Recently I wrote a working paper for the International HRD Conference that will be held on June 2-4, 2010 in Pecs, Hungary. This working paper will be presented in the conference stream: business strategy, organizational learning and knowledge management. The paper tries to establish a connection between the fields of Human Resource Development (HRD) and Strategic Management through the concept of absorptive capacity. Up until now the corporate university has been claimed to be a strategic instrument for learning and development in organizations. The strategic nature of the corporate university remains unclear lacks scientific fundament. With this paper I try to establish a fundament for future research into the strategic potential of corporate universities.Working paper: Corporate University for strategic innovation

Visual Design BasicsView more presentations from sumeet.moghe.I'm sorry I'm not doing a weekend blogpost, because I'm busy hosting RubyConf India. That said, during my spare time I put together some slides for a lunch-and-learn session that I'm planning next week. The topic of the talk is 'Visual Design Basics', and while I understand you won't glean much information from the slides, you can try and get a flavour for what I'll bark about! I'll try to do a slightly more detailed blogpost about this in the future.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

The May issue of Harvard Business Review contains an interesting article on Talent Management: "How to keep your top talent" by Martin and Conrad Schmidt. In this article they highlight 10 critical components of a Talent Development Program. These components are: Explicitly test candidates in three dimensions: ability, engagement and aspiration. Emphasize future competencies: rather than current performance. Manage the quantity and quality: see talent as a scarce portfolio of growth assets. Forget rote functional or business unit rotation: rather focus on intense assignments with development challenges. Identify the riskiest,most challenging positions: assign them to rising stars. Create individual development plans: linking personal objectives to corporate plans for growth. Reevaluate top talent annually: on changes in ability, engagement and aspiration. Offer significantly differentiated compensation: and recognition to star employees. Hold regular, open dialogues: between high potentials and program managers. Replace broadcast communications: about strategy with individualized messages from emerging leaders. These components were uncovered as a set of best practices based upon research. In my opinion not all components are really about talent development, but rather about talent management. I also find the suggestions quite high-level, interrelated, and culturally biased. But, you might be able to translate them into ingredients of your talent development programs. Good luck, since effort in talent development will become more and more critical in the years to come!

A couple of days back I posted a presentation on Visual Design Basics. What was really the result of work between breaks from being the host for RubyConf India, turned out to be a fairly popular presentation on Slideshare with over 2000 views and counting! I'm sorry again that the presentation doesn't have too many notes for you to glean the narrative in the background. I've gone ahead and put up a narrated version of the talk here. I'm actually quite pleasantly surprised that there's such a huge interest in design skills. In fact, this is something I think about all the time and if you've been on this blog for long enough, you'll remember me saying that instructional designers need more skills than just writing. I also remember having some strong views on my friend Rupa's blogpost about a hello world approach to instructional design. Somehow the word 'designer' evokes all sorts of thoughts in my head and I can't stay shut when the disciplinary skills of instructional design become separate from the meta of instructional design. As I gain experience in this trade, I feel that while the skills for instructional design are important, there are a few personality characteristics that instructional designers just can't do without. I call these the four passions of an instructional designer. Let me explain what these are.The Passion for Embracing ConstraintsAll of us work under some constraints or the other. I would love to have a budget of a million dollars for every course, the best tools at my disposal; a really skilled set of developers and just have an unlimited set of resources. Unfortunately, none of this is true for my situation. The fact is that I love it! I believe that the best designers are the ones that embrace their constraints and still come up with stuff that's of the highest quality. I am a sucker for doing more with less and I've tried my own hand to illustrate this in my blog posts. If you have to create quality elearning, I strongly believe that the tools don't matter and you should use your creativity. I also believe you can do elearning on a shoestring -- your budget constraints should only motivate, not deter you. I'll go ahead and also say that constraints inspire creativity -- don't believe me, just look at the number of cool ideas that the 'humble' rapid-elearning community has come up with! Look at the ways that people are pushing the boundaries -- Bryan Jones' eLearningart.com (the source for characters on this post) is a prime example of how cool rapid elearning can be once you have the right hustle behind the muscle!The Passion for Simplicity"Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated awesomely simple - that's