Last week, Steve Todd and I heard Gary Hamel challenge modern companies:

How do you build an organization where innovation is everybody’s job?

How do you build an organization that INSPIRES extraordinary contributions?

This week, EMC held its third annual global Innovation Conference.  For some background on the event and the contest, check out my previous posts.  It has been amazing to watch the growth and reach of the conference.  The first year was a single site, the second year was a single site with some remote participation, and the third year was over a dozen “globally local” conferences: two one-hour segments broadcast from India and the rest of the day was different at each site.  Not only are dozens of hours of material be posted internally (EMCers can find the Innovation Café here), but some information is being shared externally through blogs, photos, videos and soon on the ECN site.

Contest Winners

One of the primary components of the conference is to celebrate the teams of innovators and their submissions, and to choose the winners.  As a conclusion to the selection process, all three top winners this year were ideas that the selection committee, rather than the community, moved into the semi-finals.  The second place winner was a combination of two similar ideas (one of which was popular in the community voting).  The “People’s Choice” award was a tie between an idea from India and an idea from Cork, Ireland; not surprisingly, both of these ideas reached the semifinals through community voting.  Beyond the winners, I know that many people were inspired either by having feedback on their ideas, or even by being able to review ideas from others. The community involvement in voting greatly broadened the visibility of the contest and conference around the globe.

Day of Innovation

We had a stacked day which, thanks to much help from many people, went very well.  The innovation contests have helped to move towards Hamel’s goal of engaging everyone in innovation.  This can’t be done without strong support from senior management.  Here is a short video from some of our executives discussing innovation and the innovation conference (we were especially pleased to get a few words from new EMCers Pat Gelsinger and Frank Slootman):

The day was anchored solidly at the beginning (Vice Chairman Bill Teuber) and end (EMC RSA Division’s president Art Coviello) with live EMC executive presentations.  Polly Pearson spoke about how innovation is a brand value and key piece of EMC’s culture.  Our keynote speaker was Dave Ritter of InnoCentive whose presentation on open innovation resonated strongly with us.  Completing the rest of the day was not one, not two, but three panels (as my esteemed colleague and this year’s third place winner, Dr. Dave Reiner would say: two’s company, three’s a cloud).  The first panel was on how we are innovating locally (which includes how we connect globally); see panelist Jamie Pappas’ blog for more on this.  The other two panels were on cloud computing from the business and technical points-of-view.  Judith Hurwitz (consultant, analyst and author) and Wayne Pauley (EMC) did a great job of moderating panels which covered a lot of ground and went beyond some of the hype and blue-sky thinking of cloud.  Even though this was an internal event, we invited Judith Hurwitz and Christofer Hoff (Cisco) to give additional perspectives and to help keep us from talking in an echo chamber.

After the conference, about eighty of us got together to discuss the ideas of the day.  Gina Minks took some video for me, capturing some of the discussion.  For me, the highlight of the conference was that there was so much passionate support to put on this event.  “Innovation” related activities can brings out the creativity, passion and initiative of people for more than a day.

As a final note – a special thanks to Mary Henderson who took my offer to help out with this year’s conference and turned that into an amazing (if exhausting) journey of putting together the local event (with lots of help from her and some of our events experts) and help out the global team.  I know that I learned a lot and made new—and strengthened old—connections.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on innovation, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

What pulls people into conferences? Big name speakers, a nice location, and all of the trinkets that you can fit while not going over your luggage weight limit (or in yet another conference bag)?  Of course not, it is the information that is important.  At the World Business Forum this week, it was the connections to ideas and people that made the event worth attending.

While I have never presented at such a prestigious venue as Radio City Music Hall or in front of thousands of executives, the basic requirement of a speaker is to understand his/her audience and craft the message accordingly.  Many of the speakers did a great job at connecting with the audience and hitting the critical issues in the world today.  I plan on writing a number of posts on the speakers that connected strongly with me.  I have added to my reading list – Bill George’s book was given to all participants, I plan on picking up Pat Lencioni’s soon and I’ve subscribed to Gary Hamel’s blog. The reading will help to reinforce the ideas that I connected with so that they don’t fade away 72 hours after the conference.

