Announcing the First Winning Countries!

The first countries to visit with my Book Tour are Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Belgium.

I should have known. The easiest way to make people do something is to tell them “Don’t do this!”

Last week I announced my global book tour and I said that simply asking me, “Will you come to our country?” will not have any effect, because I don´t prioritize countries. The priorities for my tour are based on the readership of my mailing list. Unsurprisingly, after announcing this, I immediately received requests such as “Will you come to Spain?” “Will you visit Romania?” “Is India on your list?” and “Will you consider Peru?” (I changed the names of the countries here to protect the guilty.)

My answer each time is, “Certainly! If you make your country an important one on the mailing list.”

This is how it works:

Last Friday I exported the 1,878 members of the mailing list and sorted them by number of people per country. Of course, the biggies (such as Germany and USA) all ended on top. Being from a small country myself I thought, that’s not really fair. So I asked Google for the populations of all countries, and I calculated subscribers per capita. This time the small countries (such as Iceland and Luxemburg) ended on top, obviously having a clear advantage. And I thought, that would make it too easy for Liechtenstein to win this race. So then I calculated the average of those two rankings, and this is the final result. It is a decent compromise, fairly balancing population and membership.

The top 5 countries are Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Belgium. Those are the countries where I will start scheduling workshops in June of this year.

Are you interested in attending? Do you want to discuss with me the cities to visit? Locations? Venues? Social activities? Speaking opportunities? Join the conversation with these links:

• I plan 3 workshops in Sweden. You can discuss here.
• I plan 2 workshops in The Netherlands. You can discuss here.
• I plan 3 workshops in Germany. You can discuss here.
• I plan 2 workshops in Finland. You can discuss here.
• I plan 1 workshop in Belgium. You can discuss here.

All my book tour workshops will be planned in Management 3.0-style, using constrained self-organization.

It will be fun!

Next month (February) I will look again at the backlog of countries, and I will recalculate the priorities to make decisions about July. Do you want me to visit your country? Great! Just make sure it´s the next one on the backlog and I will start planning. 🙂

Now, I suggest that you keep this a secret and don’t tell it to all your friends…