Yankee In Canada

My Signature Themes

This is fascinating and, I think, very accurate.  For those of you who know me well - What do you think?

From Strengthsfinder.com via "Now, discover your strengths" by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton.

"Many years of research conducted by The Gallup Organization suggest that the most effective people are those who understand their strengths and behaviors. These people are best able to develop strategies to meet and exceed the demands of their daily lives, their careers, and their families.

A review of the knowledge and skills you have acquired can provide a basic sense of your abilities, but an awareness and understanding of your natural talents will provide true insight into the core reasons behind your consistent successes.

Your Signature Themes report presents your five most dominant themes of talent, in the rank order revealed by your responses to StrengthsFinder. Of the 34 themes measured, these are your "top five."

Your Signature Themes are very important in maximizing the talents that lead to your successes. By focusing on your Signature Themes, separately and in combination, you can identify your talents, build them into strengths, and enjoy personal and career success through consistent, near-perfect performance."

My Signature Themes are:

Responsibility

Your Responsibility theme forces you to take psychological ownership for anything you commit to, and whether large or small, you feel emotionally bound to follow it through to completion. Your good name depends on it. If for some reason you cannot deliver, you automatically start to look for ways to make it up to the other person. Apologies are not enough. Excuses and rationalizations are totally unacceptable. You will not quite be able to live with yourself until you have made restitution. This conscientiousness, this near obsession for doing things right, and your impeccable ethics, combine to create your reputation: utterly dependable. When assigning new responsibilities, people will look to you first because they know it will get done. When people come to you for help—and they soon will—you must be selective. Your willingness to volunteer may sometimes lead you to take on more than you should.

Input

You are inquisitive. You collect things. You might collect information—words, facts, books, and quotations—or you might collect tangible objects such as butterflies, baseball cards, porcelain dolls, or sepia photographs. Whatever you collect, you collect it because it interests you. And yours is the kind of mind that finds so many things interesting. The world is exciting precisely because of its infinite variety and complexity. If you read a great deal, it is not necessarily to refine your theories but, rather, to add more information to your archives. If you like to travel, it is because each new location offers novel artifacts and facts. These can be acquired and then stored away. Why are they worth storing? At the time of storing it is often hard to say exactly when or why you might need them, but who knows when they might become useful? With all those possible uses in mind, you really don’t feel comfortable throwing anything away. So you keep acquiring and compiling and filing stuff away. It’s interesting. It keeps your mind fresh. And perhaps one day some of it will prove valuable.

Learner

You love to learn. The subject matter that interests you most will be determined by your other themes and experiences, but whatever the subject, you will always be drawn to the process of learning. The process, more than the content or the result, is especially exciting for you. You are energized by the steady and deliberate journey from ignorance to competence. The thrill of the first few facts, the early efforts to recite or practice what you have learned, the growing confidence of a skill mastered—this is the process that entices you. Your excitement leads you to engage in adult learning experiences—yoga or piano lessons or graduate classes. It enables you to thrive in dynamic work environments where you are asked to take on short project assignments and are expected to learn a lot about the new subject matter in a short period of time and then move on to the next one. This Learner theme does not necessarily mean that you seek to become the subject matter expert, or that you are striving for the respect that accompanies a professional or academic credential. The outcome of the learning is less significant than the “getting there.”

Relator

Relator describes your attitude toward your relationships. In simple terms, the Relator theme pulls you toward people you already know. You do not necessarily shy away from meeting new people—in fact, you may have other themes that cause you to enjoy the thrill of turning strangers into friends—but you do derive a great deal of pleasure and strength from being around your close friends. You are comfortable with intimacy. Once the initial connection has been made, you deliberately encourage a deepening of the relationship. You want to understand their feelings, their goals, their fears, and their dreams; and you want them to understand yours. You know that this kind of closeness implies a certain amount of risk—you might be taken advantage of—but you are willing to accept that risk. For you a relationship has value only if it is genuine. And the only way to know that is to entrust yourself to the other person. The more you share with each other, the more you risk together. The more you risk together, the more each of you proves your caring is genuine. These are your steps toward real friendship, and you take them willingly.

