Bersin & Associates Analyst Updates

Oracle buys Taleo

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:37:00 PST

I guess we saw this coming. Today Oracle announced plans to acquire Taleo, the largest provider of recruitment software, for $1.9 billion. The company positions this as part of Oracle's strategy to build a "comprehensive, cloud offering to help companies manage their HR operations and employee careers."

This is a very smart move, and one which most analysts predicted. Following SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors, this gives Oracle a tremendously powerful suite of products in the HR market, one of the fastest-growing markets for enterprise software.

A few initial comments.

1. Oracle now has a powerhouse set of products for HR and talent management.

Fusion HCM, which integrates PeopleSoft and Oracle e-Business into a new, functionally rich set of HR applications, is now shipping (with more than 50 customers already). Taleo's product set includes a complete end-to-end cloud-based talent management system, including the world's most widely used recruiting platform. Oracle can now sell best-of-breed talent management solutions of any shape to nearly any company.

2. This move directly neutralizes SAP's strategy with SuccessFactors. The integration will go quickly.

Not only does Taleo compete very well against SuccessFactors from a product standpoint (Taleo's recruiting product is many years ahead of SuccessFactors), but Oracle's ability to integrate Taleo will move very quickly.

Taleo is located within 2 miles of Oracle's ex-Peoplesoft headquarters, and most of the Taleo employees once worked at Peoplesoft. So in many ways the Taleo team can now "be back together with their friends." This means that the cultural and people-integration of these companies will go very quickly.

SAP's integration with SuccessFactors is far more difficult, given the geographic and cultural distance between the two companies. And any Oracle customer who owns Successfactors now should see the writing on the wall: over time you will become highly incented to consider a switch to Taleo.

3. Oracle is a very well-run software company. The integration and sales synergies will be strong.

While one may argue with some of the product strategies over the years, Oracle understands the cloud, they understand HR and HCM, and they have successfully evolved through four major technology architectures. The original Oracle database ran on mainframes, then it ran on client/server, then it ran on Unix/Linux, and now in the cloud. This is a very smart company with access to deep pools of talent.

Oracle's team knows Taleo well, and they have sold into HR and the recruitment market for years. It will not take long for Oracle and Taleo's sales team to become integrated and go to market together.

4. The combined companies have many unique and innovative technologies, and a large base of skills.

While product purists may debate the overlapping products (multiple talent management systems, etc.), Oracle can go to market with a few more "exclusives" when competing with SAP: the world's #1 database, the world's #1 recruitment application, the world's #1 HRMS business (combination of Peoplesoft and Oracle), a tremendous array of ecosystem partners (Taleo integrates with nearly every sourcing and recruiting tool in the world), a large mid-market business, and a very strong technology and sales team.

SAP of course has Sybase, SuccessFactors, and a large customer base of HCM customers - but their integration work is much harder. SAP is a very well run company, but now that this merger is announced, I would not be surprised to see some of the Successfactors-SAP employees wander up the road to Oracle/Taleo to see what life is like there. (By the way, the Sybase-SAP office is actually closer to Taleo than the Oracle building!)

The Rest of the Industry must Adjust

What does this mean for companies like Cornerstone, Saba, PeopleFluent, Kenexa, Silkroad, Lumesse, Halogen, SumTotal Systems, and dozens of other smaller talent management software companies? The world just got a little smaller, and these vendors will now find it a little harder to find "white space" again .. to say nothing of the potential for more mergers to take place.

I spent ten years of my life competing with Oracle (while working at Sybase) and I learned directly how smart, aggressive, and powerful Oracle can be. This is a merger we all saw coming, and one that will have much impact on the talent management marketplace. It clearly delineates the war between Oracle and SAP for the "battle of HR software" and "battle for the cloud.'

And by the way, this market is still young. Companies like Workday, Salesforce.com, ADP, and IBM are not going to sit back and wait for Oracle and SAP to grab market share. Plus, there are hundreds of well capitalized, innovative young companies in the talent management software who will continue to innovate in this market. These companies will likely continue to grow, and hope that they too can be acquired by SAP or Oracle.

There are still many "unsolved problems" in the talent management space, just now two very big players to deal with.

We will be announcing a member broadcast discussing the implications of this acquisition in the next few weeks. If you are a Bersin & Associates research member (or would like to get some help), please call us and we can set up a call to discuss what this may mean for your HR systems strategy.

Also, I will be conducting a webinar with Anand Subbaraman, Oracle's senior Director of Product Strategy, next Thursday the 16th - if you would like to hear our perspectives on this market and learn more about Oracle's products, please join us. (Register Here.)

Lessons From The Best: 2012 Bersin & Associates Learning Leaders

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:05:00 PST

Back in 2006 we had a dream of building a new type of industry recognition program that would use the rigor of our research to recognize leading L&D, HR, and talent management programs around the world. This program, which we call theBersin & Associates Learning Leaders®, is now in its sixth year and today I am very excited to announce the winners and highlight the 108 page best-practice report highlighting these fantastic programs.

About the Learning Leaders Program

There are many recognition programs in the industry. Some are very promotional (e.g. they cost a lot to apply and they tend to give hundreds of awards), some are vendor-driven (vendors highlighting some of their great customers), and some are rigorous but have somewhat "untransparent" criteria.

Our goal with the Learning Leaders program is to make the entire effort a valuable learning experience for all: for those who apply, for those who read the final report, and for us as a research organization. So from the outset we decided that the program would follow some strict rules:

Use rigorous and very clearly defined criteria, so that people who fill out the application actually learn a lot about what a "high-impact" program is, while they assess their own program
Use our research in the definition of a winning program, so that the application itself embodies our best-practice research
Be low-cost to enter (we do not cover our costs in this effort, but see it as a valuable project for our own learning and industry-wide learning and recognition)
Be highly transparent about why a particular program was selected, and try to inform everyone who was not selected what they could do to improve for the following year
Write a detailed best-practice report on all the winners, which would include models and practices others could learn from, and
Invite all the winners to the IMPACT 2012 Research Conference to talk about their success and meet others.

All this effort takes us an entire year, end-to-end. And each of our analysts puts hundreds of hours into the program. (In fact right now we are already planning the 2013 program.)

For those of you who want to learn, it means that you can read the Learning Leaders report (at no charge) and really gain the collective knowledge of hundreds of leading organizations in all aspects of learning, talent management, human resources, and related technology. For those of you who apply or want to apply, I hope that the experience of filling in the application and talking with our analysts is highly educational and helpful.

The 2012 Winning Organizations and Programs

This year the winning programs were truly amazing. I won't try to list them all here (you can read about them in the report or on the website), but let me highlight a few of the major themes:

Performance-driven learning drives business results, even during a recession. Companies like AT&T, Cisco, Xerox, HP, HCL, Jiffy Lube all put together amazing learning and performance support programs which helped their organizations drive quality, productivity, and revenue. You'll find that these solutions are all rich, competency-driven, and they leverage informal and formal learning in powerful ways.
Social learning has clearly arrived. Companies like Accenture, Marriott, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CA are leveraging the wide range of social and informal learning strategies in world-class solutions already. The world of social learning is not "coming," it has "arrived."
Leadership development and talent management are now highly integrated into world-class learning strategies. Our winners in leadership and talent management, which include PWC, SunTrust, Grant-Thornton, AT&T, and the IRS are all adopting what we call 21st Century Leadership strategies which have helped their companies survive the downturn and thrive in the global recovery.
And of course innovation and technology has moved faster than ever: the winners Dextro, Vangent, Capital Analytics, KnowledgeAdvisors, Bloomfire, GlobalEnglish, Triple Creek, Allen Communication, Korn/Ferry, and Work4 Labs are all providing groundbreaking new tools and solutions which enable HR and L&D to transform itself.

