As I left Miami after graduation, I immediately embarked on another milestone – my first trip to Vietnam.  In my new job, our team has an office in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon).  Part of my team is in this office, so I’ve been eager to meet them all.  I’ve spoken to the team on the phone and over e-mail, but was ready to see them face to face.

The journey to Vietnam was awfully long, since I was coming from Miami (rather than from Seattle).  I flew from Miami to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Ho Chi Minh City – a little over 26 hours of travel.  I was surprised to realize a quirk in my scheduling: the three flights had departure dates of May 11, May 12, and May 13!  The trip felt like I was in transit for three days, even though I wasn’t.

I arrived in HCMC on Monday morning and, after checking into my hotel and showering, went straight to the office.  I immediately felt the energy, warmth and excitement of the entire team and that continued throughout the week.  Each day was filled with lots of meetings, while the nights were busy having dinner and celebrating with various co-workers (which provided a great opportunity to get to know them a little better, outside of the office).

The team is preparing to move to a new office, on the 14^th floor of the REE Tower near the current office.  The highlight of the week, for the entire team, was on Friday – a mini-party in the new space.  For most of the team, this was the first opportunity to see the new office (although the build-out was not yet complete).

I was fortunate, throughout the week, than my boss, John, was with me on the trip. John has spent lots of time in Vietnam, so I never felt like an inexperienced foreign tourist.  Whether it involved deciding where to eat, avoiding getting cheated by unscrupulous taxi drivers, choosing where to get a massage, or knowing how to get around, John had it all under control.   [Yes, we went for a massage, not once, but twice.  For those of us coming from the U.S., it's remarkably inexpensive - each massage cost the equivalent of US$10.]  I had one day (Saturday) to set off on my own, for some sightseeing (which I’ll discuss in a future post).

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

My first trip to Vietnam was a big success.  I look forward to returning soon (and sharing the experience with my wife on some of my future trips).  

Events like this give an opportunity for reflection.  As our daughter moves onto the next stage of her life, so do her parents.  For the first time in eight years, we’re not the parents of a college student.  [And we’ll have no motivation to fly from Seattle to Miami multiple times per year!] More significantly, for the first time in more than twenty years, we’re not the parents of any student at all.  Both of our children are now officially “adults”, by any measure, although we’ll still support them emotionally (and in other ways, if they need it).

Much of our reflection centered on looking backward.  We’ve raised our children well (he says modestly).  Though they’re both talented and seem likely to be successful in their careers, those aren’t the most important traits.  They are kind, honest, respectful, and principled.  Their instructors, their peers, and their colleagues frequently praise them, consistently respect them, and genuinely like them.  Those are the characteristics that we acknowledge, as parents, with pride.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Being a parent provides the greatest pride I’ve ever felt, reveling in the accomplishments of my two children.  

I wrote this post for the SDL corporate blog, but liked it enough to post it here.

Social media usage in business is exploding, but it hasn’t yet provided a “magic bullet” to help companies use it to improve their results.  Companies struggle to jump from social media monitoring and listening to taking actions that improve their business.  Marketers try to glean nuggets to help them make decisions from a flood of data, but it’s a challenge.

 Marketers (along with politicians, public speakers, corporate presenters) have long known that audiences connect more with stories than with bulleted PowerPoint slides.  If you present a compelling narrative that people can understand and let them connect with it emotionally, they’ll be more receptive to your message.  This is true, whether you’re seeking votes, trying to persuade co-workers to embrace your proposal, or selling a product.  We connect with stories (a fact which is true at a biological level[1]).

 When it comes to gleaning insights from social media conversations, marketers should learn from their own craft, treating themselves as the audience.  Statistics aren’t enough.  The fact that there is an increase in number of tweets about my brand doesn’t help generate more revenue.  Seeing a declining trend of “content tone” in blog posts about my product doesn’t give any real insights into customers’ buying behavior.

