Bionic Leadership at Harvard's Kennedy School

This morning I was a guest lecturer in Jerry Mechling's class at Harvard's Kennedy School, "Leadership in a Networked World:  The Challenge of IT-Enabled Change".  Jerry had asked me to speak about "personal information management".   In a moment of weakness I suggested we call the session "Bionic Leadership", since I had planned to talk about how new tools can help people running organizations "sense, synthesize, and socialize" more effectively.

Bill Ives joined me, and together with the class we discussed not only tools themselves, like Google Reader,  Marketspace's "tribal bookmarking" version of Del.icio.us, and Twitter, but also more exotic combination possibilities with real-world applications to the kinds of problems K-School students might care about.

It's always interesting to survey groups like this on adoption of technologies.  This group of ~40-50 was pretty diverse:  estimated age range 25-55, from all over the world, from a number of different sectors (business, government, non-profit, military, etc.).

• Roughly 40% are on Facebook, with a handful on other social networks
• Maybe 10-15% use feed readers (skewing younger, at a glance)
• 10-15% read blogs regularly (evenly distributed)
• one class member publishes a blog

These numbers track with my experience recently in other settings.  Facebook is becoming a de facto "bridge into the future" for many people, making a Facebook app an essential part of any new web venture's promotion strategy.