Back about 1,800 inbox messages ago, I started to fret. The scrolling screens of red unread messages were my hamster wheel. A thousand inbox messages later, I felt symptoms of drowning each time I dove into the inbox, snagged a few important things and dreaded what I was missing. My real life is crazy busy enough without digital waterboarding.

Just as I was hitting rock bottom last week, a promising link appeared in my GTD Times feed. I am a disciple of GTD — Getting Things Done –but like the Disciple Peter in the Garden of Gethsemene, I’ve been dozing. The link promised PDF instructions for putting GTD principles to practice on the Blackberry and Lotus Notes. Best 20 bucks I ever spent.

It was a mind-numbing weekend, but I now have a GTD-spec message archive filing system, a modified Lotus To Do feature to keep my next-action tasks organized and a denser but more helpful Lotus calendar.

The To Do list is bulging and the calendar is daunting. The Blackberry still sucks. But the drowning feeling has been replaced by the bucking-down-the-rapids-in-a-kayak feeling. As David Allen explains in his book Getting Things Done, the drowning feeling comes from unclosed loops, from not knowing what you don’t know and knowing that you left something — probably a lot of things — undone somewhere.

So I made it through this day’s Class IV rapids and I’m feeling a bit cocky about the Class V I hear around the bend. See you on the other side.

The main point: Fear, facts and force are the favored approach for those who want to facilitate change, but they never work. Doctors know that even the threat of death is not enough to influence eight out of nine heart attack patients to change their lifestyles. Instead, successful change agents rely on a mixture of:

• Relate – Establish a new, emotional connection with a person or community that fosters hope.
• Repeat – Use this new relationship to learn and practice the new skills and behaviors you need to sustain change.
• Reframe – Allow this new relationship to help you see your situation and the world in a new light.

Good doctors have the first one down. To reframe, they need to help patients see the benefits of healthy changes today – healthy food can be delicious, exercise can give them more energy, meditation can reduce their stress symptoms. And they need to help them savor short-term wins so that they will repeat the behavior over and over until it becomes their new habit.

Best part about this book: The writing. Deutschman is a magazine writer (Fortune, GQ, Fast Company) and book author (The Second Coming of Steve Jobs) who has a raft of stories at his disposal. He never tells, he shows. He has spent quality time with the change leaders he profiles — so much so that you find out, for example, that 35 years into her successful program to rehabilitate criminals at San Francisco’s Delancy Street, Mimi Silbert still has days when she doesn’t have that fire in the belly. Her solution: act “as if” she does, and eventually the fire comes back.

Favorite quote:

I don’t think a leader can accomplish major change without being willing to slice yourself open and become part of the change. I say, ‘You guys force me to be my best self because I live in a glass house.’ — Mimi Silbert

Bits that stuck:

• Quick wins reward the hard work of change, nourish the faith and keep critics at bay.
• When stuck with a problem I haven’t been able to solve myself, the first step is to seek out a new relationship with someone or some group that has had success in this area.
• When the spirit flags, “fake it until you make it.” Act “as if” you have the spirit and it will come to you.

By comparison, my job as an organizational communicator is easy. Still, I have a well-drawn gameplan, thanks to Guber’s article in the December 2007 Harvard Business Review (you can search for it on my public Evernote folder). His four key principles:

The story must be true to the storyteller, reflecting his/her core values:

“He must enter the hearts of his listeners, where their emotions live, even as the information he seeks to convey rents space in their brains. Our minds are relatively open, but we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing their power to move us. So although the mind may be part of your target, the heart is the bull’s-eye. To reach it, the visionary manager crafting his story must first display his own open heart.”

The story must be true to the audience:

Every storyteller is in the expectations-management business and must take responsibility for leading listeners effectively through the story experience, incorporating both surprise and fulfillment. At the end of the story, listeners should think, “We never expected that – but somehow, it makes perfect sense.”

The story must adapt to the moment:

Intensive preparation and improvising are two sides of the same coin. If you know your story well, you can riff on it without losing the thread or the focus.

The story must elevate:

Even in today’s cynical, self-centered age, people are desperate to believe in something bigger than themselves. The storyteller plays a vital role by providing them with a mission they can believe in and devote themselves to.

