Gautam Ghosh on Human Resources

Are Brands People too?

2009-12-02T00:14:00.001+05:30

Manu posts (as usual) a very thought provoking post on whether brands have a Dunbar number. As he wonders:

if there was a Dunbar number for brands, dictated by the number of people the brand can connect with- internally as well as externally? There are two things I read recently which added to the thought. One was the idea of the Intention Economy (via Surekha) which “grows around buyers” and is “about markets, not marketing”, and which is builts beyond transactions alone – conversations, reputation, authority, respect all of which are earned by the sellers and buyers.

I agree with Manu's thought here, but with some caveats :-)

The reality is that Dunbar's number is a cognitive feature of people. It shows me the limit of people I can have meaningful relationships with. These are relationships in the true sense of the world, not the "social media" sense of the world.

Even though brands (people on behalf) may engage with people on social networks, and built relationships - these are around the transactions of content, collaboration, conversations.

There is however one exceptional group for whom a brand can have high engagement levels and would be around Dunbar's number. These are the evangelists/advocates of a brand - who are at the pinnacle of the ladder of engagement wrt the brand.

In the Human Capital League

2009-12-01T14:10:00.000+05:30

Bloggers are (most of the time) solo practitioners of an evolving form of expression.

However, being solo in a hyperlinked world has little meaning.

Ever since I started blogging - from 2003 - I have discovered bloggers in India and across the world to learn from. We've posted comments - graduated to emailing each other - to carrying on to connect on Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

Some of us have started HR micro-communities on Ning, and there are twitter lists too.

And then there are group blogs that aggregate the blog postings of various bloggers in the same area, like Human Capital League.

Here's a little more detail:

Human Capital League, a new online community for workplace management professionals and others interested in the best practices of training and development, employee benefits, recruiting, payroll and the many other people-related functions that keep the wheels of commerce turning smoothly.
If you blog about workplace issues we'd love to have you syndicate your stuff here and become one of our Featured Bloggers (like the nice folks whose posts you'll see below). It's an easy way to get extra readers and promote your expertise with no extra work. (The posting process is automatic once it's set up.) Send me a note if you want to know more or you can click on "Add your Blog" in the navigation bar and do it yourself.

Even if you're not a blogger, you should register and fill out the profile page. That'll allow you to leave comments without moderation, rate posts, promote your business and participate in all of the other community activities.

As some of you might know, I am part of the HRM Today blogging community too. Yeah, multiple memberships is cool!

Leadership in Hyper-Linked Times

2009-11-30T10:56:00.000+05:30

As organizations get more and more linked to external stakeholders, and their people become unofficial spokespeople on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and become marketers whether or not it is their role.

In such times - specially for organizations that are living in this hyper-linked worlds - what are the leadership behaviors that should be adopted.

Not surprisingly, these behaviors are not new. As I mentioned earlier, the tools of web 2.0 promise real organization development, and therefore, the behaviors of leaders must reflect the tenets of OD and these times.

They are:

Openness and Transparency - In the web 2.0 world there is little there is hidden, even vague terms of services cannot be changed without people noticing. A leader always has to remember and more importantly live this with the utmost sincerity - both within and externally
Conversation - It is not just about being transparent, leaders should also engage with employees and external stakeholders about what issues they face and if nothing else - they should acknowledge it, and if needed communicate what they are willing to do about it. Of course, sometimes legal and stockmarket requirements can require executives not to make forward looking statements. In earlier non-internet times I reckon this was known simply within the organization as MBWA
Content - Leaders must realise that their organizational brand and product brands are what users interpret - and that they cannot control it. Indeed, they must actively work to give it away - understanding that there is nothing so powerful as an idea owned by the users. How can you as a leader encourage content and conversation creation, both within and externally to the organization.
Collaboration - Leaders of hyperlinked organizations know that people and groups cannot do things independently anymore- they have to collaborate with partners, other employees, other stakeholders to create lasting impact. Their own behavior sets the tone for all their employees, so they must be and be seen to be collaborative.
Communities - Leaders understand that people -internally and outside the organization - are part of shared interest groups - around various 'social objects'. For employees that could be "how we use this cool tool to solve problems" to "employees who like football" - and externally it could be "people interested in the benefit our product gives" - and if you're Apple, Google, Lego, Harley-Davidson you could have communities around your product too. As a leader you have to understand the deep universal desire of people to connect around a certain shared passion. Identify what ties in to your objectives, and then understand how to facilitate it - give it sustenance. What are the tribes who you will align with?
Collective Intelligence - Leaders know that when communities have conversations and collaborate, new and better ideas get generated. They might be better than the ideas the firm comes up on its own, and there is no shame in admitting it and embracing it. This is the pinnacle of giving up control and becoming part of the community yourself.

