Recently in General Category

We are currently hiring a new finance/ admin person. One of the impacts of online job classifieds is that it is far easier to apply, and so you get far more applications than when people had to write and post a letter. For another position we're advertising, for an Extremely talented office/ events/ digital media assistant, we've received over 150 applications in the last five days - a few very good, and many just not worth looking at.

However there are occasional compensations for the work of going through many resumes. One application for the finance/ admin position included the following in her career history:

XXXXXXX Finance Service in China (a professional financial consulting company, handling tax dodging sensibly and regular accounting operating for clients)

As an accounting clerk/ admin officer

Ahem.

These things always take longer than we’d like. But finally the new Future Exploration Network website is up! There are some new features to the site that I’ll point out in subsequent posts, and a couple of final tweaks yet to make. Please let us know in the comments here or by email if there’s anything that doesn’t work properly or you have any suggestions – thanks!

This year looks set to be a very interesting - perhaps transitional – period for my organizations Future Exploration Network and Advanced Human Technologies. While they currently function as highly virtual firms with only a small core team, they may start to grow more as we do larger projects and also get involved in some online ventures. Our strategy is to largely hire people in part-time roles, which gives us access to a whole pool of students, parents, enterpreneurs, and deviants who find it hard to get stimulating and challenging work within their constraints, and keeps us fluid and flexible.

We’ll be advertising a couple more roles in the next little while. For now please pass on this ad to anyone who you think might be interested – thanks!

Extremely Talented Office/ Events/ Digital Media Assistant – Part-Time

Media | Internet | Strategy| Events | Future : Work in a boutique international firm in a highly diverse role including administration and using your talents

Tomorrow we leave on a little over two weeks holidays – it’s a good time of year to get away, so we always take the opportunity. The last three years Victoria and I have taken our New Year’s holiday in various Asian countries – Vietnam and Laos, Thailand, and Japan. The last was with our lovely daughter Leda, who was four months old at the time, but not too young to acquire a taste for Japanese cuisine and esthetique.

This year we’re heading to the North Coast of Australia’s New South Wales. We’ve made no bookings for accommodation or anything else, so it will be a very laid-back affair as we wander around and probably hang out for a while in the hippie hinterland rather than cosmopolitan Byron Bay. My wife Victoria will paint and design, and I may make some progress on my novel set in the near future (realistically a few years away from publication yet). Leda will no doubt make some friends and enjoy being out of the city for a change.

I’ll report back on any startling encounters or insights when I'm back, but there’s unlikely to be anything as futuristic as Leda’s encounter with a robot in Akihabara, and more likely I'll just experience a very pleasant stilling of the mind before I throw myself into 2008, which promises to an extremely fun and exciting year.

Have a fabulous New Year!

As we move into Christmas season, many people will find themselves in social situations they may not want to be in. They may find themselves sitting next to distant relatives or acquaintances who are tedious, obnoxious, annoying, pedantic, weird, bombastic, stupid, or all of the above.

For these situations, I would like to provide a handy guide to party conversation that will help anyone to be completely comfortable in any social situation and conversing with anyone.

Ten years ago, in a period when I went to even more parties than usual, I observed that close to 90% of conversations were essentially content-free. There are in fact many, many things that can be said that are ALWAYS appropriate at ANY point in ANY conversation. This means that you can say these phrases, irrespective of what the other person has just said, and it will always be a relevant way to continue the conversation and appear to be a brilliant conversationalist. I then engaged in a long-term research project, spanning many parties, in which I compiled a list of these “appropriate phrases” that can be used at any point in a conversation.

In the spirit of Christmas generosity, I now share these phrases with the world. Before you go to your next party, memorize a few of the phrases to use. If you prefer, print out the list, and surreptitiously refer to it during the conversation. No one is likely to notice, given your outstanding conversational skills.

Have fun with the 335 phrases listed here, and please add any other “always-appropriate” conversational gambits below when you have completed your Christmas party research. Happy partying!

You expect me to believe that?
That's a good one
I'll drink to that
Truer words were never spoken
Have you ever said that to anyone else before?
If something's worth saying once, it's worth saying twice
Could you say that again for me in a low, sexy voice?
I'm sure you can do better than that. Take 2!
Just give me one last pearl of wisdom, and then I have to go
Are you an actor, or are you always like this?
We don't go for that sort of thing where I come from
Lots of people tell me I have a sick mind. Do you think so?
You're joking
Enough small talk. How about it, then?
Do you understand what you just said?
Do you know for a moment there I almost believed you

RossDawson.com is now launched! The website focuses on my individual work as a keynote speaker and strategy leader, which complements my organizational roles at Future Exploration Network and Advanced Human Technologies.