Tellingly, the guy from Hollywood says the story has its own power, regardless the medium:

It isn’t special effects or the 0′s and 1′s of the digital revolution that matter most – it’s the oohs and aahs that the storyteller evokes from an audience. State-of-the-art technology is a great tool for capturing and transmitting words, images, and ideas, but the power of storytelling resides most fundamentally in “state-of-the-heart” technology.

Key idea: Public Relations today means attending to relationships. Good PR starts with listening to the desires, needs and pain points of our customers and potential customers. It also starts with an excellent understanding of what our organization can offer to the customer and potential customer. Then, engage in a conversation with the customer and potential customer. This is the crux of what Brian Solis has called PR 2.0.

Ah-has for me:

• Solis draws a distinction between “PR 2.0″ and “Web 2.0.” In fact, he says his PR 2.0 predates the advent of social media. He wants PR practitioners to think first of the relationship, then choose the tactics that are helpful to that relationship.
• The truly excellent thing about Web 2.0 is that it unearths conversations we haven’t heard before — or that we had to spend a lot of money to hear. Think of  Twitter, blogs, Facebook, etc. as free focus groups.
• While it’s great to land your company in one of the top-ranked blogs, your bread and butter is the “magic middle” of the blogosphere — those in the middle of the bell curve who as a group have influence over vast numbers of readers who trust them.
• We have to get away from using the terms “messages,” “audiences” and “users.” Think, instead, of conversations with customers.
• Measurement of success can include “number of conversations.”

Favorite quotes:

• Don’t speak in messages. Instead, spark conversations based on the unique requirements of each market segment and the people within them.
• The ideal PR professional of the twenty-first century is not only a market expert, but also an informed, socially adept conversationalist — and we all know, or should know, that listeners make the best conversationalists.
• PR is evolving into a hybrid of communications, evangelism, and Web marketing, strung together by the teachings and benefits of sociology, anthropology and psychology.
• You must realize that the metrics for transforming one person into an evangelist far outweigh the resources required to repeatedly throw spaghetti on the wall in hopes that it just might stick.

What I liked: Parts II and III. Lots of specific advice on converting our old PR practices into PR 2.0 ways. I recommend the first chapter of Part III to those of you who are intimidated by the new media and despair at ever getting a handle on it. The authors do a great job putting it in perspective.

What I didn’t like: Awful wordy. I love Brian’s blog posts, even though they always are the longest ones in my feed. The book is loquacious on a grander scale. If you are a reader of Brian’s blog, I recommend speed-reading through Par I to get to the good stuff.

Jared Diamond excels at putting human flesh on the archaeological bones left behind at the scene of ancient societal collapses — things like trash heaps and fossilized pooh. His book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail, lists several factors at play in the typical societal implosion. But the common denominators to all were resource depletion and slow-footed decision-making. I couldn’t help but think of today’s global warming deniers and drill-baby-drill chanters when reading of society after society that methodically drove themselves off cliffs.

Diamond notes that in nearly all the collapsed societies, the end came quickly — within a few decades of the point where consumption outstripped the environment’s capacity. He doesn’t put an expiration date on our civilization, but he worries about the future of his children. These things worry him: global warming, fossil fuel depletion, deforestation, soil erosion, and hunger. This week the official tally of the world’s hunger exceeded 1 billion for the first time. When the people in Third World giants of China and India reach First World consumption levels, will more go hungry elsewhere or will First World consumption fall? If the latter, will that be voluntary or the result of strife and boycotts?

A modern collapse may unfold country by country. It may already have begun with the collapse of Afghanistan, Somalia and the Solomon Islands. Are North Korea and Pakistan next? We could sit back and hope it doesn’t overtake us. That’s what the last rich Greenland Viking did.

(NOT advisable for Kindle users — lots of maps and photos you can’t see).

UPDATE 10/24/09

Watch Yale Environment 360 video on West Virginia coal mining. We haven’t leveled the last Apalachian mountaintop, but the moral/value questions are being raised. A  government   says it isn’t the government’s job to decide what people do on their land. Isn’t it?

