Bulding Social Business By Muhammad Yunus

Started listening to the book "Building Social Business" by Muhammad Yunus. In my daily work, when some one talks about making a business social, they usually mean using one's network to get something done or selling something to a person based on knowledge derived from that person's social network.

On the other hand, social business is about building a self sustaining business that brings about social change.

Cloud Will Make Software Affordable & Help Grow The World Economy

When I first moved to the San Franscisco Bay Area from Minneapolis, I was put up in the DigitalThink corporate apartments in Jack London Square in Oakland, California. I could see the container ships load and unload at the Oakland port from the water front. It was interesting to see huge ships dock at the port and cranes go to work to unload the ship and load them again within hours.

What surprised me was the lack of people involved in the whole operation. I could hardly see any people in the dock. I wondered what happened to all the longshoremen who loaded and unloaded the ships and the waterfront culture we have read about in stories and have seen in movies. The Oakland docs were a bit boring in my opinion.

Longshoremen at Noon by John George Brown. Courtesy : http://corcoran.org

So when I ran into the book "The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger" by Marc Levinson, I picked it up and read it.

Mr. Levinson talks about the culture of the docks, which where in the middle of the great cities of the world like New York, San Francisco and Rotterdam. The longshoremen earned above average wages, even though work was dangerous and had unpredictable hours. They had to load and unload ships manually and the process was the most expensive part of the transportation cost.

The standardized container gradually eliminated this inefficiency and, after 20 years of legal and unions struggles, became the standard way to ship cargo around the world. This reduced shipping costs significantly,  made goods cheaper, created jobs in many parts of the world and grew the world economy.

But at the same time, docks did not need as many longshoremen. Factories did not have to be located near ports. Ports moved away from city centers to cheaper locations and the culture of longshoremen was transformed from brawny risk takers to high skilled very well paid machine operators.

When I read the book, I could not help think about the many similarities between longshoremen and the millions of information technology workers in the world. The tasks of corporate information technology teams that spend most of their time, installing and maintaining software will be shifted to few data centers around the world and will be made significantly more efficient than today by cloud technology. Corporations will still need high skilled information technology workers. But their jobs will be to perform tasks that make a corporation competitive, not just keep the software running.

The cloud is not just making things efficient. It used to be that only large companies of the world could afford enterprise software because of the cost associated with it. Cloud software is changing that. Cloud software is making enterprise software affordable to  millions of organizations that could not afford them before. A small company can rent the best people management software or the best mobile device management software for a few dollars per user per month. This is going to create opportunities for millions of people in every country in the world. This will grow the world economy and improve the standard of living for many.

The Big Short By Michael Lewis

The Big Short By Michael Lewis is a great read. I became a fan after reading the book, Boomerang and watching the movie Money Ball. I thought people in the software business are clueless. Wall Street is worse.

Little Bets By Peter Sims

I checked out the book, The Little Bets by Peter Sims from the library. I heard about the incremental approach the author suggests. I believe in it. No one can predict the future. But one can experiment without losing it all.

Boomerang By Michael Lewis

I just read the book Boomerang by Michael Lewis. It is an easy read which throws light on the mis-management of countries by their leaders encouraged by their people. It started off with how the people of Iceland bankrupted their country, goes on to talk about the bust in Ireland and Greece.

Interestingly, almost every bankrupt country in the world was led there by an American, more precisely a Wall Street bank, advisor.

It then suddenly hit closer to home and covered California and then the city of San Jose, where I live. A sobering book about the sorry state of affairs around the world. I came away thinking that the world is less affluent and less intelligent that we think it is.

Here is Michael Lewis talking about the moral breakdown in our society brought about by affluence. He also talks a bit about what might happen to Europe and the US in the near future.

Dip and India Unbound

I had dinner at a friend's place today. He, an entrepreneur, he gave me the following books to read.
Dip by Seth Godin and India Unbound by Gurcharan Das.

Dip talks about knowing when to quit. In India Unbound Das, an Indian venture capitalist and columnist for the Times of India (and former CEO of Procter & Gamble India), uses his experiences as a businessman as the context in which to comment on India's postcolonial economic policies. 

The Book That Inspires And Motivates Me To Pay Attention To Experiences

A while back I was collaborating with my colleagues to design the home page of Career OnDemand. Since the home page is an entry point for the application, I decided to go and look up the book, Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I am big fan of this book and the way it describes experiences of everything from entering a home from your car to meeting friends in your neighborhood.

My colleagues and I are putting people first and paying close attention to the experience of a person at every stage of his or her interaction with Career OnDemand. We are prototyping the user experience and testing the same with people even before we write code. We are working hard to ensure that the application works the way people normally do their work.

