Blogging - An Effective Process for Organizational and Leadership Development ?

The Northern Voices blogging conference is underway.

Tim Bray and Robert Scoble set the stage for the day - Tim providing a touchstone perspective on blogging dynamics in the context of its use at Sun Microsystems, and Robert setrting out to describe how he reads 1000 blogs per day.

Tim’s key points were about the use of blogs as listening mechanisms (listening to markets, customers and smart people) and the openness and authenticity necessary to develop effective blogging dynamics.

Robert underscored these key points by noting that today he posted a blog entry that was very critical of a Microsoft employee’s question about linking and showcasing an initiative for non-techies … without considering the use of RSS feeds.

Tying these two concepts together …

Listening, openness and authenticity are core elements of any organization and leadership development initiative. I think that a Microsoft executive or manager (for example) can learn a lot about her or his team, customers and markets by aggregating blog posts about a given issue … using the aggregation to listen carefully about what is being said, and then use blogging (along with other tools and processes) to respond or to consider initiatives that address - openly and authentically - the issues that have been raised.