I have been working as a remote knowledge (Web) worker for the last 9 years in two different countries and four different business units in one single organisation and I guess that, at this point in time, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Specially, thanks, amongst several other reasons, to the flexibility and freedom of being in control of your own workflow. I can imagine though there may well be people out there who question the validity of remote workers, mainly now that the trend seems to be leaning more towards that distributed, virtual global workforce I have been blogging about over here a couple of times already who are making heavy use of social software tools to keep in touch, collaborate and share their knowledge. Indeed, for most people working remotely, i.e. from home, while at a customer site, while on the road, etc. etc. it can be quite a challenge, even more if you have to justify it to your co-workers located at the traditional office. However, it *does* work! Mashable’s Nellie Akalp‘s piece on "9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home" is just another proof of how it can work out in setting up the right expectations for both remote knowledge workers and those co-located in the same traditional office to inspire that collaborative environment where everyone can benefit from it. That’s why I thought I would spend a few minutes today talking about this particular topic and perhaps add some additional ways of how it’s worked for me as well over the course of those 9 years. The interesting thing is that Nellie’s smashing article on this subject surely is spot on. As a remote knowledge worker, I can relate to it myself, and I am sure if you are one as well, you would probably do, too! So in order to build further up on her article I thought I would add my ¢2 into the conversation describing how those very same ways are working out for me, and those around me, who are also distributed employees. Hopefully, we can add some further insights that may be helpful to others… So here we go, let’s do it!: Respect Your Own Time: This is probably one of the toughest challenges you are going to bump into as you initially move away from the traditional office into your own home office. I struggled with it myself back then, and for multiple various reasons, till I eventually had that ah-ha moment that if I wanted to make it work for me I would need to add discipline and flexibility into the mix. Transitioning from being measured by your sheer presence to being measured by the results you produce can be quite challenging, but if you allow for flexibility to kick in, along with a good dose of discipline it will work out time and time again. Being a bit stubborn and resilient would also be good traits to make it work, more than anything else, because if you don’t respect your own time, how can you expect others to do the same? Show them, educate them, help raise the right level of expectations and negotiate that mutual respectful agreement that should work both ways in equal terms.  Impose Time Limits on Specific Tasks: Oh, yes, ever since I have introduced The Pomodoro Technique to help me schedule time chunks on specific tasks, specially, rather complex ones, also even the time I spend on social networking tools, it’s made a huge difference for me. I have got a stronger sense of achievement at the end of the day by checking out the logs from those pomodoros to see what I have done for the day, and I can certainly recommend it to folks who may be wondering how their days are gone by without them hardly noticing. I use to have that very same feeling till I introduced this technique on my day to day workload. And I’m loving it! It’s like a bit of fresh air coming along in small time lapses that would allow you to transition from one task to another rather easily, without losing much of the control of your own productivity. Quite the opposite, actually! Priceless! Set Strict Deadlines: This is perhaps one of the hardest things to comply with, yet, one of the most rewarding, because, just as it happens with co-located knowledge workers in the traditional office, procrastination surely is not your best friend, as some people seem to claim time and time again. The best way to fight it off is to set those deadlines, even if you don’t really have to set them up. Still knowing there is a timeframe lurking around in the horizon waiting for you to accomplish something, somehow accelerates your sense of urgency and that seems to be really handy. At least, it works for me. That’s why I rely quite heavily on one of my favourite services within IBM Connections: Connections Activities.  Log Off for "Power Productivity" Hours: Indeed, most of you folks know I am a rather heavy user of social networking tools, whether internal and / or external, but you may have noticed how, every now and then, I suddenly go silent for a period of time; I lurk heavily, I learn from what others are sharing across and eventually it’s the time when my "Power Productivity" kicks in. Once again, The Pomodoro Technique is a superb way of helping you schedule those hours, so next time you see I have gone quiet, I am not really gone away, or gone into hiding; rather the opposite… When I come back, ask me what I was busy with during that power productivity time lapse and you will see what I have been up to, which, in a way, may eventually end up on this blog as well anyway hehe Delineate Your Workplace: This is a very important point. If you are working from your home office, as in working from your kitchen, or your bedroom, or your living room, or the front porch, the terrace or whatever else, you are certainly extending your virtual office to the point where there is no hide-out. You need to avoid that. You need to find a spot where you can escape work, specially after work hours. Having a home office will help you do that; not necessarily that you need to close the door time and time again, but certainly understand that even work has got a limit in your own home space, it’s a physical room, once you leave that door, that’s when your quality time will begin. Don’t neglect it; it’s the most precious time of your day. Every day.  