How can a marketer go beyond “just data” and deliver stories with a narrative that resonates?  It’s more complicated than simple social media monitoring.  There are tools (including’s SDL’s Customer Commitment Framework, or CCF[2]), that provide real insights from social media conversations.  With more sophisticated analysis, social media content can be correlated to the stages of a customer journey.  In addition, audience segments can be identified, matching specific profiles of buying behavior.  This rich collection of information reaches beyond just listening to social media posts, allowing us to elicit the stories that match the experiences our customers (or prospective customers) are having.

The deeper insights might indicate that prospective customers learn about a new product, but struggle to get it working when they download a trial from the vendor’s website.  They might show that buzz and excitement were generated when a Memorial Day sale was announced.  They might demonstrate that the upgrade that seemed to generate lots of volume actually created a lot of frustration with ease of installation and with customer support.  In each of these cases, the story helps drive understanding and action.

What does this mean for marketing professionals?  Through the stories that are produced, Marketers can identify specific actions they will take.  Maybe they’ll target an advertising campaign at a specific segment of customers.  Maybe they’ll adjust their web presence, tweaking the pages that are presented to website visitors who are already customers.  Maybe they’ll invest in improved customer service tools.  Maybe they’ll offer discounts or run a sale, to attract cost-conscious buyers.

The important, valuable, difference is that they’ll be making these choices based on factual, reliable information – information that provided through a story.

Knowledge transfer can often be a difficult part of the ramp-up process for a new employee.  The situation is difficult if the outgoing employee is no longer employed by the organization – the necessary knowledge may already be gone.  Similarly, if a new position is created, there won’t be a single person with the necessary knowledge to provide.  Finally, in some cases, there’s resentment or resistance to the organizational change, making the knowledge transfer strained or stressful, since the person with the right information is uncooperative.

Luckily, for me, I didn’t have any of those obstacles.  It’s rare to have an “instant connection” with a colleague, but I found that with Ericka.  From the first day, we meshed well and understood how to communicate with each other.  We quickly developed a rapport and a high level of mutual trust.  Because of that connection, the knowledge transfer from Ericka to me went very smoothly.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Successful knowledge transfer is, traditionally, difficult to achieve.  It works best when there’s single expert providing the necessary transition. 

On Monday 25 February, I started a new adventure as VP of Product Development for the Social Intelligence division of SDL. Here’s the “official” description of our division (whose primary product can be found here):

SDL Social Intelligence offers an enterprise suite of social intelligence tools and services that includes social media monitoring, listening, analytics and predictive insights.

What does that mean, in plain English? I’ll answer that in two parts.

We collect information from social media conversations – micro blogs (like Twitter), social networking (like Facebook or MySpace), blogs, rich media (like YouTube) and others. We aggregate and organize those conversations (classifying it by geography, gender, and other tags). We also analyze the content of the conversations, using text analysis and keyword matching to determine sentiment, emotion and topics. All of that gets stored in a big data warehouse.

Once we have that data warehouse, we provide tools and services for our clients, giving them insights based on those conversations. From that standpoint, much of what we do is similar to what a market research firm does with surveys, focus groups and questionnaires. With our products and services, we can help our clients understand what their customers (or prospective customers) are thinking, based on the conversations those people are having online. That can be incredibly powerful.

In upcoming posts, I’ll explore some of these ideas in more detail, while also continuing to offer thoughts on management, theatre, baseball and whatever else seems interesting.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

My years at Noetix were wonderful and I have fond memories of the people and products there. I’m now ready for (and very excited about) a new challenge at SDL.

We brought in four candidates to interview for the General Manager position.  As noted before, the candidates fell into two groups of strengths: Consulting Delivery Focus and Consulting Sales Focus.  Going into the interviews, my expectation was that delivery would be more important than selling.  A big reason for this was that we had moved Kelly (one of our Consulting Directors) into a role focused exclusively on helping our sales team to sell consulting services.  With her already in that role, hiring additional strength in selling services was less important than other skills.