Here is the experience of walking from your car to the house and kitchen described in the book, Pattern Language".

The snap shot above is copyrighted material. I have shared it to promote the book. If you like it, please buy the book. This is a bible for anyone who cares about design, patterns and building meaningful experiences.

Never Eat Alone

I am reading a book called "Never Eat Alone" by Keith Ferrazzi. The one word I take away from the book is generosity. Generosity is the key to successful relationships.

The Cluetrain Manifesto

I am reading the cluetrain manifesto second edition released on its 10th anniversary. The main message, which I have posted below, is very relevant even today for everyone in the enterprise software ecosystem.

The Message
Intranets are enabling your best people to hyperlink themselves together, outside the org chart. They're incredibly productive and innovative. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices.

There is a new conversation between and among your market and your workers. It's making them smarter and it's enabling them to discover their human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happy talk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.

Gamestorming

I started reading the book Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo. I learned many of these things from my colleagues and by performing it on the job. It is good to go back to the theory and understand why I do some of the things I do.

Getting From College To Career

As part of our research for Career OnDemand, my colleagues spoke to Lindsey Pollak, an expert on Generation Y or the millennial generation. She is an author, speaker and consultant. Lindsey's insight into the millennial generation helped shape our thinking on Career OnDemand.

Last week Lindsey was kind enough to send me her book "Getting from College to Career". In the book she talks about 90 things to do before a college student joins the real world. A very good guide for college students and young professionals. Even though the book is aimed at college students, there are many simple tips that are useful for any professional. I enjoyed reading the book.

Here is a short video where she talks about the millennial generation.

The Dragonfly Effect

Reading The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith. Jennifer, who is a professor at Stanford, has written this book based on a course she teaches at Stanford.

I was curious about this book because it talks about design thinking and social media in the same book.

It has two interesting flow charts. One for design thinking and another for people who want to get started on Twitter. They make sense to me because I am a practitioner of the design thinking process and a regular twitter user. I am not sure if a flow chart will make a lot of sense for someone who is starting out. I am always wary of people stripping things down to a flow chart. But, I am going to read the book with an open mind.

The Great Reset By Richard Florida

I am reading The Great Reset
by Richard Florida this week.

Richard Florida says that despite the communication revolution, geography matters a lot. He says that people will congregate in mega regions of the world so that they can live and work together on similar problems. This might be a good book for human capital management professionals who want to understand how to attract talent.

Hot Flat And Crowded By Tom Friedman

Started listening to Hot, Flat And Crowded
by Tom Friedman.

The History Of Information by David Siegel

I started reading The Power Of Pull by David Siegel. Interesting, profound and hard book to read.
Here is a video by David Siegel where he describes the history of information.


The History of Information, by David Siegel from dsiegel on Vimeo.

Made To Stick

Started listening to Made To Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. @EnricGili recommended it.

The book is full of interesting and useful frameworks for presenting information and make it stick in the minds of an audience. The authors say that the main ingredients of an idea that sticks are

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

A good book for product managers and marketers.

A Third Type Of Innovation - Innovating Meanings

Radical innovation is pushed by technology. Incremental innovation is pulled by people who use the product. In the book Design Driven Innovation Roberto Verganti argues that there is a third way of competing via innovation. He calls it innovation by redefining the meaning of products. Some examples are the Nintendo Wii and the Apple iPod.

In the book he talks about how companies can systemtatically listen to, intepret and address the unknown and untold needs of customers.
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Great Picture. What Camera Do You Use?

I am sure this has happened to you. You show a picture you took to a friend or colleague and they appreciate it by asking you the camera you used to take the picture. I encounter a similar situation now-and-then at work. When I present a storyboard, a prototype or product to colleagues, some of them promptly send me an email asking me the tool or template I used. This is amusing and sometimes annoying. It is almost like saying, "Surely you are not an artist. You can't be hard-working or skilled. You got to have some secret tools in your closet."

Most of the time they are disappointed with my answer when I tell them that there is no special tool. You just have a pick a tool you like and apply your methods, your knowledge your skill and repeat until you get it right.

I suspect, this behavior is driven by the industrial era, mass manufacturing mind set where the goal was to dumb down the tasks so much that any unskilled or semi-skilled person can build generic meaningless products that sort of met your needs and do it at a very low cost. I believe that the industrial era and even the information era is over. If you are not an artist at what ever you do, automation, outsourcing and abundance will get you. There will always be a machine or a lower paid person to replace you.

If you are interested in this topic, I have three book suggestions. A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. The Rise Of The Creative Class by Richard Florida and Linch Pin by Seth Godin.

