Sameer Patel, currently SVP and  in charge of SAP’s Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software Products and Go to Market recently penned a blog post, "Who Spiked the Enterprise Activity Stream?" I don't want to overgeneralize and am open to corrections if I do, but the post seems to be a critique on the fact that the design of the stream, in this case a seemingly Wild West of constantly flowing and updating information sent into the Wild with little of no direction, is not a design that focuses on a drive to "closure" and that "short bursts of closure on the way to the big finale" are how work gets done. So I have a couple of thoughts.  To begin with the ironic - I follow Sameer on Twitter and value that information but yes, I could live without his tweets :-) I could also live without knowing when each and every one of colleagues has a birthday but there is value there though in terms of providing context about the people you work with. I'll try to focus on the stream though.  I don't think the manner in which the information coming to you is actually very new. My Inbox can be a stream - at times its been a river, or a firehose. Either way, its an undifferentiated flow of information, a lot of which I did not ask for, coming at me and typically I've had very little ability to filter that flow in a way that allows me to shape it so that it makes more sense to me. I don't think I need to poll my users even to find out that they think there must be a better way to communicate than an endless river of emails. As far as driving closure....the two easiest ways to find closure in email are the FWD (an action passed is an action completed) or the delete button. The point is, it's still a flow and as such, I can still miss the occasional important email from my boss or client in that flow. So why do I like the activity stream better? First, most implementations of activity streams that I've seen allow for some way to highlight to a particular user, an important post. Much like Twitter, most streams allow for the specific naming of an individual and that triggers a notification to that user, sometimes ironically in email or sometimes just using in-browser notifications. That's all mechanics though.  The second, and I think most important differentiator for the stream is that it is (for the most part) public and visible (within the enterprise). This dynamic adds a whole new layer that isn't there in email. The very visibility of posts, within the context of that "ambient learning", decreases the chances that I'll miss something important by building on an awareness of what everyone is working on and what the important posts should be.  Driving closure though - that's the heart right? Remember the Herding Cats video? I think that video was created to tell the story about trying to drive closure through email :) I think open, transparent discussions can allow closure to be driven much more efficiently than emails hidden in Inboxes and bloated PST files. The key though is that they won't do it by themselves. Behavior has to change in order to maximize the effective use of streams. Remember when people used to print out emails? Yeah, not so effective but we learned to behave differently - why assume the same isn't true with streams?  So I don't think the stream is spiked, I think it's just a new taste. :)