creativity." - Charles MingusI've spent ages in conversations that circle around, "But they need to know ______ as well!" and "Oh, but we should include ______ because that's how it is in reality." Unfortunately, people can't know everything in one go. Also, if people were ready for reality they wouldn't be in your classroom or going through your elearning. As an instructional designer you need to have an undying passion for simplicity and the natural ability to break down a complicated concept and explain it in simple chunks. As I always say, simplicity is not about being 'simplistic'. It's about making things easy to understand; this takes a huge amount of creativity and if you can't do this, I'm sorry - you're not an instructional designer. Here's an example where I've tried to explain a fairly complicated process in a fairly simple manner.The Passion for LearningWe're all busy people and it's very easy to get stuck in the rigmarole of daily work and stop learning from the world around us. As a start, it's important to start getting connected in the community. Over the last couple of years I've had the opportunity to interact and learn from a number of my colleagues around the world. There's so much cool stuff happening in the realms of traditional elearning, virtual worlds, enterprise 2.0 and social media, that being stuck to your office seat and your specialist mode of learning is nothing but a recipe for being stuck in the dark ages. But then again, instructional designers need to have the passion to learn from different sources to just make their lives easier. If you believe you have the passion then a good place to start are some of the industry blogs. I've gone ahead and packaged my favourite blogs into two Google Reader bundles. Please feel free to subscribe to them if you like:Blogs about Enterprise 2.0Blogs about Elearning and Learning TechnologyWhile I don't get the time to participate on #lrnchat, I always follow the transcripts and that's a great place to learn about the who's who of learning innovation in the world. Take some time to participate in #lrnchat and I'm sure you'll find a lot of inspiration.I'm also going to say that you need to look at other people's work and be able to gather inspiration. I keep aggregating elearning examples here, so that should be a good place to 'watch and learn'.The last point I'll make about this is that you've got to be able to learn from unconventional sources. Look at billboards for inspiration on visual design; watch news shows to learn how you can make information interesting; read different kinds of books to develop your lateral thinking and ideation abilities; learn the art of story-telling from movies -- I could just keep going on and on. The Passion for ExcellenceLast but absolutely not the least -- you need to have a passion for excellence! If an instructional designer doesn't constantly iterate through his work and isn't passionate about putting out excellent stuff, then I get really concerned. Instructional design requires a lot of attention to detail. You need to be fussy about every little element that eventually adds polish to your course. You need to set the bar really high; your bar can't be Sumeet (because I'm quite average) -- instead look at someone like Tom Kuhlmann as your role model. There are a lot of people I've learned from including but not limited to: David Anderson, Stephanie Harnett, Tracy Hamilton and Jeanette Brooks and if you follow these guys, you'll notice that there's heaps you can do in order to drive excellence in your course design. So learn, iterate, fuss and optimise your work until you stop dreaming about it at night!We have an instructional designer position open at ThoughtWorks and I in particular actively evaluate candidates not just on their abilities and past experience but also their passion for the four things I've mentioned above. What do you think? Am I being very hard by placing these requirements? Or do you think I'm setting the bar too low? I'd love to hear what you look for when hiring an instructional designer. Let me know what you think, by posting your thoughts in the comments section. And BTW, if you liked this article, please also read Garr Reynolds' 10 tips on how to think like a designer -- it's great inspiration!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

I have a confession to make -- I am more stupid than I usually seem and I usually learn the hard way. I've always had the wrong ideas about enterprise knowledge management until I started to work with Dinesh Tantri and more recently heard Andrew McAfee speak and read his book. I always thought that unbridled freedom was the way to go with knowledge management in this decade. What I realise today, is that to achieve a freeform, frictionless and emergent platform for knowledge in the enterprise, you need to start with some rules and a bare minimum structure. In today's article, I want to share some thoughts about the importance of this very structure - read on to know what I think.Walled Gardens are the bugbear for Knowledge SharingVery recently I had a conversation with Dinesh and Nikhil about the value of community spaces. One of the things that became clear to me was that community spaces are not only overhyped, but also if done incorrectly, a deterrent to knowledge sharing. This is a spin-off from Andrew Mcafee's concept of walled gardens. Let me explain this through a scenario:Company Foo establishes a knowledge sharing platform that allows every group of people to create their own space, with a separate set of access privileges.The platform doesn't have a way to search across different spaces, because every space is