Work needs more play – and not just because it makes people feel good. Play can make a person – and a company – more resilient, more creative and more innovative.

The Red Rubber Ball at Work does a great job of saying why play is important – from the points of view of many different people in business, from product designers to salespeople to Seth Godin.

For more information on play and its role in the growth cycle (from chaos to competence), see chapter one of the Jolt Challenge, an excellent book I’ve just finished. A review is coming your way soon!

Meantime, enjoy this review and I’d love to hear what you think!

How do you handle information overload? One Austrian librarian had an interesting method – and an interesting explanation for it – in the book I review today, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

While talking about the book (which I partly read, admittedly) I was reminded of Howard Gardner’s 5 Minds for the Future. Gardner talks about the need for a depth of discipline, even as we need to get more cross-disciplinary.

Such talk of deep discipline then reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which says you can master anything if you put in 10,000 hours. Although I haven’t read the book, that’s okay, because I followed the advice in How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read … nicely completing this circular, three-for-the-price-of-one book review.

How does this affect us in our daily life and work?

1. Information overload is a fact of life. Do you remember the last time you wished there was more information in your life? Yet relevance is still a struggle. The first book has some surprising strategies.
2. Our fast-moving times require innovative, cross-disciplinary thinking, yet we still need a depth of discipline or we truly will be jacks of all trades, masters of none.
3. This means that to our initial discipline we must add the skill of collaboration. We must realise that we don’t hold all the answers, nor could we ever.

It’s summed up by a great quote I read today:

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, then let us walk together.” -Lila Watson

Getting stuff done is pretty important. Richard Hollingum and Mario McMillan could have written a book about how to get stuff done, but they did the opposite: How Not To Do Things is a clever guide on exactly how you can accomplish nothing.

A great insight into why change sometimes just doesn’t happen.

Why cover it on iJumpTV? Because using social media in your organisation is about far more than getting the technology right. It’s about introducing and maintaining change – and you can’t do that successfully without knowing the barriers you’ll face.

What books have you been reading over the holidays?

Suzanne Kendrick, one of the people who contributed to that discussion joined us recently in the iJumpTV studios to talk about her work as community manager for the Grey Lynn 2030 Transition Town project. Here’s Suzanne (this interview is just over 3 and a half minutes):

Click here to view the embedded video.

While Suzanne’s work is for a non-profit, grassroots movement, there are lessons for every organisation that wants to grow a community online. Key lesson: It takes time.

If you found this helpful, you might also enjoy our interview with Ponoko’s former community manager, John Lewis, last year.