So to all the folks who had a moment of crisis about seeing Ender's Game because of the hateful comments of the book's author, as wrong and misguided as I thought that protest would be (since the message of the movie countered those hateful comments), this letter, this makes me want to cross Wolf of Wall Street off my list. I say that having not seen the movie and knowing that while Scorsese is known for nuanced, multi-faceted films - that some people will come away from this seeing the Wolf as someone to emulate.I think looking again at Ender's Game and this film - the fact that one is a fiction and one is based on real people - the Wolf is still out there profiting as a motivational speaker - really makes this a more dificult call. Read the letter though, and you decide.  ============================================================ (story link)  An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself BY CHRISTINA MCDOWELLI hate to be the bearer of bad news, dear Kings of Hollywood, but you have been conned. Let me introduce myself. My name is Christina McDowell, formerly Christina Prousalis. I am the daughter of Tom Prousalis, a man the Washington Post described as "just some guy on trial for penny-stock fraud." (I had to change my name after my father stole my identity and then threatened to steal it again, but I'll get to that part later.) I was eighteen and a freshman in college when my father and his attorneys forced me to attend his trial at New York City's federal courthouse so that he "looked good" for the jury -- the consummate family man. And you, Jordan Belfort, Wall Street's self-described Wolf: You remember my father, right? You were chosen to be the government's star witness in testifying against him. You had pleaded guilty to money laundering and securities fraud (it was the least you could do) and become a government witness in two dozen cases involving your former business associate, but my father's attorneys blocked your testimony because had you testified it would have revealed more than a half-dozen other corrupt stock offerings too. And, well, that would have been a disaster. It would have just been too many liars, and too many schemes for the jurors, attorneys or the judge to follow. But the records shows you and my father were in cahoots together with MVSI Inc. of Vienna, e-Net Inc. of Germantown, Md., Octagon Corp. of Arlington, Va., and Czech Industries Inc. of Washington, D.C., and so on -- a list of seemingly innocuous, legitimate companies that stretches on. I'll spare you. Nobody cares. None of these companies actually existed, yet all of them were taken public by the one and only Wolf of Wall Street and his firm Stratton Oakmont Inc in order to defraud unwitting investors and enrich yourselves. As an eighteen-year-old, I had no idea what was going on. But then again, did anyone? Certainly your investors didn't -- and they were left holding the bag when you cashed out your holdings and got rich off their money. So Marty and Leo, while you glide through press junkets and look forward to awards season, let me tell you the truth -- what happened to my mother, my two sisters, and me. The day my father had to surrender to prison, I drove him. My mother had locked herself in the bathroom crying and throwing up, becoming nothing short of a more beautiful version of Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine. Ironically enough, Marty, she looks like a cross between Sharon Stone and Michelle Pfeiffer. Totally your leading ingénue type. Anyhow, after my father successfully laundered money in my name, hiding what was left of our assets from the government in a Wells Fargo bank account, I arrived home to discover multiple phone calls from creditors and attorneys threatening to sue me. He'd left me in nearly $100,000 worth of debt. He left and never told me. After all of that liquidated money was gone from the Wells Fargo bank account, things got pretty bad. My younger sister ran away at seventeen. My older sister struggled to finish school in Texas. I couch surfed for two years, sometimes dressing out of my car and stealing pieces of salami out of my boyfriends' refrigerators in the middle of the night, because I was so hungry and so ashamed that I couldn't feed myself. Tips at the restaurant weren't cutting it. It's a pretty confusing experience to go from flying private with Dad to an evening where he's begging you for a piece of your paycheck so he can buy food for dinner. But, here's the real kicker -- I believed him. I believed everything my father told me. I believed it was the government's fault he was going to prison and leaving his little princess, I believed it was your fault, Jordan Belfort. I believed that by taking out all those credit cards in my name, my father was attempting to save me. I believed him when he got out, and when he told me everything would be OK. I believed him until he tried to do the same thing all over again -- until I was at risk of being arrested myself (and I'm saving that story for the memoir). So here's the deal. You people are dangerous. Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees. And yet you're glorifying it -- you who call yourselves liberals. You were honored for career excellence and for your cultural influence by The Kennedy Center, Marty. You drive a Honda hybrid, Leo. Did you think about the cultural message you'd be sending when you decided to make this film? You have successfully aligned yourself with an accomplished criminal, a guy who still hasn't made full restitution to his victims, exacerbating our national obsession with wealth and status and glorifying greed and psychopathic behavior. And don't even get me started on the incomprehensible way in which your film degrades women, the misogynistic, ass-backwards message you endorse to younger generations of men. But hey, listen boys, I get it. I was conned too. By. My. Own. Dad! I drove a white Range Rover in high school, snorted half of Colombia, and got any guy I ever wanted because my father would take them flying in his King Air. And then I unraveled the truth. The truth about my father and his behavior: that behind all of it was really just insidious soul-sucking shame masked by addiction, which we love to call ambition, which is really just greed. Greed and the desire for fame (exactly what you've successfully given self-appointed motivational speaker/financial guru Jordan Belfort, whose business opportunities will surely multiply thanks to this film). For me, it's become goddamn unbearable. But I refuse to give up. Belfort's victims, my father's victims, don't have a chance at keeping up with the Joneses. They're left destitute, having lost their life savings at the age of 80. They can't pay their medical bills or help send their children off to college because of characters like the ones glorified in Terry Winters' screenplay. Let me ask you guys something. What makes you think this man deserves to be the protagonist in this story? Do you think his victims are going to want to watch it? Did we forget about the damage that accompanied all those rollicking good times? Or are we sweeping it under the carpet for the sale of a movie ticket? And not just on any day, but on Christmas morning?? So here's what I'm going to do first. I'm going to hand you my shame. Right now, in this very moment. The shame that I've been carrying for far too long as a result of being collateral damage. Because each of you should feel ashamed. And then I'm going to go pre-order my tickets to August: Osage County in support of Julia and Meryl -- because at least, as screwed up as that family is, they talk about the truth. I urge each and every human being in America NOT to support this film, because if you do, you're simply continuing to feed the Wolves of Wall Street. Yours truly, Christina McDowell PS. Quick update on Dad: He is now doing business with the Albanian government and, rumor has it, married to a 30-year-old Albanian translator -- they always, always land on their feet. Christina McDowell currently lives in Los Angeles. She volunteers with InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit for children impacted by the criminal justice system, and is currently writing her memoir. You can reach her at christina.mcdowell1016@yahoo.com.

