I'm taking off this week after what's been a pretty active first 100 days at Edelman. I've been to too many cities to list. This includes four in the last 10 days - DC, Paris, London and Seattle. This has made it hard to find time to think. So, in addition to catching up on errands (my car registration expired in May), watching sports and spending time with friends and family, I am "going" on a mini Think Week.
For those of you not familiar with Think Weeks, they're a legendary part of what has made Bill Gates so successful. Twice a year Gates heads off solo to a cabin in the woods of Washington to ponder where technology is heading. He noshes lightly, guzzles lots of Diet Orange Crush and reads dozens of papers that Microsofties have submitted in advance to his technical assistant. The Wall Street Journal recently took a peek behind the scenes of this fascinating exercise. It looks like Scoble is on a similar track as he transitions jobs.
My mini Think Week will be nothing nearly as extreme or important, but I am modeling his process. I am basically carving out time at home to think about how technology is going to impact marketing and PR in the coming years. By taking time to think it's my hope I won't miss the small stuff, as Scoble says. I want to do my part as best I can to help our teams worldwide succeed.
Over the past few weeks I have been stashing away tons of blog posts, articles and white papers in del.icio.us and Google Notebook (which by the way, grew on me). I have uncharacteristically printed these out so that I can take them pool side, digest and scribble lots of notes. Also included in the pile are lots of internal docs.
At night I will parse all of the thoughts/ideas generated (good and bad) into a giant mind map in MindManager so that I can evaluate them. While obviously I won't be able to share many of these thoughts because they are proprietary, I will definitely share trends and ideas as I do throughout the year. (By the way, if you haven't checked out MindManager I highly recommend it. It's an amazing tool for capturing thoughts.)
I'd love your help. If there are posts/articles you feel I should be reading because they will impact our business and you're willing to volunteer them, please do send them my way with "Think Week" in the subject header or even better please leave them in comments. Thanks.
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