The Narcissism of Leaders

Some time ago I was able to attend an interesting presentation of Bénédicte Haubold’s book The Narcissism of Leaders , by the author herself. She interviewed executives, managers, and heads of companies to define the role of narcissism within leadership. What emerges from it, among other things, is that the same is true for narcissism as for cholesterol: there is a good narcissism and a bad. It is a force present inside each of us, which reveals that we are interested in the image that we present to others. In this sense, it proves that we are interested in others. It is also synonymous with self-esteem, and self-esteem is indeed a strength. Where narcissism breaks down is when it cuts us off from reality, when we are only interested in the image that we project on others for our own sake. In the case of the leader, this pathological narcissism can have serious consequences for the company.

International wiki conference approaching in Montreal

The 2007 International Symposium on Wikis, WikiSym 2007, will be held October 21-23 in Montréal, Québec, Canada. This year’s theme is: “Wikis at Work in the World:Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century”.

Leaders of wiki research and industry will attend and speak, such as:

Jonathan Grudin (Microsoft Research), one of the world’s leading researcher on Computer Supported Collaborative Work (keynote speaker)

Ward Cunningham (AboutUs), inventor of the wiki concept, who will give the closing talk

Peter Thoeny (StructuredWikis), creator of TWiki, who will give a half day tutorial on wikis in the workplace

The program also includes two headline speakers from ooPSLA, WikiSym’s host conference. Jim Purbrick (photograph) and Mark Lentczner, creators of Second Life, will talk about this collaboratively built 3D virtual world.

Peter Turchi, award-winning author of “Maps of the Imagination”, will talk about the relationships between creative writing, making maps, and creativity.

More information and registration :
http://www.wikisym.org/

Pierre Levy in Paris, June 5th

Pierre Levy, Chair of Canada’s Research Department in Collective Intelligence, will participate in a June 5th conference in Paris University Paris 8 about semantic Web and IEML language.

A short description of IEML language:

“IEML (Information Economy Meta Language) is an artificial language aiming at being both usable by computers and able to express the subtle notions of natural languages.
Its goal is to tackle three issues: semantic indexing of cyberspace data, coordination of research in the fields of human and social sciences and a distributed governance of collective intelligence to foster human development.”

More information and inscription to the conference

Wikisymposium 2006 (Austria) and WikiSym 2007

The wiki world is getting busy! After the first wiki conference in China we mentioned last August, the second Wikisymposium will be held November 25th at the Austrian Computer Society in Vienna.

More information on the symposium’s wiki (in German).

Meanwhile, WikiSym2007′s, agenda is under construction and welcomes your contributions. This is the annual worldwide meeting of wiki researchers and users.

Via Wikimetrics and WikiSym.org

Wikimania 2006 starting August 4th in Cambridge (MA)

The second edition of Wikimania will be held in Cambridge, MA, starting tomorrow. During 3 days, Wikimania 2006 will be the place for many events, including presentations by Lawrence Lessig, founder and President of Creative Commons, Mitch Kapor President of Mozilla and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The Wikimania Awards, will also be granted to the best, free writing and multimedia contents.

Click here for more details.

First wiki conference in Mainland China

On August 12, 2006, the first Chinese wiki conference will take place in Shanghai. It is an initiative of Cnic.org, a Wikipedia-like Web site. A short description of the event (CWC2006 for Chinese Wiki Conference 2006) and people taking part is available in English.

Other Chinese wiki initiatives include Baidupedia.

Relationship Intelligence Management – a new paradigm

Cooperatics, partnering with Visionarymarketing’s Yann Gourvennec, is working on a paper on “Networking and Collaborative Work Status and Trends for the Networked Economy”. The paper, which will be released in the coming weeks, will focus on the impact of cooperative approaches connected to new networking methods and tools on the economy and the way companies do business.

Here is the executive summary of our paper:

Networking and Collaborative Work Status and Trends for the Networked Economy

By Jérôme Delacroix : (www.cooperatique.com) and Yann Gourvennec (www.visionarymarketing.com)

INTRODUCTION

The advent of Collaborative work is now well and truly established within the enterprise world. In a mid 2004 survey, analyst company IDC pointed out that their “focus group participants voted Web conferencing the most appropriate collaboration and meeting tool in 60% of everyday meetings and business processes”, and this is a clear sign that collaboration – or at least some form of it – has now become mainstream. But it’s certainly not just a matter of technology. In this article, Jerome Delacroix and Yann Gourvennec have analysed the root causes for such changes. Beyond behaviour, it is the very relationship between working habits and technology which is at the heart of this issue. When Vannevar Bush wrote his trail-blazing article on dynamic associations in 1945, he created the concept of hypertext and eventually paved the way for Berners Lee’s invention of the Web as we know it. Bush’s idea was not about creating yet another technological gizmo, it was about knowledge, about improving our access to information and our understanding. At the end of the day, hypertext made possible the growth of information networks.