The question is - are you ready to make the leap?

About 2020 Social

2009-11-25T10:41:00.000+05:30

Many people have been asking me what exactly is it that we do at 2020 Social...

Is it social media marketing?
Is it digital marketing?
Is it online PR?
What exactly is social business strategy?

To answer all your queries, here's a presentation we've put together about our philosophy and what we do. To know more, you can click through to our website :-)

2020 Social Company Profile

View more presentations from 2020 Social.

Links for 2009-11-21 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-22T00:00:00-08:00

Answer First Presentation
How to communicate a persuasive idea

Twitter and Career Success by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

2009-11-18T01:28:00.000+05:30

Interesting post by Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the parallels between having influence on Twitter and the new competencies for success.

In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable.

Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.

This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has the best network wins."

Go ahead read the full article - and you can follow Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Twitter too

How can firms leverage social technologies internally? 3 Scenarios

2009-11-16T09:22:00.000+05:30

Originally posted at the 2020 Social blog

Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.

A TYPICAL CONVERSATION

Ever since I joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.
The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”

During initial discussions, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.

In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution.

SCENARIO 1: PRODUCT INNOVATION

Bedi Electronics has been amongst the top ten firms in the Indian consumer electronics industry over the last twenty years. Its 1200 employees are spread across six plants and twenty sales offices. Over the last two years, it has fallen behind its competitors in terms of product innovation.

Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.

“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”

SCENARIO 2: TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, was concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seemed to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the reason why this was happening was that the nature of serial processing that the work required meant that a delay in emailing (due to whatever reason) would impact the final output by a large extent.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”

SCENARIO 3: BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.
When Gautam met Sumit and Shalini, Sumit explained his dilemma: “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years. If we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Now that the stage is set in all the three scenarios, you must be wondering: what happens next? Find out in our next three posts.

Building Open Organizations

2009-11-12T14:49:00.002+05:30

Organizations are primarily communities first – and profit making machines later believed Arie de Geus in the 1970s , however now businesses need to be social communities to survive and thrive.

We at 2020 Social believe that businesses will move to the next level of growth not by doing the same things that they were doing but by embracing some of the biggest trends that are shaping today's culture.

Some of these trends that are having an impact on the workplace are:

Speed of decision making: As external change on organizations comes faster and faster, and as organizations get flatter and flatter – decisions are expected from the front line level which directly interact with customers, be they sales or customer support people. However often they don't have access to information that they need to really do it well.
Transparency: As society and government opens up – employees are expecting similar transparency within their organizations – and when organizations are seen as secretive and opaque they lose either their employees energy and commitment – or at risk of losing the employees themselves to competition
Collaboration: As organizations move to more and more knowledge based work, the output that groups of people working together achieve is exponential to what people can do individually. However, collaboration does not happen in a vacuum. It starts with people's willingness to collaborate aided by the way work is structured, processes are defined and the tools that are available to help people connect and work together with others
Sharing: Today's youth has grown up with social networks where sharing information and pictures is the key to connecting and relating to others. It combines expression and relatedness – considered by many to be the two fundamental human drivers. To really engage with and to leverage the strengths of these younger employees - who are India's post-liberalisation generation – they would have to enable these aspects in the workplace too.

Links for 2009-11-12 [del.icio.us]

2009-11-13T00:00:00-08:00

The 2 indias - the haves and the have-nots

People Power, says Cisco, is key to Success

2009-11-11T16:03:00.000+05:30

Amazing post by Cisco's VP of Enterprise. Go read the full article. Some excerpts

For most companies, people represent an untapped asset – a resource that becomes especially important for companies that must grow their business without adding personnel.