I would like to personally congratulate the winners, as well as all the 200+ companies who took the time to apply this year. As I read the applications I was actually very disappointed that we could not double or triple the number of winners, because within the applications there were dozens of others which came very close to reaching the same level of impact as the ones we selected.

Please take a few minutes to download the report and pass it around within your organization. Every year the Learning Leaders report is the most widely read piece of research we produce, and this year I think you will find hundreds of good ideas, models, and strategies you can use.

I would like to thank all the participants, our friends at Elearning! magazine, and our entire analyst team for the effort that went into the program. I look forward to seeing you all at IMPACT in April to celebrate!

Kenexa Acquires Outstart: Getting Serious about the Corporate Learning Market

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:27:00 PST

This week Kenexa, one of the largest and most successful HR and talent acquisition consulting companies, announced the acquisition of Outstart, a pioneering company in the market for e-learning tools, learning management, collaboration, and mobile learning solutions. This represents a major move for Kenexa, putting the company firmly into the market for training tools, systems, and solutions. (Research members, watch for a detailed bulletin on this acquisition coming later this week.)

Background:

Kenexa is a publicly traded consulting and software company which focuses on six major business areas: recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) and employment branding, assessment (Kenexa is one of the world leaders in assessment science and tools), employee engagement (validated engagement surveys, tools, and consulting), strategic HR consulting (HR strategy and talent segmentation), leadership development (the company recently acquired a leadership development company and now sells leadership programs and content development), and talent management software and services.

Over the years, Kenexa has grown both organically and through acquisition. The company just posted 2011 revenues of $291 Million and the company expects its 2012 revenues to increase to $350 Million or greater. This growth is coming through a combination of both organic growth (new business) and acquisition.

Kenexa and the Learning Market:

Kenexa offers a wide range of talent management products and services, including the company's 2X end-to-end talent management software platform. In the talent management software market, Kenexa is a leader in recruiting products and often competes directly with Taleo.

Today, because of the growing maturity of the talent management software market, large buyers of these products (30-35% of buyers) are looking for a single vendor solution. This means that many of Kenexa's current customers are either looking for a learning management system, or they are looking for a talent acquisition vendor who offers a learning management system. So for the last few years Kenexa has been trying to build or buy a competitive LMS.

Kenexa as an organization is filled with expert consultants who have backgrounds in IO Psychology and Organizational Development, so the company has a good understanding of the value of corporate learning. In addition, Kenexa's recent investment in leadership development (acquisition of CHPD) has given the company a true learning and development services offering. But until now the company has been more or less vacant from the learning technology and learning platform marketplace (around a $1 billion market).

History of Outstart:

Outstart is a pioneering company founded by two ex-Sybase/Powersoft engineers around 1991. The company's breakthrough products were its LCMS (Learning Content Management System) and development tools, which rapidly gained market visibility in the early 1990s (during the early days of e-learning).

During the last 20 years the company grew its business in learning tools and content management solutions, and later acquired its primary LCMS competitor EEDO. As the LCMS market evolved and never grew into a large market, Outstart expanded into the learning platform market, and acquired a small company with a collaboration solution called Participate. Participate is now offered as a platform solution for collaboration, knowledge management, and expert support. As part of this strategy Outstart also started building its own LMS, since many of its customers (often customer training teams) wanted an LMS to manage and administer the programs they were developing.

Later the company acquired HotLava, a well known leading toolset for the development of mobile learning applications. This was a natural extension of Outstart's content development business, and is now considered one of the top tools for the development of mobile learning applications.

Today Outstart has around 300 customers and is a slow growing but profitable company (the tools market is very fragmented). The company's LMS is relatively new and fits well for mid-market organizations or small training groups, but was not designed to be an enterprise-scale solution. Many of the original founders are still there, so the company continues to have a strong brain trust of learning technology experts.

What Outstart Brings to Kenexa:

Outstart brings three major benefits to Kenexa.

First, the Outstart LMS and Participate platform will be integrated into the Kenexa 2X talent management platform, giving Kenexa an end-to-end talent management solution. Today the Outstart LMS will not compete well in the enterprise LMS market, but Kenexa has the resources to increase that investment and build out the LMS into a scalable solution over the coming years. This enables Kenexa to compete directly with Taleo (Learn) and other LMS vendors for enterprise LMS opportunities.

Second, Outstart brings Kenexa a profitable business selling development tools to training organizations. Kenexa plans to keep almost all the Outstart employees in place, giving the company a new business unit which can go into existing and prospective Kenexa customers to sell content development tools, collaboration solutions, customer training portals, and mobile learning infrastructure. Today this is a $20-25M business, and Kenexa can grow this simply by putting more feet on the street.

Third, Outstart now brings Kenexa a brain trust of learning technologists who can develop new products. HotLava, for example, could be extended to provide more mobile solutions for content distribution and talent management. The Outstart team is a passionate and innovative development organization who can help Kenexa define and deliver its future learning products.

The Corporate Learning Market is in a Growth Phase

The $140 billion worldwide corporate L&D market is growing again (read the 2012 Corporate Learning Factbook® for details), and the gloves are off. PeopleFluent just announced the acquisition of Strategia, Saba's business is growing, Taleo's learning business has become a growth engine, and SumTotal just announced significant bookings growth. Now, for the first time ever, Kenexa can participate.

While Outstart does not provide Kenexa with an enterprise LMS yet, the company now has the potential to extend its strength in IO Psychology, talent management, engagement, and consulting into a range of new solutions for the needs of training organizations.

Recruitment is NOT Talent Acquisition

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:26:00 PST

In our Lexicon, we define Talent acquisition as “a strategic approach to identifying, attracting and onboarding top talent to efficiently and effectively meet dynamic business needs.”

The term Talent Acquisition (TA) is often used synonymously with Recruiting. However, these are two very different things. Recruiting is a subset of TA, and includes the activities of sourcing, screening, interviewing, assessing, selecting and hiring. In some organizations this extends to the early stages of onboarding, which then becomes a shared responsibility between HR and the hiring manager, with support from the learning organization.

Talent acquisition includes recruiting, but it is inclusive of other strategic elements as follows.

