Social media: To trust or not to trust

We live in a world where a human being can seldom control his/her exposure to the public eye. It isn’t easy to keep secrets any more, and they say anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever.

I wrote earlier about how close we are to a world where a manager gets information about prospective employees from his/her colleagues and former managers (and vice versa), through leveraging social media. On the one hand, it makes it easy for a manager to do the screening process, and prepare himself and his team for the arrival of the new team member. Similarly, an employee can prepare himself before joining a new organization or a new team, based on the opinion of people who have had some kind of experience at the place. But this gives rise to two possibilities that needs immediate attention.

Firstly, whoever seeks opinions through social media must have a clear idea of who to trust and who not to trust. Untrustworthy sources can wreak havoc with the process and the seeker may end up with a grossly contorted result. Given the very nature of social media, a filtration process may not be that simple to implement effectively.

Secondly, as I mentioned before, it is said that anything once posted on the internet lingers there forever. We have read plenty of stories with the same moral, each citing a case where someone was terminated from a job/rejected at a job interview due to embarrassing photographs uploaded on a social networking site. In a business context, what is ‘embarrassing’ for an organization may be very different from what an individual might choose to keep hidden. The essence here is, social media may have drastically reduced our margin for error – one mistake made long ago may come back any time to haunt an organization or even an individual as long as it exists on the web.

Gathering intelligence using Social media

I was looking at a review for mobile app called Local Mind. If you are thinking of going out tonight, all you need to do is quickly open Local Mind and put a question across to fellow users who are already at this place you intend to go to. If so inclined, they can give you a real-time update on how the place is, what the crowd is like and even quick tips on the offers that are currently on. It is the social networking equivalent of calling ahead and checking with a friend what a place is like – except, your ‘friend’ base is suddenly expanded and you can get answers from the people who are at that place right now!

Stop for a moment and think – what else can this system be used for? The concept is really simple. Take something you do in everyday life, where you are likely to call a friend and check in advance, then do the same on a social network. We usually depend on the past experience of a friend, about how he/she felt about something/someplace he went to some time ago. This time, you are getting real-time updates from people.

How about doing the same when you are about to join a new project, under a manager you are not familiar with? Or on the other side, how about doing the same about a new team member who is about to join the project you manage? From one’s fellow team members and former managers, you can collect a lot of information, even though you really don’t know them personally.

Social media can do so much more for a business than branding it in front of potential customers and investors. The easy part is getting the answers, while the tough part is to choose from what you get! More on that in the next post

Coincidences and the Innovation Butterfly

At its simplest, an Innovation butterfly is the very initial cause for a particular instance of innovation. It may be a thought, a complaint, a protest, or even a rough sketch drawn playfully on a napkin while having coffee – something that seemed insignificant at the moment.

The mobile phone probably began with a thought by someone, who was stuck in the middle of nowhere, wondering “Now where do I find a telephone booth?”. Tata Motors claim to have hit upon the idea of an affordable car (which we now call the Nano) when someone noticed a family of four trying to balance themselves on a two wheeler. Start thinking of this scenario applying the extremes of pure logic, and you can break it into a number of vital pieces:

1.    Potential inventor drives by on a busy road

2.       Family of four gets on the two wheeler on the same road at exactly the same time

3.       The person (inventor) looks outside and sees them

4.       Visibility and weather conditions were good enough for him/her to see them and take notice

5.       He wasn’t preoccupied enough to let the sight escape his mind

6.       He/she wonders how the family can be helped out of this predicament

7.       He/she thinks of, or probably discusses with someone or hears about the possibility of building an affordable car, while this memory is fresh in his mind

Each of these 7 appear to be independent of each other and and are seemingly insignificant to the bigger picture. But if any one of them had changed, the inventor never may have noticed the family and may never have noticed a business need for such an invention. This is what is called the Butterfly effect, as applied to innovation. And each of these steps could be the proverbial Innovation Butterfly – a seemingly insignificant and possibly underrated beginning to a major event of Innovation. Theoretically, any event before these seven could have been a contributor, such as whether the family was going for a movie, or to visit someone at a hospital.

You never know what could start a revolution. Keep your eyes open for the next big thing, but most importantly, keep your mind open!

Innovation: Who is the best judge of ideas?

Great minds think alike. The greatest go ahead and patent it.