As for the people that I connected with, I don’t expect to be hanging out with George Lucas in the future, but I do expect that I will keep in contact with many of the bloggers that I met.  In addition to the bloggers that I knew from the World Innovation Forum, I communicated with some of the bloggers prior to the conference on LinkedIn as we prepared for the event.  Two days of blogging, Tweeting and a couple of meals together starts a nice connection.  Through social media, those of us that share common interests can stay connected easily.  Below is the group photo of the bloggers on stage – if you click on the photo, it will take you to Flickr where I have tagged people.  I have also created a Blogger’s Photo Wall (see the “page” or “tab” at the top of this page).

Here’s the backstage video of us on stage (I apologize for some of the fast moves):

To continue the discussion and follow my posts, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

The first day of the World Business Forum was great.  I am going to take a little time to process my thoughts and notes (see my Twitter feed for some of my initial thoughts).  The barrage of speakers was a fire hose of information.  I am very impressed at how many blog posts have already been written by some of the bloggers that are in attendance.  Here is a shot of the Blogger’s Hub – we were in the 3rd mezzanine which is a great view.

30 of us went out for dinner at the Beacon Restaurant.  As I hoped, we had a fantastic meal and wonderful conversations.  Despite having a very full day, every time I looked around the room, people were deep in conversations on everything from analyzing the day to discussing the latest FTC rules on disclosure.  [My full disclosure: HSM gave show passes to all of the bloggers, but we are free to write about everything; the Beacon Restaurant provided great service - we all paid for our own dinners; I MET GEORGE LUCAS]

Since I coordinated the dinner, I did ask that everyone say hi on video.  The light in the restaurant was dim, so the footage is a little dark.

For more of my coverage of the World Business Forum, see http://blogstu.wordpress.com/tag/wbf09/

For an aggregation of most of the blogs and Twitter activity from the conference, see the FriendFeed room which I set up: http://friendfeed.com/world-business-forum-wbf09

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

Here is the 3rd video in a series to help educate on Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE):

For a full list of EMC FCoE resources, see my previous post The current state of FCoE.

Additionally, on the question of “end-to-end Ethernet”, see the discussion on Scott Lowe’s Why No Multi-Hop FCoE? blog post.

Both Cisco and Brocade have made announcements about new products for expanding the FCoE ecosystem.  Cisco’s Nexus 4000 provides the blade switch functionality that I discuss in the video.  They also have a whitepaper on FIP (FCoE initialization protocol) and FIP snooping which is part of what is needed for a multi-hop environment.  Brocade announced an FCoE blade for the DCX FC director product line.

Let me know if there are any related topics that you would like to see covered.

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Nigel Poulton has been posting some good articles about FCoE on http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com/. It’s good to see a good discussion taking place, many people still don’t understand the basics, so it’s good to repeat and if you look at the details hopefully people will understand that FCoE shows great promise, with the caveat that we are still very early in the maturation of the technology.

A brief update on FCoE related standards

T11 FC-BB-5 has been ratified by T11 (so it is “done” although it still goes through some processing which is typically a “rubber stamp).

T11 FC-BB-6 is starting up and while the charter and timeline are not finalized, it will be discussing how to create larger FCoE configurations (allowing for creation of a “CEE Cloud”).

IEEE Data Center Bridging: the link level components (Priority Flow Control, Enhanced Transmission Selection and Data Center Bridging Exchange Protocol) are defined and should be ratified soon.  Congestion Notification is a 2010 target.  Layer 2 multipathing will be handled by the IETF TRILL standard which is defined, but not yet in products.

For more on the standards, see the presentations and papers below.

Product configuration today

EMC is supporting FCoE switches from Cisco and Brocade; Converged Network Adapters (CNA) from Emulex, QLogic and Brocade; OSes supported are Windows, Linux and VMware [as always, see the E-Lab Navigator for the latest]

Today, the configuration is from a CNA to FCoE switch (must have a switch, no support according to FC-BB-5 for server to storage w/o a switch; if you need this, use iSCSI) and from the switch you can then plug into the existing LAN and SAN.  Storage can either be plugged into the configuration via the SAN (through existing FC switches) or directly into the FCoE switch (today via FC or via FCoE when available).  Note that configurations of having FCoE traffic go through multiple FCoE (Ethernet) switches will require the updates which are being worked on in FC-BB-6 (although a small expansion of configurations specifically with blade servers should be able to be supported soon).  FCoE today is a consolidation at the server and access layer – full end-to-end solutions with larger aggregation will take time.