Talent Acquisition Planning & Strategy – ensures business alignment, examines workforce plans, requires an understanding of the labor markets, and looks at global considerations.
Workforce Segmentation – requires an understanding of the different workforce segments and positions within these segments, as well as the skills, competencies, and experiences necessary for success.
Employment Branding – includes activities that help to uncover, articulate and define a company’s image, organizational culture, key differentiators, reputation, and products and services. Employment branding can help advance the market position of organizations, attract quality candidates and depict what it is truly like to work for that organization.
Candidate Audiences – necessitates defining and understanding the audiences in which an organization needs to source for specific roles. Different sourcing strategies should be applied based on the understanding of the jobs and where the audiences will come from to fill them.
Candidate Relationship Management – includes building a positive candidate experience, managing candidate communities, and maintaining relationships for those candidates not selected.
Metrics & Analytics – is the continuous tracking and use of key metrics to drive continuous improvement and to make better recruitment decisions, to ultimately improve the quality of hire.

Within each of these core elements of TA are many other sub-activities and best practices. And, of course, the selection of tools, technology and outsourcing partners is a key element of a company’s talent acquisition strategy.

Recruiting is what many people want to dive into; however, that is what we call putting the cart before the horse. The elements listed above are necessary for doing recruiting well. To use an analogy - the design and implementation of leadership programs is only a piece of a leadership development strategy, following an understanding of business goals, defining leadership competencies, and integrating with other talent management process. In other words, a leadership program is to leadership development what recruiting is to talent acquisition. Alone, neither will drive their highest value to the business.

In early Spring we will be publishing a new, more comprehensive Talent Acquisition Framework. In this report, I will help you make sense of what is arguably the most complex area within HR/talent management. Stay tuned!

Finally, be sure to join me at our annual IMPACT conference April 10-13 in St. Petersburg, FL. I will be facilitating/delivering four sessions that address the topics of next generation recruiting, employment branding, improving quality of hire, and high-impact global recruiting. In these sessions will be senior-level TA leaders from UnitedHealth Group, Turner Broadcasting, Accenture, Eaton Corporation, Halliburton and Royal Caribbean.

Learning Revisited: Kenexa Adds OutStart to Its Fold

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:43:00 PST

At the beginning of 2011, I predicted that it would be the Year of Learning – learning revisited in all its various corporate guises.

The talent management providers took this to heart: the addition of learning management has been one of the hottest acquisition areas in tech this last year. And it continues: today Kenexa, the HR management software and services company jumped into the “gotta have learning” fray with the acquisition of e-learning provider OutStart. Boston-based Outstart delivers interrelated mobile, social and learning knowledge solutions.

The integration of learning into talent management systems makes sense. The automated link between assessments, either for new hires or longer term employees, to educational offerings to fill gaps or add skillsets is only logical. Similarly, the integration of performance review outcomes to training for remediation or fast-track curricula for high-potential employees all support an integrated single view of the employee, the group he or she is in, and make growth paths transparent.

Kenexa is only the latest technology company to add learning management to its portfolio of talent management: SuccessFactors acquired Plateau, Taleo bought Learn.com, PeopleFluent acquired Strategia. The ERP companies have long had integrated learning as part of their human capital management solutions. The need for corporate learning now is particularly pivotal.

Companies have long provided training – but now they are upping the ante, as it were—and for good reason:

Despite continuing unemployment, corporations report their inability to find the skilled talent they need.
New graduates are not leaving school with the skillsets they had in the past. This is especially critical for corporations that rely on lightly skilled hourly workers, such as retail and hospitality, and industrial skilled labor for manufacturing and repair services.
High-potential candidates and current leaders who kept their positions during the recession often saw cutbacks in bonuses and career development, including internal training. They see their own corporations as failing to invest in them just at a time when outside recruiters are honing their skills in sourcing the passive candidate.

New emphasis on succession planning for corporate leaders highlights educating candidates internally to ensure an understanding of the organization and its culture. This plan to address smooth management transitions relies on a “building” rather than “buying” strategy.

While corporations are investing in building their talent bench strength when they cannot buy it, the technology world is more often buying the learning systems they need rather than building them. The key to their success will not be in the “Look, I have one too!” approach – but in the skill they demonstrate in integration, fairly swift integration.

Learning management was left to the side for too long—now its time has definitely come—as a vital part of integrated talent development and management.

And if you missed 2011 as the Year of Learning, you have another chance: let us help you drive your learning initiatives for 2012!

Globalization Changes The Playbook - Leveraging Leadership Brand to Drive Global Business Goals

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:25:00 PST

Globalization is here --- and here to stay. Embracing it is easy. Leading in a global climate, well, is not quite so easy. Building and implementing leadership brand (and culture) to drive business goals can be even more challenging.

What do they do that their leader peers may not? What role does leadership brand and culture play in achieving global business results?

Effective Global Leadership Practices

We have discovered several desirable and global leadership practices and “how do I do it” tips:

Globally astute leaders are committed to self-discipline, hard work, and accountability within the context of their organization’s leadership brand to become more adaptable in how they inspire and lead people in a diverse world. They must execute on tasks similar to their non-global counterparts, yet they must be ready to flex their style to fit different environments, employee backgrounds and geographical expectations in order to get work done.

How To Get Started With Global Leadership Capability
To infuse global leadership capability within an organization often requires a transformation starting with the definition of a leadership brand and creating a culture that supports the brand. That requires the integration of global requirements into key talent processes and systems including, but not necessarily limited to:

Leadership Principles Identification
Leader Competencies and Behaviors Identification
Leader Supply and Demand Identification
Global Succession Management Strategy Definition
Stretch Assignments for Future Global Leaders
Global Leadership Development Solutions Including Global Coaching and Mentoring Resources
Onboardings for Global Leaders, Teams, and Employees
Communication of the Leadership Brand to Employees, Customers, Stakeholders
Integration of the Leadership Principles and Brand Into Other Talent Processes – how talent is hired, managed, developed, recognized

At our IMPACT 2012 conference this April, three senior leaders are eager to share their experiences and success stories about how their organizations are creating a leadership brand, holding leaders accountable to modeling leadership behaviors that support the brand and thus create the leadership culture to drive global business success.

These global executives:

John Carmichael, Vice President of Organizational Development and Training, Brinks
Phyllis Dozier, Vice President of Talent Development, UnitedHealth Group
David Kuhl, Senior Vice President of Global Talent Management, First Data

will discuss critical considerations and practices for defining leadership brand, developing and implementing a global leadership culture that ensures a people strategy needed to enable their global business goals. They will offer actionable and pragmatic insights to questions like these on global leadership:

How do you define global leadership brand? and culture?
What is the business value of implementing leadership brand?
How can leadership brand support global business growth?
How does your leadership culture mitigate potential barriers to global business expansion?

Weaving a global perspective throughout an organization is a necessity, not a “nice to have.” If you are a global organization, or thinking about expanding globally, you can’t afford to miss this insightful discussion.

These panelists will speak about the tangible value and benefits of leadership brand and culture to support global leadership for companies competing in the world’s fastest-growing markets. Don’t miss it and please come prepared with your questions.

Or, if you’d like to jumpstart the conversation, please feel free to write to me laci.loew@bersin.com. We are eager to ignite the conversation.

Until next time…

LMS Market Remains Hot (but not as hot as Facebook)

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:10:00 PST

The LMS market remains very hot, and so does Facebook (below). Comments on both.

This week Peoplefluent (a $100M+ talent management software company, built from the combination of Authoria and Peopleclick) announced the acquisition of Strategia, a small but very successful enterprise learning management systems company. Strategia was a Canadian enterprise LMS company with large clients like Bombardier.

