Orson Wells says in his very special voice,”We will sell no wine before its time.” You can see this wine commercial for Paul Masson on YouTube. This blog is not about wine, though. It is about timing.

I understand why to sell no wine before its time — the wine isn’t ready to be consumed!  It would not taste right, it would reflect badly on the wine maker, it would “leave a bad taste in our mouth” (pardon the pun) from the experience.

What about the timing for discovering the world revolves around the sun, and not the other way around?  It took over 1000 years from the first person’s assertion of the earth revolving around the sun, not the other way around, before Copernicus gained credibility for this novel view of reality!   Indeed, Nicholas Copernicus was destined to put forward the theory of the earth’s motion at a time when the idea could be heard. During an earlier era Aristarchus declared the same, too early in mankind’s receptivity to gain credibility.   Although true, truth found no champions.

A modern forward-thinking mind, Dean Kamen, invented (among other things) the electric scooter Segway. His intention was that they replace cars for local transportation but they proved too expensive. I see them downtown upon occasion, driven by the neighborhood “safety cops.” Kamen, according to Fortune Magazine (May 3, 2010), has learned that change takes time and a group effort. Indeed Wilbur and Orville flew, yet it took another 50 years before flying was mainstream.

Although adoption curves have their own timing, they are shortening by and large.  For example, the speed of change is lickety-split on the web. My wonderful social media intern, Audrey Vernhet, informed me recently that Facebook could cost money in the next few months. I am NOT ready to climb on that adoption curve!

Speaking of adoption curves, I wonder when business leaders will take up the accountability for being trustworthy and hold each other to account for the position power they hold?  See www.trust-in-leaders.com for an opportunity to comment by completing the research request.  I welcome your thoughts.

Just as I begin to gain some early confidence in myself within LinkedIn, Facebook, albeit pretending to be on Twitter, here comes 3.0.  If you really asked me what can I DO in Web 2.0… well, nobody has ever said, “You stupid person, that’s not what you do on Twitter.”  And I must confess it has entertainment value for me.   And if you haven’t waded into the social media waters you’ve been left behind, stranded on a dry desert island.

Malcolm Gladwell says, in his latest book Outliers, that it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery.  I’m not there!

That said, I am armed and dangerous.  This picture is my computer (MacBook Pro) and on the keyboard, just in front of the Fortune Magazine article about Web 3.0, rest my two Flip Video HD cameras.  My new hobby is interviewing people who have something valid to say about trust in leadership, and I have successfully surrounded myself with more and more conversations on this topic.  Hence, the building library of interviews on my website.

On some days I could convince almost myself I’m gaining some proficiency, then I go to an event such as the one sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council (SDSIC), an inquiry into “What exactly is Web 3.0?  No one has the answer, but there are some cool tools associated with whatever it is.  I have been perpetually challenged to figure out what meta-tags describe my blog, for instance.  Here’s a cool shortcut to doing that:  It’s a web service called Open Calais, created by ThomsonReuters.  I just submitted the above text to Calais, and I was presented with all the meta-tags, blogging just got faster and easier! Check it out.

Dimitry Shapiro, “Chief Disruptor” and Founder of Veoh Networks was on the panel.  Whether he’s right or he’s wrong, he is convincing!  His observation is that to be web savvy, you need to know the google search commands as a BASIC skill.  Dimitry refers to www as the “Wild Wild Web”, and strongly suggests Web 3.0 would be a “structured web with reputation.”  Words like “semantic web,” “reputation systems,” “open research,” were terms bantied about,  in the midst of sharing links to other great sites;  “Feedly,” a Firefox plug-in that brings in user-selected inputs from Google Reader, Twitter, RSS feeds in easy to read magazine style format;  Open Publish for blogging;  Huffington Post.

Dimitry, like me, is interested in trust, his specialty is the media.  He calls it journalistic integrity and he says we used to have it.  The “Bloggosphere, Twittersphere have made the world,”according to Dimitry, “a very scary world.”

I recently had a fast-paced hour-long conversation with Robert Porter Lynch, author, teacher, speaker, champion of increasing the experience of trusting leaders.  He observed that if trust in our leaders isn’t repaired in the United States, we as a nation are threatened to our very core.   Here are the LynchPrinciples — please download the PDF file.

Robert is writing a book on trust and leadership — he is Building a System of Trust.  He spends his life on airplanes in academic and business contexts, talking about what causes trust, conversely what causes distrust, and the impacts on business and life.

I then attended a conference on social media where I learned a term, “crowd sourcing,” revolving around our need to go to our friends for advice, people, resources because authority as we have known it cannot be trusted.

Decisions are made based on assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions prove false.  Consider these recent, faulty assumptions.   Real estate values always go up.  Financial institutions hold your money safely while you don’t need it. Retirement funds are managed to out-maneuver real risks.

These  eight principles of collaborative trust from Robert’s book that is coming out in the fall of 2010 provides reminders of what is important.  We are all leaders of our own lives, and we could choose not only to embrace them, but speak about them, remind others about them — in other words, Share them!  Encourage them!

Once upon a time I co-authored a book, Market Smarter not Harder.  Guy Kawasaki generously provided a testimonial for that book.  (Hey Guy, I still have a pre-pub copy of your Selling the Dream.)  Times have changed.

Fast forward to today when  I attended the San Diego Venture Group where Guy demonstrated social media, no kidding.  Mesmerizing.  I audio taped the entire thing, because as you know if you’re reading my blog, I am unwilling to be left in the dust in this exciting digital era.  My professional focus has not been marketing for a long time, it is helping organizations’ leaders foster trust by leading with integrity and competence.  I am good at that, not so good at social media, YET…..

Here for you is Guy’s presentation (disclaimer: this is raw audio) in segments by topic.  Lively.  Funny.  Relevant.  Edgy.  Enjoy.

guy-about-facebook

guy-about-twitter

guy-about-objective-marketer

guy-on-retweeting

Here are the documents used in Guy’s presentation.