This means that corporations must design a cognitive stimulus plan based on employee contributions, and business must embrace some admittedly unusual notions about how, where and when work occurs, and how employees collaborate. Some of these notions recently arrived from the Web 2.0, social networking realm.

It is time, though, to recognize that community is at the heart of teaming and teaming is at the heart of workplace collaboration. And collaboration is where we find innovation and operational excellence, by tapping into knowledge at the source: from one functional group to another; from one business unit to another; and from one company to another – as partners in a distributed valued chain.

Finally, management needs to view collaborative social networking differently. As Morten T. Hansen notes, in his excellent new book, Collaboration, they must oversee the adoption process and change culture to achieve positive results.

To some degree, every aspect of information technology is in transition: cloud, virtualization, collaboration, and consumerization. CEOs want more and CFOs want to spend less. I could go on and on with challenges for the CIO. But what about the people who actually use all this technology, day after day, to get their jobs done? What are they telling us about how they want to work?

The millennials, the largest presence in the workforce, are already “black belts” in virtual communications and collaboration.

It's raining jobs?

2009-11-10T16:11:00.000+05:30

So says this rather extra positive report in the Economic Times:

Global consultancy firms Accenture, Deloitte, banks StanChart and Barclays and Indian IT giant Infosys all have announced hiring plans that would see the creation of at least 13,000 jobs in India by the end of next year.

Personally, I think a news item about 13000 jobs being added is not in any sense of the term flooded. Specially since the unemployment rate in India is still around 7%.

Gender Parity in the workplace

2009-11-10T15:53:00.001+05:30

Interesting discussion about gender disparity in the Indian workplace. The funny thing is, in the large unorganized sector which accounts for more than 90% of the workforce, the Indian woman is present - and their strength is being leveraged by self-help groups and other civil action bodies. Maybe it's time for corporate India to take some pointers from them?

Excerpts from the article:

Women indeed seem to be getting to that goal of parity at least in the huge organisations headed by Ms Nooyi & Ms Kochar. Ms Nooyi revealed that 30% of PepsiCo’s global workforce are women, and Ms Kochhar noted that 26% of ICICI’s 40,000 employees are women, 80% of them below 30 years of age and for whom ICICI has provisions for maternity and child rearing leave.

Mr Ghosn said that in 1995 Nissan had 1% women in the workforce and today it has risen to 5% women working in all verticals.” But Mr Seth persisted in averring that equality had to be taken in totality, with womens’ contribution and impact being judged not only by their presence and experience in the workplace.

But who says the road to gender parity is smooth anywhere? When a woman employee at PepsiCo asked for six months leave to take care of her ailing mother, Ms Nooyi had to come up with a creative solution. “When we distributed her work to other employees,” recounted Ms Nooyi, “they resented it.” And when Mr Ghosn contended that there should be paternity leave for male employees even as he echoed the need for more women in workforce, Ms Nooyi snapped, “Provided they actually stay at home and take care of the child!”

And here's some related news: India slips a notch on gender index.

Find and know your experts using social tools

2009-11-04T16:08:00.000+05:30

Interesting article in the WSJ how social technologies can help tap into and be aware of an organization's expertise systems.

To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that's a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts' knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.

But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.

Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts' "softer" qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn't easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

While I agree with the premise - let us agree that social tools won't just enable adoption - specially if the organization has treated external social networking with a different standard (i.e. by banning access and firewalling them :-)

Adoption of tools will also be slow in organizations where automation is being viewed as something to be suspicious of, or if it entails duplication of work and effort.

The other aspect is - not all experts would like to write about their expertise or might not have the skills needed to cultivate readership or networks.

What does one do then?

RiseSmart CEO Sanjay Sathe on the new direction

2009-11-03T17:58:00.001+05:30

I've already interviewed Sanjay Sathe once last year, and that was at a time when RiseSmart was trying to establish its own JobConcierge service for senior management.

RiseSmart is now trying to establish an outplacement service too.

