Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead [Hardcover]

I'll start with the best bit - Chapter 9. This promotes the idea that the changes with the greatest potential rewards also tend to have a significant risk of failure, and as a result, failure needs to be handled sensibly, without unnecessary persecution and blame.

It's also the main chapter that does look at all at what to do when things go wrong. While the rest of the book talks about how to evaluate how open you are as a company and as a manager (the assumption throughout the book being that you are relatively senior in the company, not a social networking evangelist lower down the ladder), and benefits that you can see from being more open, there is a shortage of discussion of how it can go wrong.

Throughout the book there are plenty of discussions of open strategies followed by companies like Dell (in fact Chapter 10 reiterates most of them a second time), highlighting how a company managed to become more responsive and more able to deal with an unfolding crisis through being more open.

My main issue is that it doesn't apply the same treatment to the flip side - what issues have arisen because a company became more open, what the risks really are, and how the companies being discussed addressed that. It's too focussed on promoting the open leadership style.

A slightly more minor issue is that it's very focussed on large brands and companies - the kinds of ones where an issue written about by a blogger might manage to hit the news sites. I've no doubt that the majority of execs looking at books like this work for rather smaller companies, where that kind of exploding negative publicity is much less likely, yet there was no discussion about how different sizes of company might as a result have different pressures to be more open.

That said, there are plans and checklists for working out how open you want your company to be, and how open you already are, and if you're wanting to adopt a more open approach, then it will provide reference material for justifying it also. In the sense that a book like this may be largely 'preaching to the choir' and more putting existing ideas of increasing openness on a more solid footing, it serves that purpose well.

I wouldn't necessarily consider it any kind of definite work on business planning, nor compulsory reading, but there are enough anecdotes and plans and so on to make it solid enough to have merit for anyone who is looking at their social networking strategy. The writing style is friendly and doesn't get too bogged down in detail, so it is a book that you can read through relatively quickly for a business-focussed text. It also references website resources to offer further support in implementing a strategy.

So, all in all, good, but not great. A relatively easy read, but more for managers already interested in a social networking strategy than anyone else.

Open Leadership is for corporate leaders and executives who want to lead through the openness (transparency) of social media technology. If a company wants to succeed it needs to "let go" and adopt the right approach to effectively improve communication channels through the empowerment of all involved. This attitude, of optimistic confidence -- used professionally-- can assist leaders in reaching out to all executives, employees customers (current and prospective) in a way of which builds relationships and a sense of belonging and honesty across social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other online sites and blogs.

Author, Charlene Li, teaches us that with the right mindset, skills and traits a strategy involving relationship building, integrity and select openness leaders can increase public awareness to form an online community that really works. By creating an open culture, which encourages risk, yet also supplies the survival skills needed to recover from a failure should they be needed.

This book takes a detailed look into how to produce a fun, but structured openness online through open leadership and collaboration. If you are a leader looking to take this route, this is the book for you. I've learnt a lot from this and thoroughly enjoyed the examples of well-known leading brands she mentions when highlighting their progress as they adopted these very ideas.

Two years ago Charlene Li and her former colleague Josh Bernoff published a book called the Groundswell, which helped to explain to marketers how social media affected consumers relationships with organisations and brands for marketers. The book became a must-read for marketing directors around the world and helped many of think about how they thought about opening their marketing activity to online.

This time around Li's target audience is the managing director or CEO who wants to get some ideas on how they get their arms the social world putting in place organisational changes to address the social world. Only part of the book is about social media, much of it would ring true to students of modern management theory with themes of transparency, empowerment, bottom - up management and `open' organisations. All of which as themes pre-dated the social media explosion, but have been further validated by it.

Li continues to write an an accessible, easy-to-read style. If you know your Facebook from your Twitter, this probably won't tell you anything that you don't already know, but it will give you a structure to hang all your knowledge on. However it is worthwhile reading if you want to know what ideas the boss is likely to be kicking around next.