Dear Smart Leaders,

Happy New Year 2011 to you, your family and friends.

I would like to thank you to those of you that have been great contributors last year for dedication and sharing your knowledge and experiences. It was great to have you and learn from you all. It is hard to believe that we finished holiday season, celebrated New Year and are already working hard toward making 2011 great success.

Many of us used holiday season to catch a breath and reflect on last decade. We had global “ups” and “downs”, time of prosperity and GFC. It seems that a new decade requires new approach, perspective and leadership skills. Do we know what they are? We may not know it as yet, but we can feel that something is missing. What we learned in the past was not enough for us to foresee and prevent disasters such as GFC. Our group has such an incredible leadership membership. I would like to invite you on a journey of discovery and shaping future of leadership. I hope you all are as excited about new challenges and great potential ahead of us.

There are number of ideas that I would like to introduce this year:

1. Make our LinkedIn Smart Leaders Network Group an “Open Group”.  This will allow us to use social media to share our discussions.
2. We need to use this Smart Leaders Network blog to continue some of our discussions as well as communicate information relevant to our group.
3. Guest Bloggers. Our website has already in build functionality that allows members of our group to contribute on leadership topics. Please let me know what you think about this idea and if you are interested in writing about leadership.
4. Monthly topic of interest. I would like us to focus on specific leadership related topic/idea. This would allow us to discuss concepts and share experiences as well as learn from each other.
5. Group monitoring of “promotions”. From time to time our LinkedIn Smart Leaders Network Group has posts that are not related to leadership nor topics of interest to our group members. Some posts are simply promotions with little value to our members. I would like you to take initiative and move such posts to promotions by using already existing feature.
6. Mentoring Program. I would like to ask you to give this idea a little thought. We will be looking for both mentors and mentees. Please let me know if you would like to participate? These will be mentoring programs with a difference. More details will follow…
7. Book reviews. I believe that our community would benefit from reviews on latest books related to leadership.
8. Contribution Program. For those of you who are interested in helping me to manage this group, wait no more. I am happy to hear from you. Initially we can make it on 6 monthly basis. This may be a good idea to get exposure to our community.

Please let me know what you think about the above. Ideally I would like you to comment on this post. Having said that I am happy to open discussions about other ideas you may have. Please feel free to come up with suggestions. Depending on what and how many ideas we have and some level of prioritisation may need to take place.

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”
- Steve Jobs

Best regards,
Barbara

This entry was posted on Monday, January 10th, 2011 at 8:08 pm and is filed under Leadership, Mentoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.