There is only one thing that hurts more than saying “Why didn’t I think of it?” after reading about a new invention. And that is having to say, “I had actually thought about it a few months ago and didn’t realize it was a good idea”. Around the world, it is estimated that the conversion rate of ideas to usable products is about 0.000002%. That means roughly 2 in every million ideas are taken forward to be fashioned into some meaningful product. I can assure you that’s a conservative estimate, and the real number is far less.

In any case, the gist of it is, a lot of ideas come to people and very few of them are worth pursuing. But then, what separates a good innovation ecosystem from the rest is how these viable ideas are identified and brought forward through a good judging process. In the million ideas, there may be 50-100 more ideas that are actually usable, but fall by the wayside because no one was able to appreciate the merit. Famous examples in technology are the mouse and graphical user interfaces, which were originally invented by engineers at Xerox, where they were both dismissed as ideas which are of no use to people. Other companies like Microsoft, Apple, etc swooped in and took it from them with minimal effort. Also think of the first few talent show judges who rejected Elvis Presley and The Beatles as not worth it.

Now that thought typically has two types of effect on the people of an organization:

1. Potential innovators gain in confidence, thinking their ideas may have more merit than others have been giving them credit for.

2. People in charge of filtering ideas may get more nervous, fearing “How can I reject an idea today, if it may come back tomorrow as a huge commercial success and mock me?”

So, does this mean that a culture of innovation will cause some not-so-good ideas to pass through the filter and generally lower the standards? Yes, but this would again indicate a flaw in the evaluation mechanism, rather than the idea generation engines. Do not let the former kill the latter. In the world of journalists, we often lament the many writers who have died on the editors’ table. This is more or less the same plague that has affected innovators of modern times.

Collaboration for Innovation: When and How does it Work Best?

 

The work life of a modern day professional has two key phrases in its description:

1. Continuous innovation and idea generation

2. Making oneself relevant to the business and the organization

These two key phrases are essentially tied to the concept of thought leadership. The Global CEO study by a major IT MNC showed up some telling numbers when it comes to innovation. 40% of corporate chief executive officers and other business executives suggested that employees are the primary source of innovation. About 35% attributed it to customers, while fewer than 20% suggested that ideas primarily come from internal R&D. The reason is pretty simple: At an employee level, there is tremendous amount of collaboration between unrelated thought processes. Customers may not have this luxury, nor will an R&D unit that works according to a predefined thought pattern – exceptions possible.

The first step in any major instance of transformation is when someone thinks about a situation and realizes there is a definite problem to be solved. Then comes the organized thought process and hopefully, a stage where a solution is found. But this poses a question – At what stage is an instance of innovation mature enough to be presented before the people?

If you have an idea, research upon it, build a prototype and present it, it works well for the business in the sense that it is a product that is ready to go. But in this case, you are depending heavily on yourself and your inspiration to get a product out. How often is this viable?

Several ideas that come to you may have been dismissed just because of the fact that you don’t know what to do with it. But someone else might have some excellent follow up thoughts on it, without ever having got the original spark. Collaborating at a very early stage of the innovation process will produce better results than working together on a prototype at a later stage – in terms of the number of ideas reaching the market and also the quality of the product created from the idea

Value creation for employees

Having touched upon value creation through loyalty and its importance in an organization let me round it off with a few more thoughts on the topic. I was having a conversation with a fellow USsociate, who asked me to shed some light on the other side of the coin – Value creation for an employee, by the organization.

I did mention it briefly in a prior edition, but let me elaborate on it a little bit today. It is analogous to the oldest instance of business transactions, which has remained essentially the same amidst all the economic evolution that has happened over centuries. The exchange of value for equivalent value in a different expression is essentially the root of any ideal transaction. On the part of the employee, the value transfer occurs through making use of his/her skills for some activity or result beneficial to the business. The organization running the business receives this value addition and instead, compensates the employee through some other expression of value.

Some of these expressions are more obvious than the others and hence are often mistakenly considered to be more precious than the others. For instance, tangible ones like the salary, bonuses, benefits, stock options, etc are very obvious to the employee. But certain other things, such as chances for learning and development, training options, the attention paid to the employee by the management and even the experience of working in the organization are also part of the value proposition, although they rarely get noticed. Surrounding yourself with quality people will naturally have a positive bearing on your own quality as a professional and as an individual. Working in a good organization is probably the perfect opportunity for this.

Look beyond the tangible value you get from an organization and also take into account what else you are gaining from your professional life.

