At The Grove we are officially launching Visual Leaders today. This means that Amazon is shipping; it’s in the stores at Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million. And one person wrote from Canada that he saw it in Toronto in its “World’s Biggest Bookstore.” Richard Narramore, my Wiley editor, writes that he’s already let a contract for a Chinese translation. The process is a bit like having a baby. In between the nine months gestation and a life time of living with the result is this one moment in time. Print is static. Life is dynamic. One has to imagine all this, whether reading words or looking at pictures.

This image from a Nike meeting captures a bit of this feeling. Can you see the book as a satellite orbiting a fluid environment of issues and challenges?

 EmergingIssuesMuralFragment

 

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Fast Company excerpted my new book Visual Leaders in their recent on-line edition. The article features my observations about how to deal with social media by thinking about messages as being buoys in a foggy sea of possibilities. I shared a set of principles that are elaborated on in the article. Click here to read.

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My second Wiley book, Visual Teams: Graphic Tools for Commitment, Innovation, & High Performance, arrived in a box at the precise moment we finished a review of our Team Performance System at The Grove’s Quarterly meeting! Needless to say I and our team was pretty exited. Everyone wanted to know what was new in this book that they could talk about.

10Showingthebook - Visual Teams Has Arrived—What's New About It?  Here is my answer.

1. New Success Stories: It tells the stories of many high performance teams that used visualization extensively to achieve results. These stories from HP, Otis Spunkmeyer, RE-AMP, Agilent Technologies, the DLR Group, and Gary Hamel’s MLab demonstrate how visual meeting methods can be used over the whole arc of team’s life.

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FutureTalkGraphicsRecently I met Mei Lin Fung, producer of Future Talk, a monthly TV show produced in Silicon Valley. She works visually herself and when she heard about Visual Meetings she invited me to be on her show.

We produced a half-hour session on visual facilitation and its application to complex problems in government. This was a three-camera, eight-person, all-volunteer crew, producing live and unedited from Palo Alto’s Community Media center. I talked about my work with visual meetings, showing some examples; then I demonstrated by taking notes on my IBM Thinkpad tablet when Mei Lin was talking.

Watch here – enjoy!