When it recently got $ 4.6 million in VC funding it seemed like a good time to catch up with Sanjay again and to understand what is in the future for RiseSmart.

Here are Sanjay's answers to some questions I sent to him via email:

1. What is RiseSmart planning to do with the latest VC funding?

At this point we’ve proven the business model of our outplacement solution, RiseSmart Transition Concierge, and it’s time to grow market share. So we’re going to expand our sales team while continuing to invest in operations and client service.

It’s really been remarkable that we’ve been able to walk into Fortune 500 companies and win their outplacement business away from longtime, and in some cases deeply entrenched, incumbents. We’ve done it time and again. This reinforces our belief in our vision — that our way of doing outplacement will become the dominant model in the future. If we use the investment from Norwest Venture Partners and Storm Ventures wisely, we’ll be well on our way to making this vision a reality.

2. How is the new strategic direction being received by existing clients?

Nothing has changed for existing clients of our consumer service, RiseSmart Job Concierge. What’s changed is our marketing strategy. When we launched, we planned to build a B2C offering to compete with TheLadders — and we believe our service is a better value than TheLadders. But TheLadders is spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, and the consumer market in general is crowded, so the investment required to cut through the clutter and build a brand is high.

With RiseSmart Transition Concierge, on the other hand, we are dealing with a smaller universe of prospective clients and the noise level is a lot lower. Corporate clients are hearing the facts and connecting with our message. As a result, we’re bringing thousands of jobseekers into our system much more cost-effectively than by trying to reach them individually through a broad-based ad campaign. And because satisfaction levels have been very high among users, we can count on reaching new B2C customers through word of mouth.

3. What are the biggest challenges that a firm like RiseSmart faces?

Any upstart company faces challenges in going up against the big players and old guard. Outplacement is a $3 plus billion industry, so the entrenched players have a lot to protect; they have been enjoying very nice margins for a long time. Now, we are threatening to permanently reduce the cost structure of the industry, and they don’t like it. We expect them to throw the kitchen sink at us from a sales and marketing perspective as we continue to win away their clients. But we enjoy a good challenge.

4. What other players in the industry are you watching very closely - and with respect :-) ?

We watch the traditional players like Right Management and Lee Hecht Harrison closely — and we do respect them for all they’ve accomplished. They built this industry. We’re just ready to take the baton and move things forward. We expect our competitors to adapt and to begin offering services similar to ours — but we’re confident they won’t be able to do it as well, and certainly not at our price point.

5. What should job seekers do to land jobs of their choice?

The most important thing is to use your time wisely. You had a routine in your job that filled your days — and now that is gone, like a rug pulled out from under you. How do you fill all those hours?

What you shouldn’t do is sit in front of your computer searching different job boards for hours at a time. It’s a time filler that can make you feel productive, but it’s not a good use of your time. This is particularly true because job boards are notoriously inefficient — how many times have you searched for “executive” jobs and wound up reading job descriptions for executive assistants, for example?

That’s why our Job Concierge service — which is not only our B2C offering but also the core of Transition Concierge — is so valuable. We do the online searching for you so you can focus on tasks that are more important, like leveraging social networks, sharpening your resume, crafting custom cover letters, and networking at industry and professional events. This is the smarter route to finding a new job.

Changing the name of the Blog

2009-10-30T10:20:00.000+05:30

This is just an administrative post :-)

I realised that the focus of this blog has moved from purely HR to aspects in the new way of working within Organizations - that impact organizational design, structure, systems, tools, processes and development.

Hence thought that a name change was in order :-)

Hence my moniker for this New Way of Working is Organizations 2.0 - focussing on how people, communities and companies are integrating this new approach to working :-)

Knowledge Work and Collaboration

2009-10-30T10:11:00.000+05:30

A very insightful article in McKinsey's What matters column on the challenges of measuring productivity of collaboration in Knowledge workers, and also insightful comments.

Primarily the article argues that while technology is deployed - productivity of collaboration is different than the way productivity is measured in the traditional deployment of technology.