Loyalty in the Value Proposition

 

In an interesting conversation that came up recently, one colleague was telling me about the value proposition between an employer and an employee. He opined: Loyalty is not one of the effects of a good value proposition. It is a critical component.

I must agree. What does an employee’s loyalty mean to an organization - is it measured by the number of years an employee works for the company? Or does it have more to do with whether the employee is willing to go that extra mile for the sake of the business?

Once upon a time, loyalty may have meant starting your career at one organization and retiring from the same one. But today, an employee is able to recognize the fact that he/she has so much more to offer. If you are a manager, take a look at your own team. How enthusiastic are they in the work assigned to them? Do they collaborate and share ideas to proactively increase the standard of their deliverables? And most importantly – would your team mates recommend your team, and the organization as a fine place to work?

Direct questioning is usually not the best way to do the measurement. The key here is subtle observation and… pardon me…. Reconnaissance! Effectively measuring this would offer you multiple advantages.

1.    It gives you an idea of the loyalty graph of your team members

2.    Tells you ways to increase productivity within your team and inspire people to perform well

3.    Gives you an excellent measurement of how you have been performing as a manager!

Building relationships at work

 

‘Building strong relationships’ describes a business model with some evident merits and perhaps a few demerits. The concept essentially points towards a sense of commitment and a certain level of freedom of operations.

The more mature a relationship between a service provider and a client, the more aligned the employees of each would be to the other’s business goals and processes. At the same time, there is less intervention from the client side and ideally, this drives up productivity at the service provider’s end. Selling is made easier, and there are certain advantages in hard times, such as in a recession; the client will think twice about cutting budgets in a long lasting engagement – of course, this is subject to compromises on both sides. In short, if the relationship is good, the business is good for both sides.

As an employee, who do you feel is at the other end of such a commitment: Is it the person who recruited you, the person who you report to, the head of the company, or some other individual? It can be anyone at all, as long as this one person made a difference in the individual’s life. The difference can be imparting some knowledge you won’t find in books, or it can be showing him/her how to think and work better, or it can even be about being there when you are needed the most. The significance is relative, and a third person may not be able to judge it. It is part of the personal connection.

That’s right. Many things in professional life are decided on the basis of this personal connection. Look at the members in your team and check – Have you made a difference in their lives?

Doing what the job demands…and only what the job demands

 

The relevance of an employee to the organization is too complex a metric to be decided on the basis of assumptions and depends on certain other factors. Some of these factors are directly under the control of the employee, while some others are driven by bigger wheels. That statement essentially points to another question – What can an employee do to ensure that he/she is relevant in his role?

Broadly speaking, every business in the world runs on the basis of a customer’s need, which it fulfills through its products, services or some combination of both. Whether the need is genuine or one created is another point of concern, but let’s not go into that now. In most cases, customers either purchase a product/service that fulfills their need completely, or they settle for whatever is available that best fulfills it. The same principle that applies to the relationship between the business and a customer also applies to the relationship between the business and an employee.

Typically, an employee who answers an advertisement for an opening, is expected to fulfill a specific need, which the employer is well aware of. An unfortunate trend in many cases is that the employee ends up doing exactly that – and nothing more. From the moment an employee begins working in an organization, he/she is knowingly or unknowingly part of a learning process. As an employee becomes comfortably familiar with the character of a business and its behavior, he/she also gets an insight into what other needs are remaining to be fulfilled. Some may be within your limits, some may not.

How Critical is a Critical Resource?

 What does ‘critical’ really mean at the end of the day?

I was having a chat with a friend of mine, who has a delivery role in a well known IT company. It was appraisal season, which is typically a precedent to salary revisions. Naturally, the conversation steered into hopes and expectations of ‘numbers’, as I am sure you know what I mean. The justification was clear in his mind: Critical resource means significant money. But I had a question: What does ‘critical’ really mean at the end of the day?

For an example, let us take a company ABC Inc which has, say around 50-100 accounts, each of which has several projects within them. Each project may have different teams within them. And that is just the delivery side. When a resource is critical to his/her team, is he/she automatically critical to the project? That would depend heavily on how critical the team itself is to the project. On the same lines, the project may or may not be critical to the account. And perhaps most importantly, are you fully aware of what the organization feels about a particular account and its bearing on the long term business plans? Maybe...just maybe...the organization is thinking about winding up the account you work for. So what will it look like if you walk in and demand a raise, just because you consider yourself to be a 'critical resource' on your team?