What this acquisition shows is two trends in the market. First, companies no longer want to purchase talent management software from multiple vendors - so Peoplefluent found that its customers and prospects were demanding an integrated LMS.

Second, it points out the continued growth and health of the learning management systems (LMS) market. While not every LMS vendor is growing at the same rate, vendors like Taleo, CornerstoneOnDemand, Saba, SumTotal, Meridian, Certpoint, Oracle, and SAP all report growth in their LMS businesses. We have not resized the market for 2012 quite yet (it is very close to $1 billion), but I would venture to say we will see a good 10-15% growth this year. And this does not include the new business being generated by companies like Blackboard, Wisetail, Litmos, Adobe, Citrix, Skillsoft, and all the new startup social learning platforms.

As we have talked about for years, the learning management systems (or "learning platform" market) is very big and continues to grow. New applications like extended enterprise training (training of customers, resellers, channel partners) and resale of electronic content (companies like The Economist who are launching new e-learning offerings) is growing even faster than the corporate market. And the need for easy-to-use, dynamic, highly personalized electronic content is accelerating due to the growth in mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, and iPad.

Some day the corporate LMS market and the market for electronic books will further converge, and some vendors are moving in that direction... and right now nearly every vendor is building in new social features, mobile device support, and further features for customization and personalization.

It's a good time to be shopping for (and selling) learning platforms - and with the training spending up by 11% this year (read the just released 2012 Corporate Learning Factbook for more), we expect this market to continue to accelerate in 2012.

LMS Market vs. Facebook

Now about that Facebook IPO. The times are a changin. $3.7 billion in revenues, $1 billion in profit, $1 million of revenue per employee, 850 million user accounts, 450 million daily users. And... 12% of revenue in 2011 came from Zynga the online game company. Facebook is a money machine.

The surprises here:

The revenue and profit model for a company like this is like no other. The social graph creates orders of magnitude more value than a linear "user" based business model, if you can sell advertising.
Games are much bigger than we even dreamed. When 12% of Facebook revenue comes from silly online games (like Farmville), that tells us how desperate we all are for games. I know that in my particular case I play Words with Friends, ShapeShifter, and Flight Control whenever I want to relax. I think the rest of the world does too.

From the standpoint of the Learning & Development market - think more than ever about building and using the social graph in your own organization, and bring gaming and gamification to every L&D program you can.

PS. Come to IMPACT 2012, April 10-12 in beautiful St. Petersburg Florida. The conference will sell out and we will discuss all these issues among 450 of your senior peers.

Facebook Hits the Big Time

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 00:42:00 PST

Well, they did it.

After much awaiting, Silicon Valley’s Facebook submitted its S-1 filing to the SEC in preparation for going public. Following LinkedIn’s IPO in May of 2011, Facebook, the next poster child for social media success will also become a public company. Valley watchers predict the move will create over 1000 new millionaires. One of the lucky winners could be Facebook's co-founder and CEO, the 27-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who could gain as much as $28 billion after a successful IPO (if Facebook is valued at $100 billion.) (Mark started the company in 2004 at the age of 19.) [Today's CNN reports $16 Billion...]

Companies are eagerly clamoring on to the Facebook bandwagon; one of the most recent, Glassdoor, a jobs and career community, today announced the launch of Inside Connections, a new product that leverages Facebook to help job seekers quickly uncover if they know someone at a company where they want to work. To access Inside Connections, job seekers simply sign in to Glassdoor (www.glassdoor.com) using Facebook Connect to instantly see where they have an “in” at more than 150,000 companies around the globe.

For example, if you are interested in working for Google, simply sign in to Glassdoor using Facebook and visit the Google profile page to discover who within your Facebook friend network, including friends of friends, currently works or has worked there. From there, you can browse the deep content Glassdoor maintains about each company, including job listings, anonymous reviews and ratings, salary reports and interview questions and reviews – all for specific job titles from current and past employees and job candidates.

There are many potential uses of social media-- but as the interesting item for human capitalists is the proliferation of solutions, such as Glassdoor, that link Facebook use to sourcing candidates -- especially in today's job market. With its 800 million users -- will your next candidates be sourced from Facebook? If you lack a strategy for social media recruiting, be it Facebook, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or Twitter-- or the dozens more that are out there, you may want to rethink your sourcing strategy. See this space for more information on using social media for recruiting!

The End of a Job as We Know It

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 07:05:00 PST

The concept of a job, as we know it, is starting to go away.

Over the last year I've been speaking with many corporate business and HR leaders and have heard a common theme: we need our organizations to be more agile. We need to redesign the organization so we can learn faster, communicate better, and respond more rapidly to change. This quest for the agile organization has changed the nature of what we call a job.

Pfizer, for example, has set "increase business agility" as one of its four goals for the coming year. The company created an internal labor marketplace called PfizerWorks that lets employees bid on work from each other. Executives at Siemens told me that one of their biggest challenges today is moving engineers into new roles so they can focus on new business areas. InBev (Anheuser Busch), Scotiabank, and MetLife have all launched global talent mobility programs to force people to gain global awareness and expand business opportunities.

Something very profound is happening. Jobs are getting more specialized, people work in teams and cross functional boundaries, and success is being redefined by expertise, not span of control.

And people without specialized skills are finding it harder to find work. Seth Godin calls it “the end of the average worker.” As we prepare for our annual research conference (IMPACT 2012: Building Agility through People), I would like to talk a little bit about a theme which I call “the end of a job as we know it.”

The History of a Job

Many decades ago organizational development experts came up with the concept of "a job" - a functional role which was defined by a set of responsibilities, functional competencies (skills needed to succeed), a job title, level, and career path. These functional roles are institutionalized around the world. We write "job descriptions" when we hire people; we create organization charts which show functional roles in a hierarchy; we have billions of dollars of HR software which manage job competencies, compensation levels, and skills; and we have millions of workers and managers who have been trained to hire, manage, and organize their teams around these pre-defined jobs.

For you as an employee, you read the job description, take on the "job," try to do it well, and expect regular rewards and upward promotion. And if you work for a well run organization, there are training tools, assessments, feedback, and recognition programs to help you succeed.

Well, the world has changed. It's all about expertise, not just experience.

Well the world has changed. Today, thanks to communications technology, people can do their "jobs" everywhere and anywhere. We collaborate across the globe just as easily as we can in the same room. People don't necessarily progress "upward," but often "sideways" or "deeper" in expertise.

And as a result of this shift, if you let your skills atrophy, you're dead. Your employer can likely find those skills elsewhere by hiring a contractor, bidding out work, or finding another internal expert. We have entered a workforce where deep skills are the currency of employment, not just experience.

In our research we call this "the borderless workplace," a concept which explains how workers work seamlessly with people inside and outside their organization on a continuous basis. And this shift has redefined what a “job” actually is.

Let’s look at a few examples.