Mortenson discovered the root of extremism — madrassas — long before the U.S. started to shoot first and ask questions later. While drones and no-knock raids spawn new recruits for the fundamentalist madrassa schools, Mortenson’s Afghan and Pakistani compatriots are building and staffing schools that offer a balanced education, especially to girls. A ridiculously small investment — $12,000 and some sweat equity — builds a school in the poor mountain villages where government dollars never arrive and where religious leaders and corrupt warlords stay in power by keeping people in the dark.

I recommend Three Cups of Tea, a biography of Mortenson that is perceptively told by David Oliver Relin. Mortenson was as clueless as anyone when he stumbled into the mountain village of Korphe after a failed attempt to climb K2 in 1993. He recuperated there for several weeks and observed the village children jotting their reading and math lessons in the dirt in an open-air “school.” He vowed to the village elder that he would return to build a real school. With equal parts honor and naivete, Mortenson took three years to fulfill that promise.  The lessons he learned made him perhaps the most culturally competent American in Pakistan, enabling him to build an in-country team that turned small amounts of American cash into high-impact education projects throughout the region.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Mortenson was asleep in a tent in the Pakistan mountains when his bodyguard awoke him to tell him of an attack on “a village called New York.” The bodyguard peered beyond the mountains toward Afghanistan and told Mortenson that it had to be bin Laden’s doing. How many days would it take for us in the United States to figure that out (and how many more days for Bush and Cheney to try to pin it on Iraq)? Our world has become so small that mountainmen sans iPhones can read our fortunes.

Mortenson was among the first American civilians to fly into Afghanistan after the bombs quit falling, and he immediately sought out a notorious warlord to obtain permission to build a school. Upon hearing the request, the warlord embraced Mortenson and exclaimed “Dr. Greg!” It was the name Mortenson, a nurse, went by in Pakistan. The hope he represented had preceded him across the “lawless” mountains. Because of Mortenson, bin Laden is now surrounded by 130 schools and more than 51,000 educated Afghans and Pakistanis.

Team building in organizations too often attends to the interrelationships of individuals and neglects performance. Organizations that create a culture that monitors and values group achievement are more flexible, innovative and efficient, Katzenbach and Smith say.

They lay out the fundamentals of high-performing teams, discovered through comparisons of several groups that have achieved much more than the individuals alone could have achieved. These teams bucked corporate culture, overcame insurmountable odds, introduced new products, or fashioned new niches in old industries. The common elements they discovered were that high-performing teams were small in number of members, skill sets were complementary, teams were committed to a common purpose and performance goals, they were committed to a common approach, and team members held each other mutually accountable.

This book is most useful for a leader who has a good team that is ready to go to the next level. Leaders of dysfunctional teams would be too distant from this roadmap to find it useful. But even a leader in that situation may apply the principles to any special task force or work group they participate in. Most of the successful teams profiled in this book were cross-disciplinary groups put together to tackle a specific problem or informally convened to circumvent organizational roadblocks. This book has been so popular that it has been revised several times. A new revision is in order, as the 2002 version still has a glowing account of a high-performing team at Enron.

Dreher, an educator, aikido practitioner, and student of the Tao organizes passages from the Tao Te Ching to guide leaders to awareness, centeredness, honor, and humility. The first section of the book addresses inner processes that help leaders achieve personal confidence in their role. The second section discusses ways a leader puts the Tao into action.

The book may be read front-to-back or its well-marked passages scanned for specific purposes. I randomly choose a passage to ponder at the start of each day.

Clampitt suggests that effective communication is like dance, with partners passing messages back and forth, learning about each other and co-creating meaning. It is an ongoing process, rather than definitive episodes of message transmission and receiving. If a leader understands communication in this way, performance feedback becomes something that is mutually constructed. Culture grows organically and can be influenced by what managers allow and disallow by word or deed. Leaders foster value systems that guide members’ actions.

Clampitt provides engaging case studies and analyzes them in light of scholarly research. He covers fundamental organizational communication situations and problems, including change management, culture, and knowledge management. He sets out his basic framework in the first few chapters. Subsequent chapters may be selected as needed to address topics of particular interest.