almost like a site in itself.Soon, different groups of people (communities) set up 'community spaces' and restrict access only to members of the community. Sales has their own space. Technology has a separate space. Marketing has their own space. Support and Evolution has their own space. The story goes on.One fine day a new salesman trying to put together a proposal needs information about:Company Foo's previous work in the space;case studies of successful deployments in the domain;Company Foo's track record and capability supporting this kind of work;and the various technology platforms they have expertise inGiven that each community has it's own space (walled garden), the new salesman doesn't have a way to search across all communities for the information he needs.Over a painstaking few days, the new salesman eventually finds all the information he needs by signing in to every individual community space and searching separately on each space. He has to wait a couple of days before he gets approval to join a couple of community spaces, and that delays his proposal.We could go on with this story but I guess you can see how tough things can be when every community builds their own isolated knowledge sharing space. Community knowledge can never become organisational knowledge this way, and over a period of time, the system becomes extremely difficult to manage. This is the classic nature of walled gardens in the enterprise.Tear down the walls firstOrganisational knowledge sharing can do without walled gardens. What we need instead is one place for all communities to share knowledge and the structure to emerge from user generated tags and metadata. This is where a certain bit of knowledge housekeeping comes in. I believe that leadership and knowledge management teams need to strongly discourage internal groups and communities from creating inaccessible islands of knowledge. There needs to be a strong incentive to contribute knowledge to one platform, that is powered by search. Yes, there'll always be the need to have team wikis and collaboration spaces. This is where it becomes important to clearly define the scope of team collaboration and organisational knowledge and create some clear (but porous) boundaries between the two. Which is to say for example, that it's absolutely OK for a team to set up their own wiki or workspace and do so with minimal friction, but when some team knowledge becomes organisational wisdom the team has the incentive to contribute to the organisational knowledge base. The challenge for knowledge managers is to make this contribution as easy as possible so that people don't have to make the same effort twice and the structure doesn't come in the way of knowledge sharing.My beliefs about post-modern Knowledge ManagementIn my current world view, I have a few beliefs:Enterprise knowledge needs to be public (to all employees) by default and private only if there's a very, very good reason for it.Knowledge sharing needs to move from being part of closed channels to open platforms.People should have a choice to collaborate privately, but have the support to easily make their private knowledge public.Discussions and conversations should get organised using tags and metadata as against separate mailing lists and groups. People should have the option to subscribe using email, but this shouldn't be the default.Knowledge managers need to define, maintain and protect the structure of 'no initial structure'. The structure should emerge over time using tags, ratings and user input. This however needs continuous involvement with all communities and is by no means easy.Content stewardship is key -- things don't happen on their own. Knowledge managers need to keep their eye out for quality content on private channels/ spaces. They need to have the agility and presence of mind to move this to being organisational knowledge with a strong incentive for the authors. This is essential to the process of long lasting change.What do you think of today's blogpost? I'd love to hear your views on the topic, so please post liberally in the comments section. The inspiration for this blogpost was a conversation with my friend Sahana, so I'd like to give her some credit for this. If you liked my post today, you may be interested in some of my other posts on collaboration and enterprise 2.0.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Harold Jarche wrote a though provoking item on Learning Organizations.  It is based on a paper with the interesting title: "Why aren’t we all working for a learning organization?". I couldn’t resist to comment on this discussion. I love publications on the Learning Organization. They are abstract and paint a picture of an organization that no one would resist. It’s implementation though is very hard, because it requires a deep change in most organizations on all organizational aspects (e.g. style, structure, systems, …). The research on learning organizations and organizational learning tends to focus on organizations that are far from these concepts (large corporations with scientific management roots). That is why I find it interesting to research organizations on the other end of the continuum: organizational learning in new ventures / start-ups. These new organizations have most of the admired characteristics of learning organizations, but still also have their limitations in learning. They often lack the command & control, structure and systems required to effectively capture their learning. The ‘too much’ that large organizations have of these factors can be ‘too less’ in new ventures. The inhibiting factors for learning therefore have two different faces.