Customer service agents work in some type of support center. But today this may be virtual, taking place at home or in a remote location. Service agents can instantly access experts in engineering, sales, or product design through knowledge portals, online video, and email. So if you are a customer service agent that specializes in the support of one particular product, are you a "customer support agent" or are you a "product specialist?" If your company is smart, they will redefine your job as "product specialist" and put you into a role which lets you share your expertise with other service agents. You will make more money and serve others in the organization.
Look at IT and engineering. In the 1980’s companies hired “computer programmers." These were people with general programming skills and they came to your company with to learn your systems. Today there are dozens of highly specialized IT skills (UI specialists, Ruby-on-Rails experts, data scientists, systems architects, IOS experts,etc). If you don’t have deep expertise in one of these areas, you’re going to find it hard to find a “programming” job. And IT executives use borderlessness more than ever: if your company needs a programming skill, they will find it in India, China, or eastern Europe.

Your value as an employee is no longer "I am good at my job" but “how much demand is there for my skills.”

This is the process of "increasing specialization," a process which naturally takes place in high-performing organizations. Much research has been done over the years and it all shows that "specialists out perform generalists" by up to 10:1. Specialized software engineers produce 10X more productivity than generalists. Specialized sales people can sell 5-10 times as much as generalized sales people, and on and on.

Malcolm Galdwell's best-selling book Outliers is explains how all experts develop their special skills over long periods of time (7+ years to become excellent), and ultimately become world-class at narrower and narrower skills.

Roles not Jobs: Tasks and Projects, not Functions.

What this all means is that in today's high performing companies, people now take on "roles" not "jobs." They are responsible for "tasks" and "projects" and not simply "functions."

While a company may still need to hire a "customer service agent" or a "director of customer service," what they really want to do is find a person who has a highly refined set of skills which they need for their company. So if the company is Southwest Airlines, they're going to look for someone with great sense of humor, a high degree of emotional intelligence, and the willingness to do what it takes to solve a customer's problems. They aren't looking for people who "have had that job" but rather people who "have these skills."

And leadership, by the way, is just a "role" like any other - with its own particular set of skills. (Grundfos, one of the world's most successful global manufacturers, defines its leadership as "innovators," "executers," and "managers" - all peers with each other.)

This is particularly true in technical and professional roles. Many of the HR executives I talk with tell me they're having an increasingly difficult time recruiting. As our research points out, this is not because there aren’t people looking for jobs, it’s because their organization needs specialized roles and the workforce itself has not fully adjusted to this new world. The VP of Talent Acquisition at one major insurance company told me that she is no longer looking for "IT staff" or "computer programmers" but rather "Ruby on Rails Programmers with 5+ years of experience in Agile software development."

This is the essence of my thesis: "jobs as we know them are changing dramatically."

Five Ways High-Performing Organizations Manage People

I talk with many companies each year, and have found that high-performing organizations (the "agile" ones) manage people differently. They have embraced the new definition of work:

1. They reward results and expertise, not position.

Accenture rewards its consultants based on a 7-level capability model, which people are expected to focus on over many years of their career. People are evaluated based on the "internal demand" for their skills, not just their manager's assessment of performance.

Intel regularly rewards and moves top engineering talent around the company to promote and build their expertise.

2. They break down functional silos and facilitate work across business functions.

One of Pfizer’s greatest organizational breakthroughs was the company’s focus on “science teams” which collaborate and share information on various body systems, organs, and molecules – across different product teams.

IBM regularly creates global action-teams which take people from functional groups and brings them together to work on large client projects.

3. They reward continuous learning and “learning agility.”

The Federal Reserve and even the IRS now reward people for contributing knowledge to others becoming better teachers and learners. Some academics call this a push for "serial incompetence," meaning people are regularly moved into new roles to expand their breadth of experience.

4. They hire for values, innate skills, and fit, not for experience.

The famous Google hiring tests focus on intellectual ability and fit, not on experience.

Swardovski, one of the world’s leading retailers, looks for integrity and sense of value in its candidates, not retail experience. Even the giant American Express has changed its hiring standards to look for “hospitality personalities” not customer service experience.

5. They encourage and promote horizontal mobility.

United Health Group posts all major job opportunities internally and has built a whole team dedicated to “facilitated talent mobility.” This team helps people find new jobs internally, develop their own internal careers, and saves the company millions in external hiring.

All these high-performing business focus on people taking on "roles” and “responsibilities” and building deeper levels of skills and cross-functional contribution.

Implications for You, Your Organization, and the HR Marketplace

I’ve been talking with companies about this for the last year, and this shift has many important implications.

Job Seekers:

If you are a job seeker, it means that now, more than ever, it is time to focus on your own skills and abilities. Decide what you are truly good at, and focus on building this set of skills in a deeper and more meaningful way. Read everything you can. Take courses to build fundamental skills. Remember that experience drives mastery: get more experience doing different types of projects in your own job today. This makes you more valuable to your own employer as well as to the external job market.

Business Leaders:

If you are a manager or business executive, think hard about your own organization. Have you created enough flexibility in the organization to empower people to develop expertise and bring it to your customers? Do you encourage continuous learning and learning from mistakes? Do you reward expertise and functional depth? Do you define a “high-potential” as a strong technical or functional leader and not only a strong manager or executive? (Managerial skills are actually “functional skills” also.) For more on this, read about our High-Impact Learning Culture research.

HR Vendors and Suppliers:

Are you delivering the right products and services which reflect this huge shift in the nature of the workforce? Do you have tools and services which help people build expertise, find expertise, and develop and improve internal organizational agility? If not you may find yourself selling products which rapidly become obsolete. (Look at how quickly Monster.com, “a job-board” is being replaced by LinkedIn “an expertise network.” The company's earnings just dropped 5% despite a 9% increase in the number of postings.)

HR Executives and Managers:

Are you promoting HR practices which create cross-organizational work and expertise? Is your reward system flexible and open enough to enable people to work on project teams which cross the organization? Is your performance management process agile and flexible and does it force continuous feedback and transparency? Do you hire for skills and capabilities or just experience? Do you promote and facilitate talent mobility? Do you regularly communicate company values, goals, and strategies to encourage people to think of the organization as “one team” and not a set of functional silos?

The world of work is dramatically changing. Come to IMPACT 2012 and learn more.

Getting Bullish on SAP in the HR Marketplace

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 08:16:00 PST

SAP, the world's largest application software company, just announced the best revenue and earnings growth the company has made in many years. The company's quarterly revenues grew by 12% to over $3.4 billion Euros and profits rose by 23% to $1.6 billion. And now that the company has announced its plans to acquire SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion, the company has become a very serious player in the HR software marketplace.

SAP's Legacy in HR

SAP has quite a legacy of experience in the HR market. Going back to the early 1990's when SAP R/3 was first announced (the company's suite of ERP applications), SAP developed a global HR system and payroll solution which is in use by thousands of companies. While SAP's roots come from the financials and manufacturing segments, the company built a very robust HCM (SAP calls its HR suite Human Capital Management) years ago and developed one of the most sophisticated (and somewhat complex) approaches to competency management in the market.

In the last ten years SAP has invested heavily in its talent management modules (the company offers a whole suite of performance management, goal management, learning management, competency management, and competency management products) which are sold as part of its ERP solution. Companies like P&GE, Comcast, General Mills, AT&T, and many of the world's most complex organizations use various elements of SAP's HCM products today. SAP's learning management system (called its Learning Solutions Offering or LSO) has been through years of evolution and continues to grow as the company invests in new features for new training application areas.