The article states:

Our research suggests that improvements depend upon getting a better fix on who actually is doing the collaborating within companies, as well as understanding the details of how that interactive work is done. Just as important is deciding how to support interactions with technology—in particular, Web 2.0 tools such as social networks, wikis, and video. There is potential for sizeable gains from even modest improvements. Our survey research shows that at least 20 percent and as much as 50 percent of collaborative activity results in wasted effort. And the sources of this waste—including poorly planned meetings, unproductive travel time, and the rising tide of redundant e-mail communications, just to name a few—are many and growing in knowledge-intense industries.

The steps the article suggests are:

Defining knowledge workers and how they work
Applying technologies

I would add that other support processes and structures followed by the organization must be analysed to understand how it is impacting collaboration too.

One of the main issues that become bottlenecks is the disincentive to collaborate and a tact approval or even explicit reward system that focuses on contra-behaviors.

For example if a new worker sees that the people being praised and held up as star performers are lone workers - that becomes a very strong reinforcing psychological mechanism to not collaborate.

Tweeting Better than Facebook within Organizations

2009-10-27T06:01:00.000+05:30

Interesting post in the Blogspotting blog :)

SocialText CEO Eugene Lee argues that Twitter might be a better model than Facebook for next-gen communications within companies, so-called Enterprise 2.0. Facebook's trouble? Reciprocal friending. The problem, he says, is that employees on corporate social networks start collecting friendships of execs. "Because the Rolodex is public, it becomes a matter of VP trading cards."

A preferable model for corporate relationships, he says, is Twitter, where people lend their attention, not necessarily their friendship. In SocialText's Twitter-like corporate offering, Signals, more people are likely to "follow" the CEO--assuming he or she has anything interesting to Tweet.

For those who don't know - Yammer is a tool which is said to be Twitter for the organization!

Are you using it? Do you like Yamming (!) in your firm?

Culture and Collaboration

2009-10-27T04:59:00.000+05:30

Jack Vinson posts his reaction to this Web Worker Daily article, Corporate Culture, Not Technology, Drives Online Collaboration by Will Kelly about what kind of culture will facilitate collaboration.

My take on this is that the elements of culure/context are important, but also as important are structures and processes to enable collaboration.

One big example is: what behaviors are rewarded?

We can try until we cry, and deploy the best collaboration tools - however if people get assessed for individual work and contribution - collaboration will not be the first thing they think of.

And we come back to what we call "the ladder of engagement" in 2020 Social. People will adopt the tool naturally - and most of them will be consumers and curators - not collaborators and creators - which should be the goal of the team leading the change.

How to get a professional services firm started on Social Media

2009-10-23T22:36:00.000+05:30

Here are a few ways in which a professional services firm can quickly establish a presence and connect with prospective clients and stakeholders

Integrate the Website and the Blog

The website and blog would probably be the "mothership" of any firm's web presence.

Content (text, pictures, videos) would be the reason:

a. Search engines would get keywords to index the site
b. People would find the site – and subscribe to get the updates.
c. This content could then be syndicated to other websites – by RSS feeds.

Linkedin

Linkedin is a business networking site – and firms and their employees can build visibility and brand equity by engaging with groups and in Q and A. They can also utilize the event feature to showcase organizational events.

Facebook

A firm's page on facebook page does two things - it builds a community of fans and can also syndicates the blog's RSS feeds (for example the 2020 Social FB page) – so that every time the blog is updated the fans would get the update on their facebook home page. The ability to upload pictures would also focus on giving a firm a human face.

Twitter

Twitter is a status updation service by which people choose to follow users. A firm can start a twitter account that also syndicates the RSS feed. This however would be most useful when people choose to follow the firm's status on Twitter (example 2020 Social) - and the firm can get its employees to tweet individually and have conversations with interested people.

Other services like Slideshare, Scribd

These are services which help in sharing documents and presentations which can then be embedded as widgets on the blog/website of the firm. This also helps firms to come out favorably on searches engines as these sites get ranked quite highly by search engines.

Discussion forum

Various services like discussion fora where influencers of the domain and various e-groups on Google Groups and Yahoogroups where professionals congregate- engaging in conversations there would also provide a firm with huge exposure to a firm.

Next steps for a firm after exploring what suits its needs...