In today's blogpost I want to touch upon one of my other favourite topics - presentations. There's no doubt that an effective presentation is a killer tool for business success. The ability to express your idea effectively lends a tough to beat edge to your technical skills. If presentation skills are so important, then you'd want to think every professional worth their salt should be able to create and deliver an effective presentation. That isn't the case, is it? So here I am, making another set of points -- about six things you should NEVER do, if you want to be an effective presenter. Read on to know more.Don't just start slamming slides togetherI find it really strange how the first thing prospective presenters do, is to get into Powerpoint and start slamming slides together. Having followed Garrey Reynolds for long and having been a fan of Steve Jobs' style of presenting -- I've come to agree that the computer should be a bicycle for your mind. This means that a computer should accelerate your abilities and actually give wings to your own thinking. Having said this, when you start slamming slides together, where's the thinking? You may argue that you're thinking while putting together your slides, but is that really the case? I'll argue that when you start your presentation design at the computer, you're context switching between slide layouts, searching for images, dealing with hang ups AND thinking through your story. We know that context switching isn't the best thing for any kind of productivity. So if you really care about creating an effective presentation, then take some time away from the computer to think through your story. Try answering a few questions for yourself:What state of pain are you addressing?Why does it matter?What's the solution?How can you make the solution simple?If you can do that and then draft out on paper, a play by play plan of your presentation, then you will see a few benefits:Because you know how you wish to present , you select the best tool for the purpose -- Powerpoint, Keynote, Prezi or the good old whiteboard.You know exactly what you want to show on screen - so putting together your presentation is a fast paced, almost mechanical job.Lastly, if things go wrong and you don't have a projector at the venue or your computer crashes or there's another catastrophe, you're still well prepared. You can confidently make your presentation, because you have a strong grip on your story!Don't be a compulsive bullet-pointerIn my recent post about slideuments, I argued that if your slides can convey their message without your presence, then you might as well send out an email and save everyone the time. The good old practice of bullet pointed presentations has to go away. Remember your audience can read faster than you, so if you have to read from your slides, then your presence is already redundant. Take a look at Steve Jobs' presentation style and look out for when he uses bullet points - never! Does he read from his slides? Never! Does he look back at his slides for prompts? Never! That says a lot for the amount of work that one of the most inspiring speakers of our generation puts in.But it's not just Steve Jobs who you need to look at. TED presenters don't do bullet points! Now you may argue that your business presentation isn't the same as Steve Jobs' product launch or an inspiring TED talk. Agreed! Here's what I'll say though, and I'll say it with a two bullet points!If you want to make your 'business' presentation effective, you need to make it engaging.A bullet pointed presentation where you read from the slide, is not engaging.So if there's a lot of text that you believe your audience should absolutely see, then put it into a well crafted document. Give it away as a handout. In my previous post on this topic, I've outlined a few strategies to avoid slideumentation - they could be helpful. And if you really, really are dying to use bullet points - then as Simon Jones says, use them at the end of your presentation to summarise your points!Don't do live demosI think I've heard Martin Fowler say the same thing at some point; I believe live demos are a recipe for presentation disaster. Forcing yourself to do a live demo is like saying, "Look at how much of a man I am! I'm willing to put my presentation to risk with my bravery!". One of the things you want to do in a presentation, is be in absolute control. I like to minimize the number of things that are out of my control in a presentation situation. Patchy network connections, a bad day with the demo software, and 'errs and ummhs' at the time of presenting are all things beyond my control.What I prefer instead of a 'manly' live demo are screencasts embedded into my presentation. Powerpoint, Keynote and Prezi support embedded video quite well so why not make use of this capability? You demo looks assured and polished and there's very little chance of failure. And then once you're done with your presentation, you can show live stuff in a more intimate and less intimidating setting. Don't have a screencasting tool on your computer? Mute your mic and use a simple tool like Screenr.Don't darken the roomI can't tell you how many times I've seen presenters do this. They set up the room, they get the projector to work and the moment the audience is in, they switch off the lights as if it's a movie theatre! What happens is, people can't see the speaker -- they just look at the screen. In his excellent article here, Cliff Atkinson says:"It turns out that when you watch people speak, the visual cues help you to predict and understand the auditory cues that follow soon after. These visual cues are actually not limited to the lips, but include the entire human face."Remember that even if you don't switch the lights off, people should be able to see your presentation clearly. That's because most modern projectors can handle ambient lighting and have sufficient contrast to be able to deal with a well lit room. By keeping the lights on, you keep people awake and can easily maintain a connection with them.Don't use age-old clipartIf bullet points are bad, clipart is worse. A decade old, cheesy, overused clipart makes you look as if you were too lazy to click a photograph or search for a 'meaningful' image from the internet. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure screenbeans were a rage in the 90's! Design trends change fast and using screenbeans today is like wearing 70's style bell-bottoms to work. It's perhaps a bit unfair to generalise all clipart as bad. Some of the more recent illustrations in Microsoft's clipart collection are great for creating a consistent look in your presentations. I must say however, that I prefer to snag my own photos and I often use stock photography for my presentations. Yes, stock photography can be expensive, but there are quite a few places where you can find high-quality, free images. Of course there are many ways to use images poorly in presentations, and you need to avoid those! And visual design plays a huge part in making your message effective.Don't droneLast but not the least, you owe it to your audience to keep things simple. Last year at one of our conference briefings, Martin Fowler handed out an invaluable tip -- structure your presentation around no more than three key points. That's presentation zen for me! Most presenters drone as if it's their last opportunity to speak about their topic. What you want to do instead, is create enough interest for people to feel excited about your topic. In his post about the Japanese principle of 'hara hachi bu', Garr Reynolds says, "Performers, for example, know that the trick is to leave the stage while the audience still loves you and don’t want you to go, not after they have had enough and are 'full' of you."So for this last section here are my tips:If you're doing a sales presentation, stick to your USP and avoid forgettable details. As Guy Kawasaki says, follow the 10-20-30 rule and finish your presentation in (less than) 20 minutes.If you're speaking at a conference, leave at least 25% of your speaking time for (detail-seeking) questions and spend the remaining time to generate interest.If you are teaching people then present the strawman first and tease out details through facilitated discussion and exercises.Keep things simple - provide additional details in a handout or a follow up email.Remember, if your presentation is interesting enough then your audience will hunt you down for details. But if you bore them with forgettable facts, they won't wait to rush out of the room when they have the opportunity!What do you think of today's post? I must say I am no presentations expert and I've learnt all these lessons the hard way. What I do have, are sufficient experiences of failure to say what doesn't work - and of course that's the focus of this article. I'd love to know your thoughts about this topic, so please do let me know either by emailing me or adding to the comments section. And BTW, if you're keen on exploring and analysing Steve Jobs' style, then take a look at the links I'm categorising here. Until next time, cheerio and present well!The characters in this blogpost are from Byan Jones' elearningArt.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Very nice book promoting video on ‘Where good ideas come from’ from Steven Johnson. Slow hunch and connectivity seem to have an important role according to the author. Besides a wonderful way of presenting his thoughts, there are quite some good insights that make this 4 minute video a worthwhile watch!

If you haven't noticed, I've avoided personal blog posts in the recent past but this one is a little different. It's been exactly a year since I brought Tequila home. It was a bit of an up-and-down stay for her and eventually she died in a freak accident. If she was still around, she would have been more than a year old today.I haven't stopped thinking of her for a single day since she died and I've always thought of a dozen 'what-ifs' that could have possibly meant that she was here today. She was my little girl and always had unconditional love for me. I can't stop blaming myself for her death -- if I had come home earlier that day, if I had not secured her enclosure or gotten her a better crate, if I had ensured that she was without a collar each time she was unattended, she would perhaps be with me.I miss her a lot, particularly today -- all I can do is hope that she's reborn stronger and fitter and is part of a family that can give her a healthy and happy life. I hope you can join me in this prayer.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Again a very nice Animation! Sir Ken Robinson speaking about the need to change our Education Paradigms. Although this is not a new discussion, the way it is represented here is almost Art. The Art is both in the content and in the presentation. And just like with all good Art, the interpretation and idea’s about solutions are left to the audience. The remaining challenge is: "How can we transform the educational system to meet these ideas?"