With the acquisition of SuccessFactors, the company now offers a SaaS best-of-breed set of talent management products and the only piece left to do is integrate all these things together (more information on that front is coming soon). (Research members please read our detailed analysis of this merger here.)

SAP's Bigger Business Growth

But even this is all small potatoes in SAP's bigger business: selling application software and IT infrastructure solutions. In the last 5 years SAP has acquired BusinessObjects (one of the largest business intelligence software companies), Sybase (my former employer, one of the world's leading database and IT infrastructure companies), and now introduced a very exciting new product called HANA (High Performance Analytics Appliance).

HANA is actually a "database machine" - that is hardware. It brings together a lot of software technology from SAP, Sybase, and Business Objects to enable companies to replicate their database information into a very highly optimized format which can be queried at 2,000-4,000 times faster than a traditional database.

I was actually a product manager for this type of product (Sybase IQ) in an earlier life, and let me say here that this type of solution, if well implemented, can transform the way we use information. Imagine if you could query all the information in your candidate pool or employee pool and rapidly analyze sourcing quality, employee mobility, compensation variations, risk of resignations, etc. in a highly visual way. Hana, from a performance standpoint, makes this very fast.

SAP sells HANA to IT departments as an alternative to various other hardware systems (Oracle's Sun or Exadata products, IBM, Dell, etc) and even though the product is only around a year old, it is selling fast. In the new world of BigData, companies desperately want ways to turbocharge access to all this information.

Of course for those of you who follow the software industry, you know that there is a death match taking place between SAP and Oracle. Both companies are competing heavily (and to some degree so are IBM, HP, and others) to win the market for software applications, database software, and underlying infrastructure (middleware, business analytics software, and specialized hardware).

Oracle is by far the leader in database technology, but with SAP's acquisition of Sybase and SuccessFactors we can expect SAP (Oracle's biggest customer, believe it or not) to slowly but surely start moving its investments away from Oracle towards its own Sybase technology. (Read "Moneyball Comes to HR: Data Science Matters" for more information on BigData in HR.)

SAP is a Bullish Bet

Over the years SAP has been a frustrating company to work with in the HR market - their HCM solutions are extremely well engineered but hard to use and highly complex. Their user interface continues to lag the market, and the company's sales and marketing focus has not been optimized toward the needs of HR buyers.

Now, however, I think the tide is shifting. SAP's amazing momentum growth as a company, coupled with its experience in HR and the SuccessFactors acquisition, gives it a lot of potential to become a major player in all the software markets for HR. Very soon SAP will be announcing its more detailed plans for SuccessFactors, and we will all be watching to see how well they have thought out the integrated product strategy.

Making an SAP decision for HR is still a very big move. Workday continues to build momentum. Oracle Fusion HCM is now in the market. ADP is in the talent management market. And the focused talent management vendors (Taleo, CornerstoneOnDemand, Saba, Peoplefluent, SumTotal, Silkroad, and dozens of others) are all growing and innovating rapidly.

But given the latest revenue and earnings announcement from SAP, the company's growing success with HANA, and the potential for SuccessFactors (and Lars Dalgaard), I think we all have to keep our eyes on SAP as a growing leader in the $130 billion market for HR software and solutions.

The Business Case for Talent Management: Steve Ballmer Agrees

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:40:00 PST

Talent management makes money.

If you are trying to build a business case for a corporate talent management program, here is some astounding data:

Of the 700+ organizations we studied in 2010 and 2011, only 7% told us that they have a "strategic talent management" program. We defined talent management in four levels of maturity:

Silo'd (all HR practices operate seperately, with little standardization)
Standardized (HR practices standardizes, but not highly integrated with each other)
Integrated (A talent management leader in place, but integration still in process)
Strategic (A high degree of integration with business leaders taking charge for most talent practices).

Our research found that around the world, 28% of organizations are "silo'd", 45% are "standardized," 20% are "integrated," and 7% are "strategic." This data was collected through a variety of surveys and interviews. And this maturity is very slowly improving (only 5% were "strategic" in 2009).

Now the big news. This pays off.

Companies at level 4 are generating more than twice the revenue per employee, 40% lower turnover rates, and 38% higher levels of employee engagement. And they also spend almost twice as much per employee on HR in general. So while this costs money, it really pays for itself.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer proves the point.

Now let's look at a very specific example. BusinessWeek just published a fascinating interview with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. In this interview Mr. Ballmer discusses his growth as a leader, and explains that when he first got the job 3 1/2 years ago he believed that he could "muscle" most major decisions through the company. But Microsoft's tremendous failures with Vista demonstrated that the company was not working well together and there were not enough empowered leaders in engineering. Today Ballmer has totally changed his management philosophy and is now focused heavily on recruiting the right leaders and making them work together.

I spent a few days at Microsoft recently and after many years I felt a whole new energy. Product groups are clearly working more closely together, the company is now heavily focused on design and usability (Microsoft's new phone software is getting rave reviews), and I expect Windows 8 and Skype integration to be a huge home run for the company. If you read between the lines of Ballmer's interview (and visit Redmond), you can see that this turnaround is all about talent management and leadership. And today Microsoft's stock is at it's highest level in three years.

Talent Management is Good Business, not just Good HR.

As we discuss throughout our research, Talent Management is not an HR strategy, but a business strategy. HR's role is to design and promote the process, but it is up to line leaders to actually "run" talent management. They are the "talent managers." So until and unless you have line leaders taking charge, this is all just more human resources administration. So only 7% of companies believe they have reached this level of management maturity.

And this is not really a surprise. Organizations must continuously invest in management and leadership training, because people are always getting "promoted" into leadership without the necessary skills (67% of respondents rate their first line leaders far-behind or well-behind in the skills they need to do their jobs). And the "Right" leaders for your company are unique to your own culture, business, and strategy.

By the way, talent management is not something you copy out of a book. Your talent management strategy is unique to you. If you are a fast-growing company, you may need to focus on strategic sourcing and building your employment brand. If you are globalizing, your focus should be the integration of your recruiting and internal talent mobility program. If you suffer from low engagement and employee performance, it may be time to focus on the revamp of your performance management and development planning process. And on and on.

The bottom line is this: companies that work on these "soft" programs dramatically outperform those that don't. The numbers prove it.

Quality of Hire is a Buzz, Buzz, Buzzing…

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:55:00 PST

Over the last few months, as I’ve taken on the role of leading our Talent Acquisition research, the phrase “quality of hire” pops up every day. (The latest buzz phrase.) It is most often referred to as a key metric for a talent acquisition function. I would go one step further and say that quality of hire, and the challenge of improving it, is at the core of a TA Function’s existence.

Quality of hire can be calculated in different ways, and really depends on what a company is trying to measure and what they’ve defined as important. Are you improving quality of hire if retention in the first 12 months of new employees increases? Are you improving quality of hire if time to productivity decreases? Or, is improving quality of hire measured by an organization's ability to fill skills gaps? The answer is, it could be all of the above. But the goal of improving quality of hire does not begin with the metric.