As we spoke with the candidates, the interviewers were generally in agreement, even before having a debrief meeting.  One candidate (who was “sales focused”) clearly interviewed far better on the phone than he did in person.  He was quickly (and unanimously) eliminated from consideration.  Of the two “delivery focused” candidates, one was clearly stronger than the other.

That left us with two strong candidates – one “sales focused” and one “delivery focused.”  As we made the final decision, it became clear that a weighting between those two areas wouldn’t matter.  Although both finalists were strong, one candidate, Jon, seemed better in most ways and (just as importantly) was nearly as strong at “selling services” as the one purported to be more focused in that area.

So, our final decision was relatively easy.  We all agreed that Jon was our choice.  I worked with our HR director to make an offer, which (happily for all of us) Jon accepted.

Next time, we’ll complete this series with the final transition of responsibilities from Jan, as she reaches retirement.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Don’t pre-judge what’s most important when interviewing candidates with diverse backgrounds.  Allow the interview process to play itself out.

After filling our new manager roles, we turned our attention to hiring a new General Manager of Consulting.  This position would include most of the responsibilities that Jan had carried out as VP of Professional Services prior to her retirement.

We knew that we wanted to find an external candidate for this role.  Our HR Director identified candidates through all the traditional recruiting channels – recruiters, employee referrals, LinkedIn, job posting sites, etc.  After resumé screening and phone interviews, we identified four candidates we wanted to bring in for interviews.

Interestingly, the candidates naturally grouped into two main categories (with two candidates fitting into each one):

• Consulting Delivery Focus
  Two of our candidates had very strong track records for delivering Consulting services.  Each had been a VP of Consulting, managing large Consulting teams, delivering more revenue than our team currently delivers.  Both had grown up through consulting organizations, having started as consultants with strong technical skills in the core technologies that are essential for our team.

• Consulting Sales Focus
  Two of our candidates had very strong track records for selling Consulting services, with career focus in Business Development.  Again, each had a strong track record, but focused primarily on “generating demand” for consulting, rather than “fulfilling demand” for services that had already been sold.

We arranged for each candidate to fly to Seattle for an interview.  Because of the critical importance of this position, we also arranged for key remote employees (especially Rene and Chris) to travel here to interview the candidates in person.

As we scheduled the interviews, it wasn’t clear (at least to me) which of the two divergent areas of strength would prove more important to us.  It would depend upon meeting the candidates themselves.

In the next post, I’ll describe the interviews with these candidates.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

When filling key positions, it is valuable to consider candidates with differing (and contrasting) strengths.

Delivering the good news to our internally promoted managers and new hires was the easy part.  Now it was time to take on the more challenging portion of our structured communication plan:

• Deliver the bad news to the candidates we didn’t select
  This was the hardest part.  We had four internal candidates who, as noted in a previous post, are very good at their jobs, but weren’t selected for the manager roles.  For each one, we had a conference call with Rene, myself, and, in a few cases, Jan (the retiring VP of Services).  We had agreed that I would deliver the disappointing news, explaining clearly and concisely why we had chosen the candidates we had.  I also committed to have a follow-up one-on-one call with each candidate, explaining in more detail what the strengths and weaknesses of their interviews had been.

  Each of these calls went relatively well.  Naturally, all of the employees were disappointed – each of them had hoped to be chosen.  [That’s fairly obvious – why else would they have applied and interviewed?!]  I was direct (without being mean) about where they had interviewed strongly, where they could improve, and how they could be successful in interviewing for similar positions in the future.  Overall, I think that our open and honest process helped alleviate some of the disappointment.

• Inform all employees of their new manager
  For each consultant currently reporting to Jan or Rene, we organized a one-on-one call to inform that employee of the changes we were making.  Most importantly, each employee learned in that one-on-one call who would be his or her new manager.  This was especially important – no one should learn that sort of information indirectly.