I have worked on a lot of FCoE collateral over the last year and thought it would be useful to create a list for reference:

YouTube

Intro to FCoE w/ EMC http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZWaOda8mVY – basic 101 of the technology

Deploying FCoE w/ EMC  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6IHMXEGRXs – the new equipment that you’ll need including cables, adapters and switches

FCoE Ecosystem http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExxilbDvZ1g – see FCoE Ecosystem post for more details

FCoE discussions w/ Kash Sheik of Cisco on the Storage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTz9S0cSdNo) and Network (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1mI-eB8-iE) implications of fcoe

Presentations

My EMC World 2009 presentation: Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), iSCSI and the Converged Data Center – http://www.slideshare.net/stuminiman/fibre-channel-over-ethernet-fcoe-iscsi-and-the-converged-data-center

Innovation Network Lecture – Journey Towards the Converged Data Center (archived webinar) https://community.emc.com/docs/DOC-4398

Papers

Introduction to Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/white-papers/h5916-intro-to-fcoe-wp.pdf

Fibre Channel over Ethernet Techbook [from EMC E-Lab] http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h6290-fibre-channel-over-ethernet-techbook.pdf

Between end of quarter activities and gearing up for both the World Business Forum and EMC Innovation Conference next month, my time for blogging has been a little tight.  The World Business Forum website has a nice bio on each of the speakers, below are some additional resources to help you become familiar with the speakers and their subjects before the conference.  Most of the speakers have books which I wish I had time to read, but blogs and videos will have to do.

Bill George: Bill has lots of good information on his website – http://www.billgeorge.org/ including information on his best-selling book and a blog. He also has a Twitter account. His 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis:

• Face Reality, Starting with Yourself
• Get the World off Your Shoulders
• Dig Deep for the Root Cause
• Get Ready for the Long Haul
• Never Waste a Good Crisis
• You’re in the Spotlight: Follow True North
• Go on Offense, Focus on Winning Now

Bill Conaty: Some background on him from a 2004 HR Executive of the Year post: http://www.hrexecutive.com/HRE/story.jsp?storyId=4222837 Video on the HSM Americas site: http://us.hsmglobal.com/contenidos/videoteca_detalle.html?idAdjunto=40680

Patrick Lencioni: Articles and “point of view” posts are on his company’s website: http://www.tablegroup.com/pat/

Jeffrey Sachs: A collection of articles are available on his university website: http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/1804 The website for his book Common Wealth is http://www.sachs.earth.columbia.edu/commonwealth/

T.Boone Pickens: A very interesting character – his website (you can skip the registration page): http://www.pickensplan.com/ Also, here’s an interview on The Daily Show from last November: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/wed-november-12-2008/t–boone-pickens

Kevin Roberts: He has a website – http://www.saatchikevin.com/ – which includes his blog.  Blog post from WBF Blogger Andrea Meyer did a nice summary of his webinar, Creating Loyalty in a Recession: http://workingknowledge.com/blog/?p=735

George Lucas: Beyond making some of my favorite films of all time (Star Wars series and Indiana Jones – did I mention that my dog’s name is Indiana?), Lucas has transformed the film industry with his company LucasFilm.   As noted in Wikipedia: Skywalker Sound and Industrial Light & Magic, the sound and visual effects subdivisions of Lucasfilm, respectively, have become among the most respected firms in their fields.

Gary Hamel: Two great blog posts from Hutch Carpenter – Gary Hamel: Hierarchy of Employee Traits for the Creative Economy and Gary Hamel on Management Innovation and Enterprise 2.0

In considering the Creative Economy, Gary put forth his own hierarchy of employee traits that will define the winners in the future. His representation of this hierarchy is below:

Irene Rosenfeld: NY Times article discussing her history of success: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/business/09food.htm

Paul Krugman: His blog on the NYTimes: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ Interview on The Colbert Report in July: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/233364/july-13-2009/paul-krugman

Bill Clinton: The final speaker needs no introduction, but for an update on his recent activity, check out the Clinton Global Initiatives website: http://www.clintonglobalinitiative.org/.  President Clinton was also on The Daily Show recently – you can watch the interview here: http://www.thedailyshow.com/videos/tag/Bill+Clinton

Two weeks until the conference!  Please share any additional resources that you have.  I am also still looking for your questions for the speakers.

