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Last night, 70% of our neighbours decided they’d rather risk their families lives than stand in the cold when the fire alarm went off. This is the fifth time our fire alarm went off this year. Again, it turned out to be a false alarm. Last time we were told it was a faulty sensor. Was there a thorough root cause analysis done? If so, why did we have a false alarm again?

About 30% of our building went outside. The other 70% must have assumed it was another false alarm and decided not to go outside. The fire alarm has lost it’s effectiveness. It’s no longer capable of doing it’s job. Even if it does go off when there’s a fire nobody will listen. Doing an effective root cause analysis and communicating it to the families living in this building can save lives.

Tim Sanders has written an excellent book on the nitty gritty part of networking. Unlike other networking books, Love is the Killer App explains three required differentiators: Knowledge, Connections, and Compassion.

The section on Knowledge is all about finding a way to add value to as many people as you can. In here, Tim gives you detailed steps on how to read, highlight, and annotate you books. He even covers how to choose what to read. He then covers how to put this information into a conversation.

The section on Connections is all about finding a node on your network can help this person solve their pain. He’s very clear that it’s not about throwing two people together to see what sticks but instead it’s a thought out, focussed connection between two people that can clearly benefit from each other.

The section on Compassion is interesting. Tim explains how to communicate emotions in todays workplace. He even recommends ignoring your own feelings of embarrassment and just taking a chance. There’s lots of material on how to communicate compassion using body language as well as verbal communication. I still have problems with this section of the book, but it’s just my reserved nature.

Whenever I heard about Love is the Killer App, the title would send up red flags in my head. I just couldn’t get past it. Finally, I stumbled across it in the library and thought “What the heck?”. It turned out to be a quick read and after reading it, it’s the perfect title! This is a book that I would recommend buying and will pick up as soon as I have some spare cash.

Take a look at my reading list and recommend something to for me to read!

Books mentioned in this post:

My wife got a new laptop for Christmas and we’ve been suffering ever since trying to figure out how to keep our photos in sync. Usually one or the other computer is not turned on, or the DHCP server has changed the IP address of the desktop or some stupid thing. I found an article today describing www.foldershare.com. They have a little application that sits in your system tray and synchronizes selected files among all the computers you authorize. It does it all in the background and it does it quickly.