Carnival of the Capitalists.

I set out this morning to tell you about Carnival of the Capitalists as another way to filter blog content that you don’t keep up with.

Blog authors will submit for the weekly Monday Carnival a post they think was their best of the past week or past month’s time, or perhaps they’ll pick the one that stimulated the most blog comment conversation. So essentially, when you feel there’s info overload you can simply trust the author to choose for you.

This week is the second time I’ve contributed something from Talking Story to the Carnival in my own “because it’s relevant” train of thought, in sync with our Ho‘ohana theme of community, getting involved, and putting yourself out there. I also wanted to share what Hayden had to say.

The Carnival is also a great resource for finding new blogs that might interest you, (which I know, adds blogs to read versus lightening the load).

This week, the Carnival is held at Anita’s Small Business Trends, and there are a whopping 45 entries to look through. (Now’s the time to practice Bren’s clipping technique.) Anita has done an incredible job in giving us a succinct preview of each article with her links – auwe what a lot of work! So with these thoughts in mind, and just yesterday having a bit of a “keeping up” discussion of our own, one of the first articles I click on is this one:

“BusinessPundit.com – Rob discusses "Information Relevance" and the problem of overwhelming information that we face today, suggesting that an important future skill for business leaders will be to determine quickly if given information is relevant or not.”

Clicking in, I find that Rob is responding to someone else that had given him this equation to consider:

(blog) content > attention (time) available

In part, he says,

“Over the last few decades, information has been one of those things that could separate the great companies from the mediocre ones. More information on buyer preferences and habits, local tastes, production efficiencies, financing options, and every other area of business have enabled companies to squeeze more and more out of every dollar spent. But we will eventually hit a wall. Human brains can only process so much information, yet it is human brains that must make business decisions.”

If this taste of his post is relevant to you, you can click in to read the rest (I’m not as succinct as Anita!) where he talks about his “initial guess” to the answer. It’s a good post.

For me it all comes down to this: it’s your time, spend it how you want to. Read and learn what you want to; on Talking Story, I’ll keep offering you the choices I think you might like to choose from, just ‘cause that’s what I like to do.

The first thing you learn as someone who loves to write, is that not everyone will read everything you put out there – actually, you learn that as a manager doing memos or business plans, or as a teacher giving out homework assignments ” and that’s life, you shouldn’t take it personally.

What you’ll read me saying about all this in Managing with Aloha falls right in alignment with keeping things relevant for people, just said in another way:

As a manager, recruit, select, employ and manage people well based on their ho‘ohana – their passion for work they feel is worthwhile and meaningful.

When whatever employees love to do
is a fit for whatever you need done in your business,
you both win,
and they’ll do the relevant filtering for you.

Afternoon update: I like the way Dave says this for me here, participating in the comment conversation on Customer Service over at Todd’s place. Are you packing a hammer and chisel?