Stuart Miniman

Follow me on Twitter @stu

Subscribe to my blog http://blogstu.wordpress.com

We’re 1 month away from the Innovation Conference; here’s a quick update on the contest and view into next month’s conference.

Contest Update

In my last post on the EMC Innovation Conference, I discussed how this year, the judging was a mixture of a judging panel and community voting.  The semi-finalists were evenly split between the popular vote and the judges, with 1/8 overlap (high number of community votes and high ranking from the judges).  The judges then reviewed all of the semi-finalists to narrow down to 30 finalists.

Since there was a relatively low number of overlaps in the semi-finalists, I was impressed to see that ~1/2 of the finalist ideas (14 of 30) were community semi-finalists (and ~2/3 [21 of 30] were judging semi-finalists).  The finalists included a diverse population of EMC, including teams from 7 countries from a broad spectrum of the organization.  I’d like to offer special congratulations to 3 EMC bloggers who have ideas in the finals: Steve Todd, Barry Burke and Craig Randall.

Conference Update

EMC’s new Bangalore facility, which will be the primary location for this year’s innovation conference, has opened.  You can see a picture of the facility here (you will also note that it is a “LEED” certified Green Building).  BusinessWeek did a nice writeup:

EMC is signaling strongly that it seeks innovation from India—not just cheaper labor. When the company holds its third annual global innovation conference on Oct. 14, the main stage for the virtual event will be at the Bangalore campus…EMC is doing some interesting things to engage its global workforce. But, for now, the main point I want to make is that this company is doing the right thing vis a vis its Indian employees. It doesn’t treat them as commodity brains to be had on the cheap. It signals that it expects great ideas and work to come from them. I bet it will.

A key piece of the conference at each location will be a panel discussing local innovations.  Not only will this be great for the local conferences, but the sessions will be recorded so that they can be shared internally with the global workforce.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on innovation, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

We are less than a month away from the World Business Forum which is being held at Radio City Music Hall on October 6-7. HSM Americas has been announcing via Twitter the members of the Blogger’s Lounge.

As we lead up to the conference, you can get to know the bloggers through their posts which I’ve aggregated on the World Business Forum FriendFeed group.  During the conference, there will be a lot of Twitter activity.  For the best experience, I would recommend that you follow a real-time stream of the hashtag, #WBF09; I will be using Tweet Grid, which you can see from this link.

I will update the list as more information is available. [UPDATE: updated 9/29/09]  I was very excited when I saw the list of speakers at the conference.  Now I wish that there were two more days just to talk to all of the bloggers.  We will all be looking to pull the outside world into this event, I hope you will join us and let us know of questions that you would like discussed.

Stuart Miniman

Follow me on Twitter @stu

Subscribe to my blog http://blogstu.wordpress.com

In the current economic situation, a marketing idea that has gotten a lot of discussion is how business can use FREE to engage with customers.  Not that everything should be free, but that the idea can be used to give people a good understanding of a product or service before having to commit money. Conferences and events have been under intense pressure with the economic conditions, especially those that require travel — which is one of the tightest controlled budget lines.  I have attended a few conferences this year and most of them have been embracing social media to enhance the experience.

In order to reach larger audiences, companies have been providing remote participation options.  Cisco’s Cisco Live and VMware’s VMworld both have very robust remote experiences (I attended Cisco’s in person and VMware’s remotely).  You can watch webcasts of the keynotes for free; Cisco also offers the technical content online for a lower fee than attending.  The one piece of the conference experience that is toughest to replace is the one-on-one interaction.  This is where I see social media playing the biggest part; not that blogs and Twitter replace this experience, but they give a flavor of the energy and engagement of the event.  People can remotely be pulled into the discussions remotely and will be more likely to want to attend in-person the next time.