I am pretty sure you are not going to ask me what tool I used to create the Cartoon strip above. :)

Promote The Blogs of Your Employees On Your Recruiting Web Site

In the book Empowered by Josh Bernoff, the author talks about how the marketing funnel we all learned about in Marketing 101 has changed. People used to become aware of your company via your messages, consider your products and a few buy your products.

The new marketing funnel from the book "Empowered by Josh Bernoff"

But things have changed. Josh says that Mass Influencers among your customers are broad casting information about your products. Increasingly, new customers are listening to the voice of influencers who have already bought your product and not the listening to the your messages you spent millions to broadcast.

This suggest that sales is no longer the end point. You have to continue to delight your customers so that they broadcast your praises. You also have to empower your customers to broadcast their messages by enabling them with appropriate content and tools.

Most of what I said above is not news to anyone who understands the basics of Web 2.0.

How does this apply to recruiting people?
However I see the same situation applying to recruitment as well. Increasingly, new recruits have access to the voices of your employees and ex-employees via dedicated sites such as Glassdoor.com and LinkedIn. They also can quickly access the personal blogs of employees within the company. By following a company on LinkedIn, they get a remarkably accurate view of turnover in the company.

For example, if you want to know what is going on in the BusinessObjects division of SAP, you will get an accurate, timely and straight-from-the-hip information from Timo Elliot's blog. If you want to know what SAP is doing in the Web 2.0 area, you will get an accurate and indepth view from SAP Web 2.0 Blog run by Timo. In fact even SAP employees go there to get up-to-date information. Timo's content is a combination of original material he puts together and SAP official marketing messages he curates.

People executives, with some rare exceptions, think that their recruitment messages on their web sites are the only ones heard by potential recruits. Most recruitment web site content and messages are written by, let's face it, recruiters.

Here is what I suggest.
Why not list the top influencers who work for your company along with links to their blogs in the company's recruitment web site. Give them an incentive to share their personal blog there. List them by their area of work and encourage potential hires to visit the blogs and read them. Don't try stunts like ghost written blogs of executives. It takes 5 seconds to tell that a blog is not genuine. Do even think about hiring a traditional PR person to write a 'personal' blog. In fact if a blog is completely error free, I get suspicious.

How do I know who the top influences in my company are?
Most people who write about their work would have listed their blogs in their LinkedIn profile. Put some one on the job to collect these profiles and analyse them. If you are planning to hire a lot of engineers next year, reach out to your engineering bloggers. If you are planning to hire in Japan, find out if any of your Japanese colleagues blog.

So, Do I need to install a blogging software and hire a VP of Social Media?
No. you dont have to do that. You can do this without any IT investment. Don't force an tool chosen internal IT on your employee bloggers. Bloggers are using what they are using for a reason. You are going to them because they are the influencers while your recruiters are not. So, let your influencers make their technology choice.

By the way, you may want to keep such influencers from leaving your company. I guess you already knew that.

Lessons About Feedback From The Okra Salad Recipe

I cook South Indian dishes regularly. Last week I wanted to make Okra Salad and I looked up the recipe in the book Dakshin, by Chandra Padmanabhan. The author suggested that adding a bit of salt to the salad brings out the flavor and enhances the taste of the dish. But she cautioned that quantity and timing is everything. You have to sprinkle the salt over the dish at the end. If you add the salt in the beginning it will bring out the water in the okra and make the dish soggy, sticky and almost inedible. On the other hand, if you dump a spoon of salt after the dish is done and try to mix it, the okra crumbles into pieces and looks unappetizing.

There is a lot we can learn from this about giving feedback to a person about his or her performance. I have seen people, who in the name of feedback, pour cold water over every idea a person suggests. My colleagues do not open their mouth when such a person is around. Such people have good intentions. But they dampen the performance of everyone else around them.

The other extreme is managers who never give timely feedback and pour it all out during the annual performance review, leaving the employee wondering why the manager never shared his feedback throughout the year.

A good manager knows that the quantity and timing of feedback matters; very much like a good cook knowing when to add salt, how much to add and how to blend it in.

PS: In India the okra is called "ladies fingers". If you want to order Okra in a regular Indian restaurant in the US or Europe, look for "Bhindi Masala". Bhindi is the Hindi word for Okra. You will not find the Okra Salad that I make it any regular restaurant. I am afraid, it is a dish available only in South Indian house holds and select Indian vegetarian restaurants. Image Credit : Food.com

After I wrote this post, the Head of Customer Success at Rypple @dpriemer reached out to me via twitter and said that they have developed a suite of social software that enables managers to improve the performance of their team members by giving feedback. The Co-CEO of Rypple @ddebow liked the post as well.

I am not an active user of Rypple. But I have tried it. If you liked what I said and want a tool to engage your colleagues by giving them feedback, you may want to give Rypple a try. There is a free trial.