Is a leader who tweets a twit?

BLUF: Is there any reason for a leader to use Twitter to improve their effectiveness?

I need your help. I'm plugged into many social and other networking applications (LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc), but I'm still yet to enter the tweet-sphere. I've looked at what Twitter does and how it works and I honestly can't see why I'd use it to be more effective as a leader.

The only reason I've been tempted to use it so far would be to try to get more followers than Justin Timberlake. I mean, you always need to be striving for some type of goal, right?

So, on this post I'm hoping to hear from you on whether you use it, why you use it, and whether it can or has improved your effectiveness as a leader. And please don't send me your response in the form of a tweet...

This time, the choice is real - revisiting focus

BLUF: Knowing you have to work on just ONE priority until it's complete, what will it be? This time, I'm not asking a hypothetical question...

Every now and then I pick up one of my favorite management texts, Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive, and re-read a section - the book gets better every time I do this! This week I re-read the chapter "First Things First", and it prompted me to write a second post on focus (see Focus Grasshopper for the previous posting).

The primary message in this chapter is two fold:

1. Effective executives focus on one or (at most) two things at any one time and complete them before moving to the next major area of focus
2. Sloughing off yesterday - in order to focus the effective executive leaves behind unproductive initiatives no matter the investment in them to-date or remaining work to complete them

In the last post I asked the hypothetical question, "If you could only use one form of communication as a leader, what would it be...?". That, plus my reading of the Drucker chapter led me to ask the following question in this posting - "Knowing you have to work on just ONE priority until it's complete, what will it be?". Modifying the question slightly to reflect Drucker's wisdom you could say, "Knowing you have to work on just ONE priority until it's complete or unlikely to produce any tangible results, what will it be?".

So - what will it be for you? I can't really tell you what my ONE item of focus is at the moment, as it's related to competiveness in the industry I'm in. I expect the same will be true for many of you. Still, even if you can't say what the one item is, I'd really like to hear your thoughts on the concept of this type of laser focus.

(as a side-bar, I started this post off with "BLUF", which is short for "Bottom Line Up Front". I originally picked this term up from my favorite management podcast, Manager Tools. Hopefully "Bottom Line Up Front" speaks for itself, however, for more info take a look at BLUF (communication). I'm going to start off all my posts with this from now on. Keep me honest in case I forget!)