Strategic Content Professional [KNWLG] Become a strategic lynchpin

Is a content marketing specialist vital to the organization? Seth Godin's book explains why

Seth Godin's Linchpin is a great introduction to today's individual's strategic position. Godin tells the uninitiated (or inexperienced) worker of how in many companies there are a few "linchpin" contributors. He actually developed a unique original perspective on the idea of who is a vital "linchpin" worker. He suggests of a way to change how we work, making every worker irreplaceable by giving workers freedom to think and do creative work. This idea of giving each worker the ability to think for themselves and do the most they are able is not new. He suggests that our industrialization of white collar jobs made robots of workers. Essentially making most jobs routine, defined carefully to the point of simple tasks. He also suggests ways of looking at work and at management which are different from the traditional American corporate standard. I have seen this situation recently working as a freelancer on long projects (2 and 5 months) inside established companies. On the other hand, there are also great examples of companies which do not fit this mold. It seems more useful to today's content marketer to focus on where their work can be unique, productive and strategic.

Learning From General Business Books (2nd installment)

In the last article about learning and practicing new skills, I wrote about Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers book. He tells a story about how people in remote locations, away from the (accepted) mainstream centers, become accomplished experts and seem to suddenly show up as if discovered by a reality pop music show. Gladwell's is one of the many general business, social science and psychology books describing idea or trend. Many similar books from Seth Godin, Jim Collins, Michael Lewis and others, also tell stories useful to navigate today's changes in media use (especially the internet.) How do we turn a story of the financial failure in the US to something we can use? (see Michael Lewis's The Big Short) We can even go one step further and ask how do turn it into a new skill? If Gladwell explains the phenomena of expertise away from centers of knowledge, can we turn this idea into something we can use? That part is even harder, some general business ideas do not seem relevant to most businesses. Yet, they are and they can make or break a company, your career and maybe even your everyday work satisfaction. Look at these trend and idea books as today's version of the 1970's self-help books.

Do Internet Skills Matter? After The Gold Rush

How crucial are skills to the internet professional? WOW, hold on! What are we talking about? Is there such a thing and an internet professional ? ? ? This question kind of sneaks up on people. Since the internet profession has evolved and grown so quickly, it seems like experience or "showing up for work" at a successful company is enough to qualify as a professional. That's the nature of fast growing professions. Even in the software industry, where professional skills pioneer like Steve McConnell have been preaching for over a decade, professional qualification, certification and skill assessment is not an industry standard practice. Yet, for the customers, especially the ones starting out with new internet projects (without experience) the qualification and skill level of their employees is crucial. In general, the world of software development and content management, are mysterious and vague. This state of affair has not changed in a long time. As far back as 1974 Brooks' The Mythical Man-Monthdescribed in details the follies IBM in his biggest project to date, the IBM System/360, and how difficult estimation, development, testing and maintenance of large software projects. Much has changed since the early days of software development, yet we are still in an era where it is difficult to manage and therefore describe to outsiders the work of technologists in software. This is even more true today with different aspects of content and application use on the internet.