We often talk or read about how consumer-level technologies are shaping the expectations that employees bring to the workplace. This McKinsey Quarterly article though highlights another vector that will impact the workplace - the experience that consumers will have with marketing efforts.  Read the full article but look at these dynamics: 1. Now: Consumers will want to interact anywhere at any time. 2. Can I: They will want to do truly new things as disparate kinds of information (from financial accounts to data on physical activity) are deployed more effectively in ways that create value for them. 3. For me: They will expect all data stored about them to be targeted precisely to their needs or used to personalize what they experience. 4. Simply: They will expect all interactions to be easy. Now ask yourself how closely your enterprise software/applications are mapping to those dynamics. Remember, your enterprise software (training, payroll, expense accounting, etc) isn't judged by that system's competitors but by your users' consumer-level experiences. 

I thought I'd like to try a "Pic a Day" project this year. I asked around for suggestions and got some good ones but the one that felt right was "things I'm grateful for." I am feeling very positive right now about the New Year and I think this will be a cool way for me to express how good I'm feeling. Hope you agree.   The first one is easy.... I'm grateful for my wife, Greta (aka @sassysbgal). She is and has been my rock - so much of what I am, I owe to her and her love and support. We're totally MFEO. Beautiful, funny, kind, a great mom, I could go on but she is #1 for a a multitude of reasons. So here we go, Pic #1

No, I didn't miss one already...my Day 2 is here. I did want to mention that I'm gonna consider Twitter my 'system of record for this experiment. I'll also be keeping a set on Flickr here. I'll use my blog when I need more space than Twitter allows.  I'm grateful for my feet and my legs. As I walk around the house and go for a run, I'm reminded that are many people who can't do those things. Some because of disease or injury and too many because of injuries sustained fighting for my country. So I'm deeply grateful that either because of luck, genetics or the sacrifice of others, today I can go for a run.

I was reading a post by Chris Heuer (you should also read this one) and the central focus was on the worthiness of "social business" as a generic brand name for what we're currently engaged in. I think the key piece in the post is this sentence: "Social Business isn’t a solution to a company’s problem; it is an aspiration." That's spot on. It certainly matches up with everything I've seen working in #socbiz. Too often, the mistake is to confuse the technology with the aspiration. I think though that as a name, "social business" can capture that aspiration..."e-learning" though, I think falls short.  Becoming social as a business is something a company can strive toward. If you or your organization needs any help in that regard, feel free to contact me :-) You ever tried to aspire to "e-learning" though? Yeah, exactly. The name frames a product not a goal and that's the problem.  People think e-learning is a solution to a problem and if it is then the only problem it's going to solve is compliance. It's also not that accurate - I don't want to rehash the whole name thing but is learning really being sold online now? Or is it training? And performance support? This amorphous name thing has been clouding the ROI debate since the start of time. So now we have a name we can't aspire to and a product brand that's not really accurate.  Now "learning organization" - there is an aspirational name. I think this quote from Senge is what really got people: "…organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." I think people saw that and saw e-learning and thought..."there it is! I'll buy some of that and we'll be a learning organization!" I think people really want to be learning organizations but they want to think that it's a solution buy to get there. That's why people are on their 6th LMS. This is also exactly why Gartner says that 80% of social business efforts will not achieve their goals.  Becoming a learning organization and a social business are worthy, aspirational goals. They can be supported by technology (see again the part above where I can help with that :-)) but they MUST be supported by the appropriate organizational design and change management - the appropriate level of committment - to get there. 

