This article is a short summary of my experiances about leadership. However these points are very simple to write down every fresh leader should learn these things from one by one, to have deep understanding.

Nature of good leader

• Always be prepared
  If you have a meeting with your team, you should always spend time to prepare for it
• You are the Hero of your team
  Whether you want it or not, you will be the one who will be followed, you should show always the best of yourself (if you are unstable, you team will be unstable, if you are focused, your team will be focused)
  If you do extraordinary job, if you are on time at meetings, if you do late night jobs, if you do your best, your team will follow you
• Give strict but honest valuations
  Saying the hard truth is not always pleasant, but a must
  Focus always on the improvement
• A "Thank you" is more important than money
• Listen to your team
  Most of the time, team can solve every problem facing with you, because your problem your teams problem, and your teams problem is yours. Listening carefully will always help to understand their inner thoughts, and yes it can cause further work for the leader, because good leader cares
• Give vision
  Saying day by day what to do to your team members will narrow their focus, and they will some time later just "follow the commands"
  You should give them further vision, a goal, which is consist of not only numbers, but values. Vision, mission, value creating meetings could help to develop these goals. You should be at honest on these meetings as you can, sharing your hopes and what you want to be reality
• Delegate tasks consists of not only to say focused what to do, and what the expacted outcome is, but also giving the "Why"
• Sit next to your team members
  
Pair working will help to improve the efficiency of your job expecially when you have complex job and also will help to
• Be calm
  Never loose your head, or if you does do that with a purpose
• Be determined
  Did you ever feel insecure yourself, and did not find the right way? Just go ahead!
• Self-discipline
  If your want to be the best leader, you should achieve your team to believe that they are the best
• Consequent behaviour tells strength about your personality to others, you can be wrong, but accept others truth only when it is established
• You should choose between "A" or "B"
  First glance it could be very fun, always giving the final word, but after some time it is not so simple. You should learn how to even giving a decision, because a bad decision is always better, than no decision. Taking the risks will do you a great leader
• Don't be a sheep
  Not everything others says is good, even if the majurity is swearing on their lifes, and even if the analisys says that

...and why this really works? Because we should solve the candle problem

Communication

• Keep eye contact during converstaion
You should look always into your collage's eyes
• Listen carefully
  A good leader is a good listener
• Use words like
  • "We" instead of "I" or "You"
  • "I trust in Your job"
• Your body tells the rest of the story
  Your gestures and body language, are as important as you say in person. Learn how to controll it.
• Smile
  A smile shows that you like what you are doing

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) was introduced in the United States House of Representatives on October 26, 2011.

PIPA (Protect IP Act) is a proposed law with the stated goal of giving the US government and copyright holders additional tools to curb access to "rogue websites dedicated to infringing or counterfeit goods", especially those registered outside the U.S.

Visual Summary

Source: AmericanCensorship.org

Response of the world

On the 18th of January the world's biggest online pages blacked out for a day to protest against censorship (See images below).

Google (Search engine)

Firefox (Browser)

WordPress (Blog engine)

Facebook (Social network)

Read Facebook page about SOPA:

Mark Zuckerberg
The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet. The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

Impact that SOPA and PIPA can cause

Source: khanacademy.org

When will be any decision?

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate.

This article wants to clarify some basic approaches about motivation. How the main motivating factors working, and how ot give positive and negative feedback as a leader.

Basic motivation factors

1. Personal allowance (salary) and bonus
2. Produce new things and positive feedback (recognition)
3. Fear
4. Self directions (free use 20% of work time)

What motivation factors motivates?

1. Personal allowance (salary) and bonus → work length
2. Produce new things and positive feedback → work quality
3. Fear, punishments → work length
4. Self directions (free use 20% of work time) → work quality

What kind of skills the motivation factors boost?

First see the following video about the "Candle problem"

TED - Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation

Money narrows your focus, and can make any change on your mechanical skills. Real world problems cannot be solved only with mechanical skills

1. Personal allowance (salary) and bonus (work length) [boosts mechanical skills]
2. Produce new things and positive feedback (work quality) [boosts cognitive skills]
3. Fear, punishments (work length) [N/A]
4. Self directions (free use 20% of work time) (work quality) [boosts cognitive skills]

Choose the recognition level in the company

Recognition level means, when you will say as a leader to the employee that "this is good job".

"This work is mediocre. I would be embarrassed to show this." (Steve Jobs)

or

"This is incredible! Really, insanely great! You are a star!" (Steve Jobs)

Working with Steve Jobs means, that you should do extraordinary good work. The level of recognition in this case is very high. This working culture suggests that you should outperform your boundaries.

Excellence, perfect, strong

Limit negative feedback within the company, teach the leaders to correct feedbacking

The basic rules of giving negative feedback as a leader are the following:

• Do not stall negative feedbacks, the best time is right after you noticed the bad thing
  (As soon as possible after the event)
• Find private space, give only face to face feedback
• Judge the person's behaviour not the him- or herself
  (Focus on their actions, not on the person)
• Take exact example and be specific, tell what is expected and why is it good to do this way
  (If you say you got bad attitude, you don't give an exact situation where he/her did something wrong)
• Be objective and calm
  (You should focus on personal development, you don't give negative feedback just because, you give negative feedback because you want him/her to develop, be a better person)
• Listen him or her
  (Let him or her to talk, what he or she thinks about the event and example, so you will recognize, what he or she recognized and learned from the talk)

Give positive feedback

Yes, you should also give positive feedbacks, because one positive feedback could be stronger than a negative one. We can teach people with positive feedbacks, and there are also some rules of it:

• Give the feedback in public, it should be given publicly
• If you praise someone, you should every time tell, (1) why and (2) how good the job was
• Never mention any negative "but" things during the talk
  (If you say "It was a very good jub, but next time be more specific, with numbers" you will tell with this that, he or she did something wrong, even if the whole job is extraordinary. In this way it's a negative feedback)
• Be aware of your or companies recognition level, do not praise someone if the job isn't as good as it should be, or didn't meet the companies recognition level

This article is about a phenomena, that can boost your co-workers during you everyday work. No its not something you can teach them, more than help them to feel it. But the first question is that are you already passionate about your work?

