Sales mistakes and wheely orgs

This is an article in Entrepreneur on the subject. Also in the magazine this month there's a cool little blurb about this guy who has what he calls a "wheel management system." The piece would be interesting reading for anyone who's in the business of designing a staff model. The photo shows the org chart which is wild, and looks like--you guessed it--a wheel.

His system is based on a chart that identifies all employees based on their skills and expertise. The chart is constructed so that if, for example, an environmental scientist requires additional materials during subsurface drilling, he immediately knows whom to call and has the authority to do so. "There is no hierarchy," says Vigneri. "The goal is to keep the project moving forward."

The thing I find interesting about all these small business articles I read is how applicable their processes are to associations and other nonprofits. Empowerment issues like these are really important when you have a small staff, whether or not you're in the business of making lots of dough.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention, Signal v. Noise has the second in its series on starting your own business up. It's great advice.

We've Always Done it That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change

From what I can tell, the impetus for this book was that the folks who wrote it, Jeff De Cagna , David Gammel , Jamie Notter , Mickie Rops and Amy Smith , were “concerned by the instinctively conservative approach to organizational stewardship that far too many association executives and volunteers continue to pursue in the early years of the 21 st century.” I took notes throughout the book, and now I realize they are far too extensive to make a very good book review. And I am definitely the choir that this book is preaching to. However, I really, really liked the problems these folks addressed and they pretty much slaughtered and butchered several sacred cows. This book is not extensive narrative or heavily footnoted, but it is based on the collective experience of 5 people who together have worked with many different organizations, and the collective themes will be familiar to anyone in the field. On a meta level, this book takes observations of what’s happening in the

Public sector information design

Here's an article from the UK's Design Council talking about how information design is important in public-sector efforts. Of course, it's helpful to everyone, but this is a good example of the universal need for better presentation of information--and more design.

An Army of Davids

So, I've been spending some time with Glenn Reynold's book (Glenn being of course the seminal and highly influential Instapundit ), and I must say that it gives me lots of language I can use to talk about phenomena that are easily observable right now. I think you could say that Glenn Reynolds has done for technology what Virginia Postrel did with design topics . Which is to say, they beat the drum and say, hey, look at what this democratization of knowledge can do for you! In that vein, the book is really pretty visionary, pointing out the magic of the internet age. And I for one see it as magical. You know how Laura Ingalls Wilder's Pa in Little Town on the Prairie said to Laura that it was an amazing time to be alive (that was in the 1890s)? I've been actively thinking that to myself for the past few years, and An Army of Davids gives me ample evidence to back that up with its talk of citizen empowerment and the "comfy chair revolution." The theme of "

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