1. Define metrics for objectives
2. Focus on a couple of tools
3. Training and skilling employees on engaging in social media/web presence

Now also blogging at...

2009-10-22T09:35:00.000+05:30

The good thing about joining a Social Business Strategy firm is that you get to blog about work related stuff :-)

So join me as I explore how organizations can utilise social tools and emerging technologies to facilitate communities, communication and collaboration - on my 2020 Social blog :-)

Making Organizations Social - am joining 20:20 Social

2009-10-19T23:26:00.000+05:30

Ok, here's an announcement that I want to make. Tomorrow, 20th October, I am joining 20:20 Social, India's first social business strategy consulting firm

I guess, what you're asking is - what the heck is a social business strategy consulting firm?

Social business is the new term (or meme, if you will) that is emerging to describe organizations that are leveraging social software and tools to connect with customers and other stakeholders - that's right folks, bringing the social web into the organization.

As I have believed - such tools (call them web 2.0 or whatever) help in facilitating transparency and openness and help achieve the true goals of Organization Development

In my role in 2020 social (follow it on twitter) I would be looking at the enterprise practice - or essentially how organizations can deploy social tools to empower employees, build collaboration, develop knowledge and positively impact business. Yeah, some people call this Enterprise 2.0 too.

It takes me back to the starting point of my career - when I started out looking at organizational processes for Knowledge Management and then e-learning.

However as much as I love tools - I know that culture always trumps tactics, tools and even strategy. So I am looking at leveraging my HR and OD learnings to help client organizations deploy these social tools.

And I am super-excited to be working along with the amazing 20:20 social team that includes an old blogging acquaintance Gaurav Mishra who blogs at gauravonomics.com. What makes Gaurav a kindred spirit is his openness and transparency as CEO - he blogs about the organization as he manages it :-) Check out Gaurav's posts on how to build an Open and Collaborative Professional Services Firm, and Top 10 FAQs on Building a Social Business Strategy Firm in India.

Am also looking forward to working with a true blue Thought Leader Dave Evans (not the AC/DC guy ;-) author of a book on Social Media Marketing who blogs at http://readthis.com

You can download 20:20 Social's position paper on Social Business Strategy as a pdf, or read it on scribd.

Who are the other folks who are doing something similar?

Well there are two that I know of - the Altimeter Group and Dachis Group.

20:20 Social has just started its journey and I am very excited to be part of something so new and emergent.

Whee! Wish me luck!

Tribalization of Business study by Deloitte

2009-10-13T22:54:00.000+05:30

While there are trends - Deloitte's study says that businesses are still some time away from leveraging the full power of social media and networking communities

As the study says:

Some of the biggest obstacles to creating a successful community are getting people to:

Join (24 percent)

Stay engaged (30 percent)
Keep returning (21 percent)

These can be easily remedied through partnering and new management practices. However, the study indicates that very few companies are taking the steps necessary to overcome these challenges.

While 58 percent of respondents evaluated partnering with existing communities, complementary vendors or end users when developing their community, 55 percent of the companies that evaluated a partnership did not actually partner.

The study also revealed significant gaps between community goals (such as generating word of mouth, customer loyalty and brand awareness) and how success is being measured.

The top two analytics for measuring success are:

Number of active users (34 percent)
How often people post/comment (32 percent)

These results indicate that participation is still considered to be the biggest measure of success. Potentially more useful analytics, however, such as increase in search engine rank and citations/links on other sites, are less often utilized, highlighting a mismatch between the desired outcome and how that outcome is measured.

Additional Findings

Of the companies surveyed, a majority agreed that the following continue to be top business objectives of online communities:

Increase word-of-mouth (38 percent)
Increase customer loyalty (34 percent)
Increase brand awareness (30 percent)
Improve idea generation (29 percent)
Improve the quality of customer support (23 percent)

However, in the majority of companies surveyed, marketing continues to be the primary driver of online communities, resulting in a significant gap between community goals and the organizations’ capability to fully leverage these communities on an enterprise wide basis.

Of course, these findings are US centric but we are seeing Indian firms also starting out leveraging the social web.

