Tim Gregory

I’m currently reading for my MBA through Henley Business School, and tackling a module called Strategic Direction.

Reading through my core textbook Strategic Management, Awareness and Change I came across a great set of skills and attributes that are typically exhibited by entrepreneurial strategic leaders:

• A tolerance of calculated risks
• A combination of leadership, general management and financial skills
• Planning, time and project management skills
• Receptiveness to innovation
• A commitment to continuous learning
• A willingness to delegate
• Motivated by factors other than financial gain
• Self-confident, resilient and persevering
• Good communication skills

I wish I had seen this before completing our KPA docs at work – I think the list makes a great framework for a set of attitudes, skills and behaviours that every manager in the online space should aspire to.

Spotted two interesting links today.

In the first, The Guardian says that Facebook now has 350m users – and there’s no point in advertising to them.

The premise is that in spite of having a massive userbase, one that is now larger than the population of the USA, Facebook is struggling to extract financial value from their audience.

The second link is a Silicon Valley Insider interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, in which he claims that LinkedIn is still profitable with ad revenues up 50%.

LinkedIn has 3 main revenue streams, with online advertising being only one of them.

Weiner doesn’t give any breakdown, but implies that a significant portion of LinkedIn revenues are generated by their premium subscription business and corporate recruitment solutions.

I blogged this week with a throw-away thought that LinkedIn could possibly be built today as a Facebook application, but now I’m not so sure… it’s clear that LinkedIn have managed to build a profitable business quite different to the type of business that could be created inside Facebook’s ecosystem.

What do you think? Will Facebook become super-profitable?

I’ve never been a big fan of tag clouds as navigation devices, but Wordle is pretty awesome..

You can plug in a block of text or an RSS feed and generate beautiful word layouts with the most frequently mentioned terms appearing more prominently.

Looking at mine, it’s obvious that I’ve been blogging about Farmville too much.

Very impressive win – 20four Labs walked off with top honours and the $85 000 prize in the Nokia Africa Calling all Innovators competition with their Afridoctor app.

It’s great to see this kind of innovation and rapid turn-around rewarded.

Read more about the development of the app and the people behind it at the 20four Labs Blog.

Facebook has seen extraordinary growth in the last year, and now boasts over 350 million users, with 50% of their active users logging in every day.

It’s clear that their platform strategy is paying off, with more than 350,000 active applications deployed on the Facebook platform, and more than 15,000 websites, devices and applications implementing Facebook Connect in the past year.

Some applications have managed to build massive audiences, with Farmville clocking up 69 million+ active users, Causes attracting 34 million users, and Cafe World serving in excess of 30 million users.

After 6 years of investment and growth, LinkedIn has managed to grow to somewhere north of 50 million users.

This raises a question for me – if LinkedIn were to launch today, with the benefit of seeing how the Facebook Platform has grown to dominate the social networking space, would they create a new service, or would LinkedIn be a business networking and recruitment app built on top of the Facebook platform?

I’d love to hear your thoughts – drop me a comment below…