I have quite a few websites for the organizations that I'm in involved with, plus the occasional book and blog. Since my work focus is largely on my organizations, I didn't even look at getting a domain for my name for a good while. When I first looked at the domain rossdawson.com, the domain was registered though unused, by a Ross Dawson living in Scotland. I diarized to check when the domain was up for expiry, and was fortunate enough to be able to pick it up. Several years have passed since then, with my attention on other things, including establishing Future Exploration Network.

At this point I am keen to make space to write my next book, so over the next little while I will put a little less energy into growing the organizations, though we certainly have the resources to deliver significant projects as clients request them. I am quite happy for the next little phase to spend more time doing speaking engagements and working as a solo strategy leader with my clients. As such it makes sense to launch the RossDawson.com website now.

The website includes keynote speaking videos, speaking topics, client testimonials, event planner information, and new global speaking schedule and recent media features, which I'll incorporate into this blog soon. It also sports a new brochure: Ross Dawson: Keynote Speaker | Strategy Leader (1MB), which gives an overview of my work as a speaker and solo consultant.

I've simultaneously set up a very similar rossdawson.net site for speaking bureaux to use in promoting me. Although it's now very easy to search for and find anyone prominent these days, speaking bureaux still like to be sure that there are no direct contact details on anything they show clients about speakers they are proposing. As such the "bureau-friendly" rossdawson.net is the same as the rossdawson.com site, except with no contact details or external references to my blog or other sites.

Let me know any feedback or thoughts on the sites, as we'll refine them over time.

While I was spending some time in New York recently, Dave Sifry, until recently CEO of Technorati, just happened to organize a photowalk on Brooklyn Bridge of a Saturday morning. He was in new York for a few days, so decided to organize it, posted it on his blog, got some other bloggers to mention it, and he mentioned it on his Facebook page. Around 10 of us saw it and decided to go along. At lunch in a restaurant in Chinatown after the event, we all told of how we came to be there. David had only met two of the people on the walk – I’ve known David for quite a few years now and have previously been to one of his photo exhibitions in San Francisco – while the rest had come across the gathering in other ways through blogs, social networks, or personal connections. It was a great example of how the online world easily enables people to get together to do fun things in the real live world away from screens. Get an idea to do something interesting, and you’ll likely find similarly inclined people to do it with you.

Below are a few of my photos from the day, including some of my wife Victoria and daughter Leda, who came along for the fun. It’s also well worth having a look at the complete set of David’s photos from the day.

Manhattan through the wires

Today it’s five years since my first post on this blog (see the posts for October 2002). Originally it was simply the Living Networks blog, launched to accompany the release of my book Living Networks, and was part of the book website. A book is static, and particularly on a topic such as living networks, it makes sense to make the topic alive and keep the conversation going. As far as I’m aware Living Networks was the first business book - and one of the first books - to have a companion blog. Since then I have relaunched the blog as Trends in the Living Networks as an ongoing conversation.

The opening words of Living Networks, launched in November 2002, were:

Macromedia, the company best-known for selling Flash software, is blogging. Weblogs—usually fondly abbreviated by their devotees to “blogs”—are essentially online publications of people’s stream of consciousness, available to anyone who cares to drop in to their websites. Opinions and personal perspectives are offered freely and informally, almost always in the context of breaking developments and others’ views. This means that blogs are liberally filled with links to whatever is most interesting in the ever-shifting landscape of information on the Internet.

I’m going to be spending the next few weeks based out of New York, around some stints in Silicon Valley, LA, and a day in Boston. My primary base is Sydney. When I used to be based in Tokyo and London and spend a lot of time on planes, I thought that if I were going to be travelling lots, I’d like my home base to be somewhere I loved. In other words Sydney, my very favorite city in the world out of the many that I have lived in and visited. However the nature of my work is that I have to work all over the place. A few years I go was speaking and working all over, part of the period when I racked up keynote speaking engagements on six continents. However I knew that wasn’t sustainable, and so I decided to focus on the US and Australia. I set up a subsidiary of Advanced Human Technologies in the US and got a US work visa, and have since largely split my work between Australia and the US, with just a few projects pulling me briefly to Asia and South Africa.

Now that I am married to the wonderful Victoria Buckley and my gorgeous daughter Leda recently turned one, when I travel I endeavor to be back within a few days or so, leading to some pretty intense itineraries. On one occasion last year when things were rather hectic, I flew over 40 hours to hop to Miami for 20 hours to do a keynote and get back home for the weekend. So it’s fantastic when we can all travel together, leading to a more leisurely approach. This means that with the whole family I’ll be able to work with the US as home base for a while. It’s tough to be based in more than one country, but if we can regularly all get over here for a bit, it’s an ideal situation. Victoria is also moving towards getting the right distribution setup for her jewellery in the US, so that fits perfectly.

I’m organizing a Living Networks lunch in Boston on October 3 – drop me a line if you’re interested in joining a few die-hard network enthusiasts. I might organize a casual catch-up in New York too – if so I’ll blog about it. Maybe see you en-route!

Hmmm.... Not sure whether to take this as a compliment.

Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network and I caught up last week after we both spoke at the Evolve conference. Cameron wrote on his blog :

"Caught a taxi to the airport with Ross Dawson and we had a great chat about the Singularity. Ross looks like an accountant but he’s really a major geek."

For those who are not geeks, the Singularity is the point at which the acceleration of technology goes beyond human comprehension. Whether and how soon it comes is a fascinating conversation for transhumanists...

Partly as we’ve decided to grow the events part of our business, we’re looking for someone really exceptional who can help to make that happen. In addition to the Future of Media Summit coming up in Sydney and San Francisco, we’re planning a number of events related to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 for later this year. Clearly the right person for the role will have a very good understanding of current technologies, as well as be familiar with the industry landscape. For the meantime we are experimenting with growing the business just with part-time roles, partly as we find there is great supply/ demand characteristics: lots of excellent people want part-time roles for various reasons, and they don’t find many opportunities.

Please do pass on word on this if there’s anyone you know who may be interested. Details below.

Tomorrow I head off to Japan for two weeks with my gorgeous wife Victoria Buckley and lovely four-month old daughter Leda. I lived in Japan 1991-94, and while I returned regularly for a while, I haven’t been there for over six years now. It will be great to get back and see what’s changed, particularly on the social and technological fronts. Japanese social and business structures have been shifting rapidly since the Japanese bubble burst in the early 1990s, yet much of the old systems still remain. When I lived in Tokyo, among other roles I was Tokyo Bureau Chief for Thomson Financial, where we were reporting on the early phases of the transition that is still under way. Much has unravelled, and there is far more to go. The next decades of Japanese history will be fascinating. I am also very much looking forward to reviving my Japanese language. I devoted much of my energy in the time I was there to studying Japanese, and I found real delight in the magic of the language. However it has gone pretty rusty, especially my reading, so hopefully I can bring it back to business-level standards, though I suspect that will take a little more than a two week holiday.

Don’t expect any blog posts while I’m away (unless I get massively inspired), but I will report on my impressions when I’m back. I have been frustrated through most of this year as I’ve attempted to capture on this blog a little of what I’m seeing and thinking about. For me, client work ultimately takes priority, and I have had a very intense schedule for the last few months particularly. There has been much I wanted to write in this blog but never got to. I still have a backlog of a dozen posts or so on media coverage, speaking gigs etc. which I wanted to comment on and have not yet managed. I definitely want to pick up the frequency of my blog posts next year – it is a high priority for me. But it does depend on what other pressing things I have on my plate. No doubt 2007 will be an exciting year – I’m looking forward to it… after a good break. Have a fabulous new year, and best wishes for 2007!

I am currently advertising for someone to work at the core of my team, based out of Sydney. I’m advertising online, through word-of-mouth, and it makes also sense to put this on my blog too. Please do pass this on if you know anyone you think may be interested. Blog readers are encouraged to apply! Special talents in online tech, PR, research, consulting processes etc. will have ample scope for application. Full job ad details below.

Leda Bella Dawson was born on 12 August 2006, exactly on schedule. We often forget what a miracle life is. One of the great things about becoming a parent is you are confronted with the extraordinary fact of two people’s genes being combined, growing for nine months inside a woman, then suddenly emerging as a perfect human being. All of the instincts necessary to feed and grow are there from the beginning. Experiencing the lifeforce of a new human is a wonderful reminder of the miracle of life.

Here are more baby photos for those interested.

We’ve had lots of interest in the name, so read here for the story of Leda.

We’re all back at home today, so back to work, and perhaps a pick up from my recent lack of blog posts, but that will be balanced with helping take care of my gorgeous daughter…

Any day in the next couple of weeks I will become a father for the first time. I’ve been told countless times that it will change my life, but I think I’ll have to experience it to understand… My wife and the soon-to-be mother is the adorable Victoria Buckley. She is an extremely talented jewellery designer, with a shop and fabulous collection of pieces that draw on many inspirations, including fairy tales, myths, and legends. Victoria's landmark outlet is in Sydney’s Strand Arcade, with clients worldwide, and exports to top-end retailers in the US and elsewhere on the cards. It’s been very interesting to me that Victoria’s and my work, while they may seem to be very different, are actually highly aligned. Archetypes, meaning, and communication are common threads in both of our work, and we find much to share in insights between our businesses.

I will soon enough find out how becoming a father impacts my blogging. I have never been quite as active a blogger as I’d like, with urgent work commitments daily often coming before my desire to blog on interesting things I'm seeing or doing. However with the Future of Media Summit now out of the way, and baby on the way, I’m deliberately creating space for myself, so it’s possible that between changing nappies and earning a living I’ll be able to blog a little more than I’ve been able to so far this year. Writing a blog post is a nicely packaged, manageable task. I doubt Trends in the Living Networks will become a baby blog, but expect a few references to babies along the way…