OD and HR Consulting Case Studies

2009-10-09T11:58:00.000+05:30

On the Vyaktitva website we recently uploaded some interesting case studies.

They are:

Developing Hiring Managers' and Recruiters' skills in conducting Competency Based Interviewing
Leapfrogging an Organization's Training Capability
Building frontline leaders' skills in Coaching and Developing their employees

Would love your comments/suggestions etc on the site :-)

New Social Business Careers: Technopologist?

2009-10-09T10:56:00.000+05:30

The Fast Forward blog pointed me to this interesting article on someone in P&G who is the marketing brand manager for Digital Business Strategy.

I've always believed new careers emerge from a hybrid of earlier careers/skill areas and Dave Knox reiterates my belief. As he says:

In its most simplistic description, a Marketing Technopologist combines the skills of a Marketer, Technologist, and Social Anthropologist. As a Technologist, you might not be a “coder” but you know your way around the language and culture of tech. You understand things like API and Open Source or why Facebook Connect working with Open ID is a big deal. Through the lens of a Social Anthropologist, you can then look at that technology and understand the impact it will have on society and culture. You can recognize that the technology behind the Social Graph can actually have a huge impact on how we make decisions or shop. And finally, the marketer will build upon both of these elements, recognizing the business potential created.

Interesting to note how social businesses is giving rise to new careers.

Tomorrow's HR professional

2009-10-08T10:37:00.000+05:30

This piece below is a work of fiction - by an hyperactive imagination. Taking career decisions on its basis might not be advisable :-)

Year - 2025 AD

Month - January

8:30 am - Anita grabs her coffee and boots up her communication device - it's been a long weekend and she doesn't know what to expect from her day at work.

Tonnes of h-mails. One is from her best friend with a collection of pictures and videos and an audio from their last vacation. Anita smiled
The next h-mail was from the HR Director of MegaCorp. He said he had an assignment for her. Could she go through the employee database and identify trends and suggestion areas? He needed an approach from her tomorrow if she wanted to accept it.
It was followed by a h-mail was from the People Strategy officer of GlobalBank - her voice came through the comm "Anita, we came across your thoughts on the learning professionals network on one of the HR networks, and wanted to explore if you can oversee our strategy to mentor the high potential employees of our finance function?"

Anita smiled. She was bored and tired of the employee database analysis kind of work. MegaCorp could go take a walk. However, before she agreed to GlobalBank's assignment - she had to do her own research.

Anita took a big gulp of coffee, fired up her personal search assistant and spoke into it: "People Strategy history of GlobalBank" - in instants all the videos, documents and inferences by the search assistant (who knew her areas of interest) was there for her to go through.

After an hour Anita grinned. She liked the challenge that GlobalBank was throwing her way.

In the next 30 minutes she put together a high level approach note about how she would like to go ahead with it, attached her HR skill certification which meant a specific fee structure that she would charge for the project.

She then attached her videos and texts on the specific intervention and sent it off by h-mail.

Phew that was a good morning's work. She needed a coffee.

11 am - Anita had finished her morning sandwich and salad and looked at her to-do list. She still had to recruit 4 people to work on a project for a real estate firm. Over the next 2 hours Anita dipped into her contact lists - furiously working her virtual rolodex and got some great leads. Five people asked her to h-mail the videos of the project and one actually h-mailed back his Real Estate sales proficiency level to signify interest in the project.

At 1 pm Anita needed to eat something more substantial. She got into her electric car and drove to the nearest organic eating joint.

Back on her desk at 2:30 pm Anita decided to connect with some folks and merely chat up. She pulled out a h-mail video and saw which ones of her contacts was reachable.

Neil, a specialist in helping organizations mould their culture in these changing times was online and smiled when she pinged him. However he was on text only mode.

Anita spoke "hey Neil, what interesting stuff are you doing?" knowing that it'll show up instantaneously on his screen as text.
Neil typed :" Am on a boring conference call with the top team of the Distributed Collective and they're wondering how their new vision needs to be supplanted with a new organizational structure" he grinned into the video.