Onboarding. HUGE topic right? Plays into performance issues, recruiting, retention... I was reminded during a recent chat about onboarding of one of my favorite books, Making the Corps by Thomas Ricks.  I hear what you're saying - that's the Marine Corps, we're a company that sells X but the Marines make a powerful choice with their onboarding. The USMC focuses their boot camp experience (from what I've read and have been told - I've never had the honor to serve) on what it "means" to be a Marine; skills, while important, come later. No one leaves boot without knowing in their heart of hearts that they now belong to something larger than themselves and what that organization's central beliefs are.  This got me thinking. Can we do the same? Could we differentiate ourselves from our competitors clearly and sharply in a cultural sense? Could you answer the question - what does it mean to belong to your organization versus a competitor?  If asked, could you clearly talk about the central tenets of your organziation's culture and more importantly, could you point to ways in which both your organzation demonstrated how it values those points and how individuals act on those values in their daily work lives? So here is the challenge - without talking about pay - tell me the cultural touchstones that make your organization special - differentiate it from others on the basis of values. If we can't do that, how important do you think that it is to focus on surfacing those values?

Anybody who knows me would probably call me an extrovert. I'm a wee bit outgoing. So this article has been floating around Facebook and I finally broke down and read "6 Things Every Extrovert Secretly Has To Deal With" - thinking that it'd be cool to hear what I secretly deal with. Turns out it was a load of crap. Out of the 6 things the author lists, only 1 - Number 5 - Craving the company of others - is one that I identify with. That one's true - I do get energized by being around other people - whoa, what a burden right? The others are BS. People will assume you're flirting: Really? Seriously? That's a problem for you? Is that just a humblebrag about how good looking you are or what? You're not allowed to be sad: Um, yeah you are. If you're actually around people who care about you, they won't expect you to be cheery when you're not. You're expected to keep the conversation going: That's an expectation you put on yourself. Get over it. Being labeled as shallow or unintellectual because you’re not an introvert: Look, if you're an extrovert, chances are you're talking alot. I think the only way people will think you're shallow or unintellectual is because you're giving them plenty of evidence. People will assume you are always confident: Again, not if you're open and honest with your friends. So my own that I'd add to the list is that being an extrovert doesn't mean you have to come off as some sort of circus barker or insincere - if you're scared of that, chances are you're those things all on your own, extrovert or not. Couple other thoughts - no charge - the article was written by a 22-year old. Now 22-year olds can be brilliant and insightful but if we're going to stack some folks up against people like Susan Cain who went to a couple little schools called Princeton and Harvard, was a practicing attorney and has written a well-recieved book -we might want to look a little harder. Finally, the reason why I think introverts are getting so much attention is not that extroversion is the norm - it's not -it is the IDEAL. We are expected from childhood on up, to be outgoing and gregarious - if we're not - then clearly something like "shyness" is to be "dealth with" and fixed. So yeah, as an extrovert, I count myself lucky to be on this side and yes, I do think extroverts have it easier and I'm all for raising awareness of intorverts and the way they experience the world to better understand their struggles.