Improving quality of hire is a means to an end, not the end itself. It is not a metric itself, but rather is defined by a collection of metrics. Think of these two very different questions.

How do you improve quality of hire? Answer: Define a strategy
How do you measure quality of hire? Answer: Define key metrics

Improving quality of hire starts at the very early stages of defining a talent acquisition strategy. It then quickly bleeds into an organization’s ability to define and message a clear employment brand, while transparently portraying its values and culture. From there, quality of hire is impacted by how well you understand your candidate audiences and different sourcing strategies for each. (Improving quality of candidates is another important goal, which I’ll discuss at a later time.) The selection of an appropriate assessment tool and the company’s ability to then grade or weight candidates against specific criteria lends to an even higher likelihood of a good selection. Finally, improving hiring managers’ interviewing and selection capabilities must also be considered.

Measuring quality of hire, on the other hand, requires a look at a myriad of metrics. Below are examples of four such metrics (highlighted in our Talent Acquisition Factbook)

Post-hire assessments - Nearly one-half of U.S. companies conduct some type of new hire assessment at 90 days, while just one-quarter conduct assessments at six months and one-third conduct assessments at the one-year anniversary mark.
Hiring manager satisfaction - Ryder, for example, surveys its hiring managers every 90 days for feedback. The survey is designed to provide leadership with immediate awareness about what is going well and what issues need to be addressed.
Candidate satisfaction - Progressive organizations are distributing surveys to new hires roughly 30 days after they start. The purpose is to benchmark recruiter performance and also ensure candidates are satisfied with the hiring process.
New hire turnover rates - Even during today’s tough economic times, our research shows that roughly one in every eight new hires left the job within the first 12 months.

Not one of these alone, however, can measure quality of hire. So, where do we stop measuring quality of hire and realize that we are measuring employee engagement? If your new employees (less than 12 months) are highly engaged, does that mean it is because of the quality of the hire, or because they really like their manager (for example)?

Honestly, I am not trying to confuse you more than what you may already be. My point is that this term “quality of hire” has been used loosely without much attention to what it really means. But I do hope that I got your attention. Throughout this year, we will address this topic more deeply, as well as many other practices in Talent Acquisition.

Also, be sure to join me at our annual IMPACT conference, April 10-13 in sunny St. Petersburg, FL. I will be moderating two panels on two important topics in Talent Acquisition – Employment Brand and Next-Generation Recruiting. I will also be presenting with my colleague, Karen O’Leonard, on the topic of Measuring and Improving Quality of Hire. You can see the entire agenda at http://impact.bersin.com/. If you attend, please be sure to find me and introduce yourself.

One last thing - If you are a talent acquisition practitioner, and are finding success in measuring the quality of hire, I’d love to hear about it. You can contact me at kim.lamoureux@bersin.com.

Yikes. Training spending up 9.5%, highest increase in 3+ years! A renaissance.

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 04:26:00 PST

Wow. After more than three years of decline in spending, corporate training budgets just jumped up 9.5% last year. (Just released, 2012 Bersin & Associates Corporate Learning Factbook®). Good news for corporate HR teams and business leaders in general.

This is a huge increase, bringing the average spending per employee to over $800, or $1021 in the High-Impact Learning organizations. In addition, spending on "informal learning" or social learning doubled this year over last, further reinforcing our thesis that corporate L&D is undergoing a true renaissance. What do I mean by a renaissance? I mean corporate training is truly entering a new, culturally important era - the era of continuous learning environments (also known as "informal or social learning").

Why the huge increase in spending? Several important reasons (you can download the executive summary for more details), many of which are discussed in our predictions for 2012.

First, companies really are hiring again, and they're finding it harder than ever to source the right talent. SHRM's latest data on manufacturing hiring shows that employers are having the toughest time finding manufacturing workers in 4 years, and SHL's latest survey on employee assessment shows that 63% of employers expect a very tough time finding key skills in 2012, a 22% increase over last year. As we discuss in our research, there is a growing imbalance in skills in the world, and employers now realize they have to build skills internally.

Second, we've cut training to the bone. Cutting training spending is often an easy thing to do, but it usually turns out to be a dumb decision. Why? Because well-run training programs actually save money. Consider what happens when you do away with formal corporate training. People don't stop needing new skills, they just get them on-the-job (or not at all). This means every cut in training dollar pushes more training workload onto the back of line managers - who have to pick up the slack. That's not to say that all training programs are great, but when they are they are some of the highest ROI investments a company can make.

Third, the training department of today is truly different. Today we have a whole new breed of training strategy taking form - one which builds a "continuous learning environment" - formal, informal, on-the-job, mobile, and social learning all blended together. Our latest Learning Leaders winners (you will read about them this month) demonstrate some of the most exciting, business-integrated, performance-driven learning solutions I have ever seen. This is the renaissance I've been talking about.

I'm over in Europe this week meeting with some companies like BT who are doing a whole research project on how to bring greater "reflection" into their workforce. Reflection simply means giving people the time, support, and reinforcement to "learn on the job" - one of the key practices we identified in our High-Impact Learning Culture research. Time and space to reflect is part of this "renaissance" I talked about earlier, and it's one of the most powerful tools you have to build organizational capability.

This is very positive news for the business environment in general and HR and L&D in particular. The training industry is back with a vengeance, and we will see some very exciting new solutions come to market in 2012!

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) - A Good Fit for L&D? (Part 1)

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:13:00 PST

Alternate Reality Game (ARG)…an interactive story-based game, delivered through multiple “real world” modes (i.e., text, phone, Internet, print, and others) within which players must participate interactively and work collectively to solve “real world” problems the story presents.

In our most recent High-Impact Learning Organization research, to be published shortly, we asked organizations to rate themselves from poor to excellent on their e-learning capabilities. Not surprisingly, the entry point for e-learning - the creation of simple, self-paced e-learning - isn't viewed as something too difficult to do.

On the other hand, expertise in things like serious games is viewed by most organizations as very difficult to do. Over 81 percent of organizations rated themselves as either "poor" or "below average" and just 6 percent rated themselves as "excellent." 81 percent. Wow. Why, do you think?

I imagine when I dig a little deeper I'll hear things like "we don't have the capacity," "what's a serious game?", "we don't have anyone on staff with specialized gaming skills," "they're too hard to create" and "the cost is too high." I probably won't hear someone say "they scare the bejesus out of me."

I don't know about you but just a few years ago if you said "serious games" to me I'd think about simulations in a 3D virtual world. Maybe even head gear. That would be cool. Head gear. Scary but cool.

Games. Fun for kids. Scary at work. What happened?

Let's reminisce about games...

Remember playing games as children where you undermined the rules at the start of the game or even during the game (hey, you’re cheating!). It was fun – you could make the game entirely different just by changing a few of the rules.

Today, as technology has become ubiquitous in our lives, games have become more complex (even Lego games) . For instance, “Geek Dad” Daniel Donahoo recently wrote about an alternate reality game (ARG) his 7 and 9 year old boys played to learn how languages are structured .