Anita spoke "That sounds exciting, Neil. Ok, I just wanted to share that there's a talk of a mentoring project for a big bank's high potentials and it seems that it'll be a long project. Possibly like 3-4 years. It's exciting for me to venture into this field - and it's thanks to your suggestion that I share my thoughts on the HR learning channel."

Neil smiled and typed "That's great news. Congrats!"

Anita typed: "Still too soon to congratulate me, but I want you to mentor me during this project. I'll need your help!"

Neil grinned "of course, and you know what my skill level and therefore rates are."

Anita made a face "Yeah I know and you'll surely get your fees"

Neil typed: "Great, I gotta go now. They want me to say something now" he grinned

Anita said "Ok, take care. Live long and prosper"

"Live long and prosper" Neil typed back.

Anita stretched out and turned off the h-mail. She needed to get out and exercise now. She grabbed her stuff and headed for the gym. Tomorrow seemed to be an interesting day ahead.

Actually tonight was an all night virtual conference where she was presenting the new compensation philosophy for GoodElectric - a client of hers, and the other HR project leads as well as project teams from Ops and Sales and Marketing worldwide would be there to poke holes into her proposal - she was sure of it. They had already left suggestions in the h-wiki of the GoodElectric HR collaborative space, but she was sure tonight they would not pull their punches.

She grinned.

Let them try, she thought.

No vulgarity in salaries please!

2009-10-05T00:01:00.000+05:30

The government after its austerity drive - now seems to be picking on corporate India to catch the fever and start cutting salaries.

By calling CEO salaries vulgar the Corporate Affairs minister is caught up in the wrong battle.

Corporate Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid on Sunday (October 4) said the government will keep a tab on what kind of salaries the country's CEOs will be paid adding that nobody in politics or outside, has reached a level of liberalism where vulgarity is also a fundamental right.

The issue regarding remuneration of company CEOs is to be debated by the Parliamentary Standing Committee, which is scrutinising the provisions of the new Companies Bill tabled in the Lok Sabha in August.

Just to put it in perspective the annual remuneration of some CEOs work out to be 50 crore rupees, which is 12,500 times the per capita income in India.

What Mr Khurshid seems to forget is that in the corporate world even if promoter CEOs pay themselves "vulgar" salaries, wagging a disapproving finger at them is not the answer - introducing measures to safeguard the shareholders and encouraging good corporate governance is the way to go forward.

Something that politicians and bureaucrats seem not to remember when they run things like national carriers to the ground!

Jobs situation improving in India

2009-10-04T23:48:00.001+05:30

I guess we all knew it, but now the numbers prove it. However I'd have to say that 2009-10 is looking much better!

New job creation dropped by over 40 per cent in 2008-09, with 469 companies studied having recruited 1,35,987 employees during the year under review, compared to 2,28,968 in the 2007-08.

The banking sector, State Bank of India in particular, has come to the rescue, while software service companies are employing less numbers compared to the previous year. The latter sector was a major job creator in the past five years and is now facing a slowdown in business from BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sectors on account of the financial crisis abroad. Of 36 software services’ companies studied, hiring increased by 69,430 in 2008-09, compared to 103,118 in 2007-08.

The crash in stock prices after the liquidation of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 had hurt new employment in securities and commodities trading service firms, while the liquidity crunch saw construction companies pruning staff strength due to the slowing in demand for housing and commercial offices. Sectors such as automobiles, steel, textiles, hotels and media also pruned hiring due to the slowdown.

The HT tells us the good news :-)

Automobile firms, some of which clocked record sales in September mirroring strong consumer demand, appear to have recruited the most. A labour ministry survey showed the sector recruited 18,000 additional employees in April-June.

Information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO), sectors heavily dependent on overseas contracts, appear to be doing well. The survey showed that the “non-exporting” (companies that do not earn significant revenues from overseas clients) IT and BPO companies hired an additional 15,000 employees during the April-June quarter, the survey showed.

Recruitment agencies and headhunting firms confirmed that enquiries by prospective employers have started trickling in and many expect hiring to grow sharply after January.

“Leadership positions are opening up but jobs across the board will open up only by January to March as employers are cautious of over hiring,” Rajesh AR, vice president at Bangalore-based staffing firm TeamLease Services.

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