Social media tools also provide an opportunity to get people engaged ahead of time.   The World Business Forum, at which I will be blogging in October, has been doing a nice job of this.  They have posted videos, webinars and blogs of the speakers available.  Not only does this promote attendance and build buzz, but it should also improves the quality of the attendees and their experience, since they will be more familiar with the topics and will, therefore, have better questions.  As a little help for the upcoming conference, I created a FriendFeed room which aggregates some of the related blogs and any Twitter posts tagged #WBF09.

For recurring events, there is the further opportunity to build a year round community.  I recently got to learn more about the RSA Conference community (RSA is an EMC company).  The event is vendor independent, which allows the community to cover the entire security industry.  While traffic tends to be highest around the conferences, people share information and connect through the site year-round.  The community site has become a valuable resource to the industry, but it has also created connections between people that make the conference a “must attend” event where collaborators can meet face to face.

If you have an exciting and engaging conference, don’t kill it or go all virtual.  Consider how you can engage the community before and during the conference so that the free experience that they get outside will pull them in.

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.  If you will be at the World Business Forum, I’m always interested in discussing innovation and social media.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

I got a new toy last week, the latest Flip video camera – the Ultra HD and wanted to share my thoughts on the camera and the software.  I’ve seen a lot of Flips (especially since Cisco bought them) and the simplicity and portability put it on the top of my birthday list. Overall, I love the camera and the software is good, but could use some enhancements (if anyone has any corrections or tips on what I list, please let me know).

CAMERA

In choosing the model, the Mino line is smaller than the Ultra, but the new Ultra HD had two features that made me choose it: 1) 2 hours of capacity with the same HD quality as the Mino HD and 2) it comes with a rechargeable battery which is removable and 2 AA batteries can be used if needed.  Using the camera is very simple – there is an on/off button, a big red button to start/stop recording and you can zoom +/- while filming.  There is a USB plug on the camera which flips open and you can plug straight into a computer (having a USB extension cable can be useful).

SOFTWARE

FlipShare Software comes pre-loaded on the camera, so you can load it onto the computer.  I had read that there was a way to privately share videos on “Flip Channels” – I found the site http://www.flipshare.com, but at first couldn’t figure out how to get videos to the site.  It turns out that the camera came with the 4.2 FlipShare software which did not have the Flip channel functions.  There was no details as to how to add channels; after poking around on the Product page, I saw that there was an update of the FlipShare software to 4.5 version.  When I updated the software, the Channels options became available.  If possible, they should look to either automatically search for updates, or at least to have an option on the FlipShare menus to look for updates.  Also note that by default, the camera will create a “FlipShare Data” folder in the “My Videos” folder, you can change this at Edit>Preferences>Library tab.

The software allows for easy sharing via email, to the private channel, or to online sites.  From the desktop, you can post to MySpace, YouTube or “other” – this last choice simply compresses the video and saves it to your desktop.  For the Channels, a limitation that I ran into is that the largest file that you can upload to a channel is 450MB.  This is not listed in the documentation or on the site, I found it in the forum Q&A on their site.  If you try to send a larger file to the channel, it simply hangs when the bar reaches the end.  What you can do to get around this limitation is to first compress the video file (using the Share>Online>Other), but once you compress the video, you will need to re-import the file to the FlipShare by using Help>Import other FlipShare files.  Hopefully in future versions of the software, this will be easier.  From the FlipShare website (your channel, not the desktop application), you can share on Facebook.  It would be nice if you could share to Facebook or YouTube from both the desktop or web channel pages.

There is a basic editing, snapshot and movie making software on the FlipShare desktop softare – these are great considering that they are free.  On the editing, note that it will only actually cut the trimmed pieces of the video while the files are on the camera; once on the desktop it will mark your preferred beginning and end, but not trim.  The snapshots are nice – probably good enough quality for 4×6 prints and since the Flip is so portable and fast, it’s a decent camera while on the go (better than my Blackberry photos).  The movie making is also nice, very simple and allows for layering of music.  Flip also offers to make professional DVDs, I have a DVD creations software package, so I haven’t this.

Here’s a sample movie that I created at a monthly social media gathering that we have at EMC.

Comments are questions are always welcome and please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com