The game started with a letter in the mail (a Chinese character with a URL) that would lead the boys to a “rabbit hole ” that then immersed them in a game (FYI...the entrance point for an ARG is called a “rabbit hole.” It is usually an online site. “Down the rabbit hole” is a metaphor for adventure to the unknown, from its use in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. You knew that but I thought I'd tell you anyway.)

Donahoo noted that through Skype sessions with “virtual agents” and missions, the kids felt they were part of the story; it felt real. That is the essence of an ARG.

Of course ARGs are not just for kids. Today we see them used extensively in marketing campaigns (Catch the Mini and Why So Serious ), events (the Olympics ) and now we see it in workplace learning.

ARG stands for alternate reality game (not to be confused with augmented reality). ARGs have been around for ten years. Back then (and today still) they were used to promote movies, video games and music. Dr. Jane McGonigal, a world-renowned ARG guru, defined ARGs in 2008 as...

“an interactive drama played out online and in real-world spaces, taking place over several weeks or months, in which dozens, hundreds, thousands of players come together online, form collaborative social networks, and work together to solve a mystery or problem that would be absolutely impossible to solve alone .”

That is a great definition, especially for the type of ARGs Dr. McGonigal designs –games that focus on improving the quality of life and the greater good – but it may be a bit onerous for a group of 20 sales executives at an organization. A simpler definition for workplace learning might be something like...

“…an interactive story-based game, delivered through multiple “real world” modes (i.e., text, phone, Internet, print, and others) within which players must participate interactively and work collectively to solve “real world” problems the story presents.”

Based on my reading, talking to organizations and the research work of others, I see the following as elements of an ARG.

ARGs aren't scary. While they can involve 3D virtual worlds, they can also be as simple as combining a page on your intranet and Skype (or any other communication tool for that matter) and a document.

Now designing ARGs can be challenging and requires special skills but it DOES NOT mean you need extensive technology skills. Web page + Phone +Piece of Paper + Sound Game Design + Whatever = Serious Game. It's do-able.

This post is a tad long so we'll call it part 1. In part 2, I'll give you some examples of ARGs for workplace learning and share with you my thoughts on why they might be a great fit for L&D.

References

Bersin & Associates, The High-Impact Learning Organization 2012 (in press and you're gonna love it!)

Büscher, M., Ellis, R., Ferrario, M., Kortuem, G., Whittle, J., Schorch, M. & Zimmerman, A. (2011). Collective Intelligence and CSCW in Crisis Situations. Retrieved December 21, 2011 from http://www.ecscw2011.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/ws5.pdf Kim,

J., Lee, E., Thomas, T. & Dombrowski, C. (2009) Storytelling in new media: The case of alternate reality games, 2001-2009. First Monday, Volume 14, Number 6, June 2009. Retrieved December 20, 2011 from http://frodo.lib.uic.edu/ojsjournals/index.php/fm/article/view/2484/2199

Szulborski, D. (2005) This Is Not A Game: A Guide to Alternate Reality Gaming (2^nd Digital Edition) (2005) Lulu.com. Retrieved December 21, 2011 from http://books.google.com/books?id=M7VwtUa2TYAC&lpg=PP10&ots=QfFCDisjY2&dq=alternate%20reality%20games&lr&pg=PP10#v=onepage&q=alternate%20reality%20games&f=false .

EDUCAUSE: 7 Things You Should Know About Alternate Reality Games (2009) http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7045.pdf

-Janet Clarey

We are Greater than Me: Building an Agile Organization

info@bersin.com (Josh Bersin) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:28:00 PST

Late last year I attended two major talent and leadership conferences in Stockholm. At these events I had the opportunity to meet with various HR leaders at Electrolux, Ericsson, Logica, BT, Maersk, Grundfos, Unicredit, Bertelsman, and others. What I learned is something important that we are building into a broad research framework we will launch at our IMPACT 2012 research conference this year.

Let me present a preview here.

Building an Agile Organization

Over time, if you look at all the businesses that thrive and compare them against those that fail, you find one thing in common: it is the "agile" companies that succeed. Why did Kodak declare bankruptcy? Why did Nokia lose so much of its market share in mobile devices? What happened to Digital Equipment Corporation and Compaq? And how is it that Microsoft, a company that many think has passed it's prime (I disagree), continues to reinvent itself in the face of amazing competitors like Apple and Google?

It all comes down to one thing: agility. The word "agility" is complex: it refers to strategy, leadership, management, and learning. Agile organizations evolve their strategy but deepen it where they have strength. Their leaders drive execution but they also empower people. Management is thin, hands-on, and highly engaged. And people and teams are constantly learning.

All these things are easy to do in a small company, but they get harder and harder as the company grows. This is why "elephants rarely dance" and new, smaller organizations frequently disrupt major players.

What I learned in Sweden (and I will be sharing much more on this topic at IMPACT) is that these "agile" organizations have many things in common.

1. They deliberately and forcefully empower first line people. At Grundfos, for example (one of the world's most profitable, growing pump companies), the entire leadership model is based on the role of individual contributors. "Leaders" fall into three categories: innovators, specialists, and leaders. There is no "ladder" upward - people work in teams and the HR organization focused on the competencies of all three groups with equal levels of vigor and investment. If you want to be a leader, that is your choice - but certainly not the only way to get ahead.

2. They operate as a unit. They understand that "we are greater than me." At AP Moeller Maersk, for example (one of the world's most global and successful diversified enterprises), there is a philosophy and deliberate attempt NOT to highlight the role of the CEO in the company. They consider their CEO "one of the team" - and he is not widely celebrated as a hero. He is just part of the team. (This is a very different culture than in US companies.)

This intense teamwork focus is far more profound than we in the United States totally understand. There is a Nordic philosophy (and I talked with Electrolux about this as well) that it is actually distasteful for you, as an individual, to think of your goals and needs above those of the organization. So unlike the "rugged individualism" promoted in our western culture, these companies expect and coach people to think about the organization above themselves. In other words, "it's not about you, buddy."

At Accenture they call this "stewardship." The L&D executive there once told me "my goal is to teach every Accenture employee to walk out the door at the end of the day leaving Accenture just a little better than it was when they came into work that morning." This is far different from the strategy that individuals drive performance and that your goals, your achievements, and your deliverables matter above all else.

These organizations are also very "non-hierarchical." As I will present at IMPACT, they may have top-down organization charts, but in reality these charts are not very useful representations of how the company works. People work with their teams regardless of level, and every person is a hands-on worker. There are no managers who "sit behind desks."

3. They greatly value and measure execution. Finally, these companies have very clear goals and objectives - but they are not "top down" rigid goal alignment organizations. While all these companies have clearly articulated financial and operational targets, they create goals and objectives at a team level - and they vigorously and aggressively track and manage them. At Microsoft and GE they create this environment by creating very independent, highly aggressive, business units - each of which creates its own aggressive path into the market.

Combined together, these three attributes are coupled with a culture of learning to create agility. And we have "written the book" on learning culture.

It turns out, as we continue this thread of research, that HR in Agile organizations plays quite a different role than it does in more traditional hierarchical organizations. And what we are going to do at IMPACT 2012 is help you understand this important role. Stay tuned for much more, and sign up now to join us. Bring your entire team: our agenda this year is the best-ever, and the conference will sell out.