Learning Bits via Kindle and Twitter From My Colleague

My friend and colleague @esdediego is a kindle ninja. He is our co-innovation lead and coaches us on what we need to stay focused on via small learning bits now and then. He reads, highlights, tweets and shares from his kindle all at once. Here is something he shared recently. The direct link to the page is https://kindle.amazon.com/post/2IW0KJRK5R227

The Role Of A Co-Innovation Lead

@esdediego is the co-innovation lead for Career OnDemand. For those who watch him from outside, it might look as if he is like an account manager. He contacts customers, arranges co-innovation sessions and hosts them. But what they do not see is the direct contribution he makes to improve the probability of success of Career OnDemand.

In a study of 59 smart entrepreneurs with the same level of intelligence, researchers found that those who sought out feedback from customer early and often were more successful than those who did not. They also found that the more feedback the entrepreneurs got from customers, the more successful they were.

@esdediego watches the quality of product design closely and determines the frequency and quantity of feedback sessions we should have with customers. Some weeks he arranges more and some weeks he decides that we need to focus on building. Like a great coach, he keeps us on a steady pace of innovation without slacking or burning ourselves out. This is not easy. We have an edge over other companies who do not understand this. Our edge is Eduardo Salamanca de Diego.

With his unique touch, Eduardo has significantly increased the probability of the success of Career OnDemand.

What If Competitors Copy The Concepts in Career OnDemand

One of our partners asked me if I am worried that competitors will copy the people-centric concepts and features that we spent years researching, co-innovating and building. I told him that I believe the concepts pioneered by Career OnDemand are so important that they should be available for all companies in the world, not just SAP customers. I have great respect for all our competitors. The software vendor that executes best and earns the trust of most customers will reap the most benefits. No matter who executes best, the world will be a better place when workers around the world are empowered with people-centric tools. The idea is to make the world run better....and may be make some money in the process.

By the way, my colleagues and I have been pretty open about the design principles that drove the design of Career OnDemand. I even have a post on the books that influenced our thinking. But how are competitors going to copy the trusted relationship we have with more than 12,000 HCM customers around the world. How are they going to repeat the more than 170 sessions we had with tens of customers over eighteen months to listen carefully and co-innovate. 

Why Should SAP Career OnDemand Customers Care About SAP HANA

One of the perks of my job is that I can walk to the cafeteria in my office and run into some of the world's best business software architects and business software executives. Today I ran into a colleague who is a solution manager for SAP HANA. He asked me what is going on with Career OnDemand and I asked him why should the customers of Career OnDemand care about HANA. This is what he said. Since this is just a informal conversation between friends, everything we spoke about is hypothetical. Nothing is official.

He and his colleagues may introduce HANA technology to the Business By Design platform sometime in the future. Career OnDemand uses the Business ByDesign platform. So customers using Career OnDemand will see significant performance improvements to start with. Because HANA significantly simplifies the technology, developers of Career OnDemand will be able to turn out innovation at a faster pace. Career OnDemand will be able to provide instant insight to managers, recruiters and employees about people, their goals, activities, career history, feedback and reputation. The right people with the right skills will be found by the right project at the right time. Talent will be put to its most efficient use because employees will be more connected than ever. He sold me on HANA. I suspect this might take a while. But it is worth the wait.

Here is a video explaining the value of HANA.

While Debating Via Email, Start With The Areas Of Agreement

While debating things over email, which happens a lot in distributed teams, it is always better to start by pointing out that we are all working to accomplish the same goal and we agree on several points. Then go to the point of debate and state your argument. If you cannot agree on one thing, don't let that stop the discussion. Agree to disagree on that one point and move over to the next point. You will be surprised how much such a small thing changes the outcome of the debate or discussion.


My friend and colleague @Chirag_Mehta added this comment.
I always follow this and it works. I do one more thing: after highlighting the agreements, I explicitly mention the disagreement to confirm my assumption. Many times, it turns out that what I thought was a disagreement wasn't really a disagreement. This also helps the other people to focus on the disagreement and not on the people who have the disagreement. It's a basic element of design - focus on the artifact and the behavior and not on the person.