To begin, if you're not reading/following Eugene Eric Kim, you should. Really. On Twitter he is @eekim and you can find his blog here: http://fasterthan20.com/. Now a couple weeks ago, Eugene wrote a post called "THE KEY TO EFFECTIVE LEARNING? SOAP BUBBLES!" The story of the soap bubbles is that they are added to soap, they don't occur naturally, to give people the feedback that they associate with getting clean. They need those markers.  Eugene made the point that in the same way, when learning, it's important to get that feedback to provide those markers that you're actually moving along. I think most of us in L&D know the importance of feedback but the folks who work on games (by that, I mean build them for a living) REALLY get the importance of timely and relevant feedback - you don't have that and people will walk right away from your product.  So let's look larger though. The whole marketspace of gamification is the re-introduction of soap bubbles. We have designed so much enterprise software that seems like it was built without any consideration that humans were actually going to use it, that we have had to go out and find a field that is built on maintaining contact with the human on the keyboard or the controller and have had to migrate the principles of that field back across the bridge JUST to get some soap bubbles going.  "Gamification" is really just the addition of bubbles to let people know that the enterprise software they are engaging with knows that they are there and has a path for them and is tracking them in a positive way to make sure they get clean - or find the inforamtion they need - or are able to collaborate with the right people.  Thanks Eugene for providing me anyway, with a much clearer way to think about the soap bubble layer. 

    The "C" word. Yep, culture. Haunts so many of our efforts. Often it's like a specter hanging over failed projects - "the culture wasn't prepared to accept that technology." We talk about it's importance and about having the right one and about disruptive ones and innovation ones but I think we need to be a bit more basic up front.      The first thing you need to understand about organizational culture is that you already have one. No one has to be tasked with creating a culture - it just happens when humans start doing that human thing and organizaing in groups. So let's begin with dropping the idea that you're going to create a culture that's going to fill a vacuum. Whatever cultural effort you undertake, know that if will be one that seeks to shape an existing culture or replace one - both are much different than starting with a blank slate....which you're not...unless you're doing a startup...that's a different post entirely.      The second thing is that changing a culture or consciously shaping a new one is a LONG TERM EFFORT. This is not a "let's measure the delta between Q1 and Q2" kind of exercise. Periodic reviews are helpful and needed to make sure that a consistent effort is maintained but this will be a year over year effort. Shaping a culture will also impact every system you have and every decision that gets made in the organization. Hiring, onboarding, pay, operations, comunications, marketing...think of an area of the organization and it'll be impacted.      I don't know if I hit that last point hard enough. When we're talking "culture"  - we're not talking about hanging up Successories pictures around the office about how great teamwork is or how important leadership is. We are talking about building a cntral core of values and beliefs that everyone in the organization knows and understands and against which they will judge the decisions they make every day - both big and small.      You also need to understand that the more successful your efforts are at creating the culture you want, the more obivous deviations from the new cultural norms will become. You need to be ready to recognize both the positive deviations - those people who go above and beyond the norm and you need to be ready to punish the negative deviations. Fail on either of those points and your culture starts to become a pale, 2D thing closer to a sterotypical mission statement than a set of values that you can order your organizational life by.      Let's recap - it's a long effort. It will effect everything. It has to be consistently adhered to.....two more points...     First - it's worth it. Done right, an organizational culture can be a bulwark against tough times and can be a slingshot past competitors in good ones. It can be an engine of innovation and collaboration and can empower people at all levels of the org., to affect positive change. Second, the end goal is definitely for everybody to "own it" - I've known lots of Marines in my life and every single one of them can tell me what it means to be a Marine they also know that ownership of that culture, the maintennance of it, is the responsibility of every member. That being said, the Marines have had a long time to cultivate that and they did start from scratch, chances are you're facing a different challenge.      To respond to that challenge, I think someone will need to "own" - explicitly - a cultural change effort. When you think about who will own it, who will shepherd it through the early days, think about the cultural values you're aiming for - if you're trying to have a more open and transparent culture, then the process of creating that should be what? Yep, open and transparent. Want a culture that makes people at all levels feel that they have input? Then guess what? Start by letting them all have input into this process. What a powerful moment in the creation of a culture when the CEO sits down at the table with a line worker and they both have input. Look for those moments when you can demonstrate the culture that you're aiming for...those moments become stories and those stories get passed along and they reinforce cultures in ways that nothing else can. So yeah, "owning" the culure will be a temp job (if you do it right) but it's an important temp job.