Think of it as a mathematical function. The absolute value of each term relies heavily on the coefficient attached to it. It is unfair to make an assumption about any coefficient unless you have considerable knowledge of the business and the future. The issue is relevance to the bigger picture.

Think about it, and you’ll see the principle applies to several aspects of life you would come across.

Knowledge Management for the New Generation

 

The ‘new generation’ of IT services – now that is a tagline we hear very often in various forums, within a company as well as external. It sure sounds flashy, and the phrase even gives us some kind of a self-assurance for the future, although a sizeable bunch of listeners don’t usually get the full implications of the term.

All right, I am not about to start a lecture on the origin of the term or what the real implications are for the business, but I want to drive a little bit of thought on certain aspects you are probably familiar with. ‘New generation’ does include new technology, new service lines and new standards for quality, but what is perhaps most significant is that there is a considerable amount of new people – new faces at the workplace.

With new faces on the workforce come new duties for the people behind each organization. The most obvious, of course, is to ensure that the new recruits are brought up to speed in terms of technical expertise. But the more important challenge is to make sure they are a perfect fit to the culture of the organization. This extends to how we deal with clients, how we manage external relations and how we project the image of the organization in the public eye.

A new employee – whether a fresher or a lateral hire – would have a set process in his mind. To modify the process according to the organization’s attitude, one would need to depend on precedent – a history of what was done in a similar situation. To open that door, there is only one key – Knowledge Management. Whether that knowledge comes from a veteran’s memory or a classified approved document, depends on the maturity of Knowledge Management in the organization.

Life runs on Knowledge Management

When you drove up to office today, you didn’t just trust your instinct to tell you which turn to take or which intersection to take it at. You may have either depended on your knowledge of the routine, or gone by the signboards and markers. In the bigger picture, ever since the first explorers sailed back home after discovering new lands, how did their successors know what route to take on the next voyage? The maps and charts they painstakingly drew up would have provided guidance for the people who followed their paths. On the road, we were able to clearly demarcate the points and make it easier for travelers of future generations, although this wasn’t directly possible at sea. Perhaps we are looking at one of the first instances of effective Knowledge Management.

For a long time, Knowledge Management has been tied to the idea of “not re-inventing the wheel”. Naturally, people need to make mistakes to learn the best way to do things – remember Edison’s 999 ways of not making a good light bulb and one way to make a good one. But then, the next time anyone wanted to make a light bulb, he/she wouldn’t have to go through all the 999 mistakes to reach the 1000th method. If Edison – or any other inventor - has made a note of what is good and what is bad, the new inventor is able to safely steer through and reach his goal.

In most industries, and especially in the IT industry, a lot of energy often goes into repetitive efforts to solve the same problem over and over again. Where and how does this loss occur? Let’s take a detailed look at it in a future editorial, but for now just keep this in mind: You are spending energy to solve the problem. So why not document the result and save equal amounts of effort at multiple points in future?

The Business Editorial - How, Why and What

Electronics Engineer à Journalist à Content Manager à Corporate Communications Professional

I am probably the only person in the world to have trodden this particular career path. To say the least, the corporate environment of an IT Services company was unfamiliar territory. My primary task was to facilitate Employee Engagement, which until then was something I had never even heard of. To navigate this realm, I had some very basic and highly effective tools – free thinking, common sense, an ability to make logical inferences, and a distrust of clichéd management texts that seem to restrict your thoughts in a way some stranger finds best.  

The best thing that happened to my career here is the responsibility of writing an editorial – a daily thought leadership blog - for the company newsletter. That’s right, every working day the entire company was presented with my thoughts on business, people, and everything that connects the two. I organize the information which I had assimilated - from what I could think up, read about from thoughtful sources, or pick up from casual conversations with some good people – and publish those, . And it worked! ‘The Editorial’ remains a very popular communication channel to reach the employees of our organization, around the world.

Then I realized that what I held in my hands was a treasure trove of unbridled thought leadership material. I decided to open it up for the good of men and women around the world who need some help in making sense of what they do in their careers.

So how regular will I be in updating this? I write one blog post every working day for my company newsletter. My promptness needs no further proof. And on my blog, I don’t have the shackles of whether something is ‘appropriate for a corporate audience’. So let’s make the most of it!