Arranger

You are a conductor. When faced with a complex situation involving many factors, you enjoy managing all of the variables, aligning and realigning them until you are sure you have arranged them in the most productive configuration possible. In your mind there is nothing special about what you are doing. You are simply trying to figure out the best way to get things done. But others, lacking this theme, will be in awe of your ability. “How can you keep so many things in your head at once?” they will ask. “How can you stay so flexible, so willing to shelve well-laid plans in favor of some brand-new configuration that has just occurred to you?” But you cannot imagine behaving in any other way. You are a shining example of effective flexibility, whether you are changing travel schedules at the last minute because a better fare has popped up or mulling over just the right combination of people and resources to accomplish a new project. From the mundane to the complex, you are always looking for the perfect configuration. Of course, you are at your best in dynamic situations. Confronted with the unexpected, some complain that plans devised with such care cannot be changed, while others take refuge in the existing rules or procedures. You don’t do either. Instead, you jump into the confusion, devising new options, hunting for new paths of least resistance, and figuring out new partnerships—because, after all, there might just be a better way.

sla2009 tweet cloud

As with #sla2008, and again with thanks to the folks at Wordle (still a great tool!), I present you with a cloud based on the tweets from #sla2009.  Click the thumbnail to view the larger image.

Compare this year's cloud with 2008 and you may notice a few things:

• "SLA", "session", "conference"and "great" are again the more popular words used
• The divisions, especially IT, PAM, KM, and LMD were actively tweeting this year
• The concept of a re-tweet (using RT) didn't exist in 2008

SLA2009 Schedule

Here is my preliminary schedule for SLA2009 in Washington, DC.  I will also be at plenty of Open Houses and sessions.

The best way to contact me while I am in DC would be a direct message on Twitter - yankeeincanada.

Fri Jun 12, 2009

• 9am SLA Board of Directors Executive Session
• 1pm SLA Board of Directors Open Session

Sat Jun 13, 2009

• 9am SLA Board of Directors Open Session

Sun Jun 14, 2009

• 7:30am SLA Leadership Development Institute
• 1pm Idea Showcase: SLA Chapters, Divisions, and Caucuses in Action
• 1:30pm SLA First-Timers and Fellows Connect
• 3pm Meet the President Elect Candidates
• 4pm Meet the Treasurer Candidates
• 5:15pm SLA Opening General Session and Awards Presentation
• 7:30pm International Spy Museum Tour /SLA Centennial Reception

Mon Jun 15, 2009

• 1:30pm Managing Knowledge-Based Initiatives: Knowledge Management Division Business Meeting /SLA Unconference Session No. 2 - TWEET UP!
• 3:30pm Advertising & Marketing Division Roundtable / The New Face of the Special Librarian: Embedded Librarians
• 5:30pm Canadian Reception
• 6pm International Reception / SLA Alumni & Student Connect
• 9pm Legal Division Open House

Tue Jun 16, 2009

• 7am Annual Diversity Leadership Development Breakfast
• 9:30am Finance Committee
• 11:30am Information Technology Division Business Meeting and Awards Ceremony
• 1:30pm Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Issues Caucus Business Meeting
• 5pm SLA Chapter Cabinet Meeting /SLA Division Cabinet Meeting
• 6:30pm SLA Joint Cabinet Meeting
• 7:30pm SLA Salutes! Awards and Leadership Reception [Ticket 830]

Wed Jun 17, 2009

• 8:30am Mashups: Future of Changing Content
• 12 pm Homeward Bound!

SLA2009 Dashboard

SLA 2009 is almost here!  Since May 2, 2009 the #sla2009 re-tweeter has been busily sending around tweets as people prepare for conference.  Undoubtedly, the volume of tweets will increase as we get closer to conference and will balloon from June 14-17, 2009.

With a bit of help, I have designed a dashboard for the re-tweeter as a "one-stop shop" if you're interested in getting a bird's eye view of the re-tweeter's data stream.

The dashboard consists of two pages: home and analytics.

Home

The home page has two elements:

1. A continuously updated feed of the latest Tweets in the re-tweeter data stream.  As new tweets are sent, a link will appear with the number of new tweets, so you can refresh the page and view them.
2. A Live Cloud of words that are most popular in the re-tweeter's data stream at that moment.  The more popular the word, the larger the font.  Each word in the cloud is linked to a Twitter search for that word in the stream - very handy if you want to see why people are tweeting about that particular word.  Stop words have been stripped from the cloud to keep it as clean as possible.

Analytics

The analytics page has seven charts showing:

1. Daily tweet activity since May 2, 2009 when the re-tweeter was launched
2. Who is tweeting the most (Top Tweeps)
3. Who is receiving the most @replies
4. Who is sending the most @replies
5. What other hashtags are popular
6. What types of tweets are being sent
7. What links being sent around are most popular

There is also a handy set of links across the top of all pages to:

• @SLA2009 on Twitter
• The SLA2009 Homepage
• The SLA2009 Personal Planner
• The Virtual INFO-EXPO
• The SLA2009 Blog
• The SLA2009 Hospitality Wiki
• The SLA Innovation Laboratory

The dashboard is based on live data from the re-tweeter's database, so check back often to see how the data stream is changing over time.  I hope you find it useful, interesting and thought provoking - most importantly, I hope you find it inspiring!