The phenomena

I work in web development, where personal and team performance is very important. During everyday development it is an often emerging situation when a lot of script didn't want to work properly, on a scrum review the product fails to operate even and there are lot of small mistakes, that makes the whole picture a great mass.

If we work in Scrum development or even in classic Project Management we always give User Stories or Tasks to the developers, but we have no really impact on how will these small pieces come togther in one product. Ok we can control them, check them, audit them, but afterwards they will feel themself as a robot, and their creative self disappears. Its a mouse trap: the developers working more imprecisely, the project managers should use more control, and so on. How can we quit from this circle? You should see one clear vision that you feel passionate about it and starting to say WE not you and me.

How can we evolve product enthusiasm?

If you belive in your product and in its vision than it is the first step to be passionate about it.

1.) Ideologies your product!

Why is your product more than average? If you could not answer this question clearly, your product is not better than the others, than you are in the "long tail" of products.

Never use bullshits like "we are more efficient", "we have more feature".

Google has only two features in their original search engine, (1) it has a really simple interface (one field) and (2) gived relevant search results.

You should not be better than others, you should be the best among the others. Perfection is the key, which will raise you above other companies.

2.) Use vision building meeting and let all developers to take part!

It is not a fast meeting you should hold, but you should give time, to people feel more and more enthusiasm about the product.

3.) Found a new company culture

The headline of your new company culture should be:

Feel every product your are working on should be a masterpiece

The hardest thing to start this, because you should start it with yourself. You should show the example how to be passionate and focused with your product, you should not satisfied only with the best results.

Peoples who were passionate

And finally let me show you some great people, who were passionate about they doing.

Jamie Oliver

"What I've enjoyed most, though, is meeting people who have a real interest in food and sharing ideas with them. Good food is a global thing and I find that there is always something new and amazing to learn - I love it!"

Steve Jobs

"We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them."

Steve Irwin

"I have no fear of losing my life - if I have to save a koala or a crocodile or a kangaroo or a snake, mate, I will save it."

Could you recognize the common characteristics in their attitude?

• They love(d) what they do
• They belive(d) what they do
• They are(were) honest with themself
• They though(t) that it is the best thing they can do

Final word

Do you remember when Robin Williams stand on the table in movie Dead Poets Society? You felt that its not normal, you felt that it should mean something more deeper than just a silly move...

If you want to feel the same passion you should do also the same: "stand on your table".

Source: Gartner

These examples shows the first signs of the future. What are the main innovations that are already amongst us.

Huge glass surfaces

New type of surfaces to display information.

Big glass surfaces

Direct interfaces

We always want to avoid carrying displays with us, that is why these small things can come into our life.

Smart contact lenses

Mind interface

The future of mind interface is that we could use complex thoughts to control our smart things, that reacts in real time.

Mind interface

Personal Assistant

Another intresting and more inspirating things are the personal assistants. Their role would be to help us in everyday. Do not forget anything, and performing things without we even recognize forgetting that. These intelligent agents would help to orginize our life.

Personal Assistant

1. Outlines
The research consist of two main parts, (1) in the first part there is the collection of textual data, which is differentiated by the sources where the written text emerged (e.g. online news, social conversations like Twitter), (2) in the second part we process the collected data with angel framework, which is a network based natural language processing tool.
To determine which kind of data will be collected an effect analysis framework have been created, in which the we collected the effects that can influence the voter. The voters voting criteria also inspected, because we still don't know which is the most common choice criteria in parlamentary election.
In the results section the 'possible results' are collected due to different approaches, so we can compare them, which was the most effective prediction.

2. Effect analysis

Effect analysis

3. Criteria
Who will win?
(1) The party that is the most famous in media
(2) The party that brings out the most positive emotion to us

4. Collection of textual data

4.1 Online search engines
The first and most rough estimation came from the online search engines.
In this research we used Google Insight search, which collects the search phrases entered in Google search engine in a specific timerange. We inspected two timerange, first the year 2009 than 2010.

However the received data does not reflected the popularity of a party. Each party received near as much hits as the others.

4.2 People's interaction (communication)
We can follow the interaction among people by reading their online posts and comments. Nowadays most relevant sources in this field are social networking sites and twitter, however in hungary the usage of twitter is much behind than writing post in forums. Another place where opinons are shared among people is blogsphere. We choosed Blogpulse tool to analyse the interactions. We also take some effort to collect Twitter messages, but unfortunetly onyl the last 3 weeks of conversation is available for searching the parties name.

5. Results

Calais AS3 API is an ActionScript 3 class, that contains an easy to use lite actionscript for the core function of Open Calais.

Usage of the class

import com.andzol.api.Opencalais;
import com.andzol.api.OpencalaisEvent;
 
//Inside function
var opencalais:Opencalais = new Opencalais("yourapikey");
opencalais.addEventListener(OpencalaisEvent.ONRESULT,opencalaisHandler)
opencalais.getData("any string")
 
//Handler
private function opencalaisHandler (event:OpencalaisEvent):void
{
	var data:Array = event.data
	for (var i:Number = 0; i < data.length;i++ ) {
		trace(data[i].name,data[i].type,data[i].typeGroup)
	}
}

Feel free to download and reuse, if you have any question contact with the author.
Download Calais AS3 API
Current version 0.8.1