiny of the process, but unfortunately many would agree this is not the case. I would say that these people are mostly guided by what they perceive as best interest, but how in this example do the results get so distorted with everyone’s best contribution? It’s not simply misplaced values that would be a simple and somewhat dismissive explanation (I don’t think many public servants wake up in the morning, dreaming of how they can ‘run this mother into the ground!’)…but the differences in the product quality with this similarity in the process I feel do warrants examination for conditions. Does there have to be nothing at stake? What then is the value added?