• Announce the changes to the entire company
  Once all of the people who were directly affected knew what was happening, we were able to announce the changes to the entire company.  This was pretty easy – I drafted an email that provided some background information on the new organizational structure. I announced (and congratulated) the new managers and concluded the message by listing everyone on the team, organized by manager in the new reporting structure.

With that message sent, we were done with this major part of our reorganization.  One big task remained: fill the General Manager position with Jan’s replacement.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Employees should always learn about managerial changes that affect them through direct one-on-one communication.

After interviewing seven candidates for our managerial openings, we had chosen two and were prepared to make offers to them.  One of the new managers was an internal candidate and one was external.

The first step was to communicate our decisions to the two new managers, and to the rest of the company.  We started this process with an important core belief: No one should learn indirectly about a change that affects them directly.  Instead, communication of those changes needed to be personal and private, and in order to achieve this, our communication plan followed a carefully structured order:

• Determine the reporting structure for the new managers
  Now that we knew who the new managers would be, we needed to work out the new organization structure.  We had about fifteen employees who were all going to have new managers.  We needed to determine who would report to which new manager, and who would report directly to Rene or directly to me.  There were a lot of factors to consider – geographic location, technical skills, personality, inter-personal relationships with colleagues (including the about-to-be-promoted manager), and length of tenure with the company.  Still, even with all those considerations, it didn’t take too long to come up with an org chart we were all satisfied with.

• Make offers to the new managers
  It’s easy to deliver good news!  We arranged a three-way conference call with the internal candidate, myself, and Rene (Director of Consulting, who would oversee this new role). He eagerly and happily accepted the position.  Our HR Director then called the external candidate with the other job offer, which he also accepted and agreed on a start date.

• Make offer to the new principal consultant
  One of the external candidates turned out to be well qualified for a different open position.  Our HR Director called him with a job offer as well, along with an explanation of why we hadn’t chosen him for the manager role, but thought he was ideal for the principal consultant opening.  Just like the other candidate, he accepted our offer and agreed on a start date.

In the next post, I’ll explain how we completed the communication (including the most difficult part of the process).

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

When you are announcing significant organizational changes, prepare a detailed, structured plan for communication and carry it out swiftly.

We had identified seven candidates for our managerial openings: five internal and two external.  We still were uncertain as to how many positions we were going to hire – at least two, possibly as many as four.

Our interview process for the internal candidates was a bit unusual.  We had five very strong employees interested in the positions.  We already knew we liked them, we knew they were good at their jobs, and we knew we wanted them on our team.  We recognized that we were immediately setting ourselves up to create disappointment for several of our strongest employees: each of them, naturally, hoped to get one of the new manager roles, but there weren’t enough roles to go around.

During the interviews, I made a point of discussing this openly and directly with each candidate.  I emphasized that the worst case outcome would be that they’d have a job they liked and were very good at, for a company that appreciated them.  Based on follow-up discussions with each candidate, that honest and candid approach was helpful.

Following the interviews, we had a “group debrief” meeting, with all six members of the interview team participating.  I like this approach and prefer it to the “have each interviewer send feedback to the hiring manager” method.  It allows each interviewer to hear and consider the pros and cons identified by the other interviewers.  It also allows for discussion of the priorities for the position and comparison of the candidates’ strengths and weaknesses against those priorities.

In this situation, the group debrief meeting also allowed us to determine how many positions we were filling.  We decided to add two managers, leaving ourselves the option to grow further as our team adds more headcount.

In the group meeting, we reached consensus fairly quickly.  One internal candidate and one external candidate stood out above all the others.  In addition, the other external candidate was deemed a good fit for our team, but not in a managerial role.  We decided to offer him a position as a Senior Consultant.

Next step: communicate the decisions, both to the candidates and to the rest of the team.

For now…I’ll leave you with this thought:

Proceed carefully when interviewing internal candidates for a new position.  You likely disappoint the candidates not chosen and you want to make sure you don’t alienate them in the process.