Slowing Down? Change Your Environment: Now, I am not saying that working from those places can be rewarding every so often as a way to freshen up your working environment, specially, if you are putting long hours, but the thing is you should try not to make a habit out of it eventually. There is still a need to separate,  to some extent, your work life, from your personal life. Not because of you, per se, but because of them. Those who make you treasure the little things that matter. That quality time that’s worth while going for after a hard working day! On the other hand, and as a side note I can tell you folks that, to me, whenever I need to change my working environment the device I have leaned on to relying the most, by far, has been my iPad, which allows me for that flexibility of taking work wherever I am and still have that sense of detachment from the computing environment. And even more notorious when I am travelling… Conduct a Time Audit: This is a rather interesting one, specially, to me, since I wasn’t aware of the many benefits of doing such time audit trail, but then again, subconsciously, I have been doing it all along thanks to the logs provided by the nifty application Pomodoro that I have been using for a good few months now. So every day, by the end of the day, I take a look at those time lapses specified in the Pomodoro logs to see not only what I have achieved during the course of the day, but at the same time the actual time that it takes me to achieve that; so in the social networking front I have come to the conclusion that unless meetings and conference calls collide I usually spend about 3 pomodoros of 25 minutes each throughout my work day to keep up with what’s happening out there on the internal and external Social Web. That seems to be the right measure for me as to how much time I spend using social software tools every day. Not too bad! Perhaps on future posts I will detail as well what other tasks / activities I get to embark on and share which ones are the biggest time sinks, although I can already give folks a hint on which one is coming up big time over and over again: presentations! (Grrr) Create Tasks Lists: I don’t know where our obsession, as human beings, comes from creating lists. They have always been there since the dawn of time and I guess we will still continue to create them for almost everything. Of course, I, too, use them quite a bit, both for public consumption, through Connections Activities, once again, and for private use, where I rely on a couple of iPad Apps Things being one of my old time favourites. They are the first thing I check in the morning and the last thing I check in the evening as they help me get a grasp of what I need to get done, and what I have done in the past. I keep up with them religiously as a way to help empower my own productivity, and that one of others, if I need to collaborate on a particular task with other peers, networks or communities. But perhaps the main reason why I heart Tasks Lists is because they help me get a grasp of my workload throughout the year, which I find rather convenient referring to whenever my yearly performance evaluation comes up by year end. Somehow, they have turned themselves into a tracking record of sorts that helps me manage how I interact in multiple projects, teams and initiatives. And I can honestly say that if you haven’t created your tasks lists just yet, you surely are missing out some big improvements in your efficiency. No doubt! Make your breaks count: Finally, this is probably one of the most important traits I can think of from working remotely. Make your breaks count, indeed! Over the course of the years one gets to learn, through the hard way, unfortunately, how important it is to have regular breaks while at work, more than anything else, because if you don’t take them yourself, no-one else will, in fact, no-one will even notice you need a break after those long hours of hard work. So the first person who should take care of taking those breaks should be yourself. Like I said, remember, if you don’t do it, no-one else will do it for you.  That’s why long time ago I resolved to take several breaks during the course of the day (Even when I am travelling) and to achieve that I have been making use of this relatively small, but rather powerful and nifty application called MacBreakZ 4 (For Macs), which allows me to stay healthy and watchful for my wrists by taking regular short breaks during the day. Then I also take extended breaks where I try to do some exercise, to help me keep fit. You know, sitting kills (A must-go-through and read infographic, if you haven’t done so already, by the way!), as so does standing, so I figured that striking the balance between both of them is going to be the key to make it work.  And, finally, another type of break I have learned to take rather consciously as well over the course of time is to schedule a one full hour for my lunch (Scheduled as in blocked in my diary for everyone!); again, based on the same principle as above, if I don’t take that break for lunch, I have learned, through the hard way, once more, no-one else would, and I won’t be able to rely on that regular and healthy habit of eating at the same time every day. So, whenever folks try to schedule a meeting or a conference call with yours truly, that time is blocked, marked as busy, in my diary. Already. And again, for everyone! Throughout the whole year! And I cannot relate well enough what a difference it’s made for me to stick to that schedule. Long gone are the days where I didn’t have lunch, or just a 10 minute lunch break, or just munching along through that conference call, while on mute. Now, I just walk away from the home office, shut the door, enjoy my one hour disconnect time from everything, get my energy levels back and ready to hit the rest of the day! Highly recommended, if you haven’t started doing that! And that’s it, folks! That’s my ¢2 worth of comments on that wonderful piece put together by Nellie Akalp on "9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home". However, and before I let you all go, I thought I would share one more way to increase your productivity, the #10, which would work as well for both remote workers and their co-located peers in the traditional office. And it’s probably one that you would be least expecting it, since I doubt most folks would associate it with that trait to help you improve your efficiency and effectiveness at work. Of course, I’m talking about sleep, or getting *enough* good sleep! Yes, something so relatively simple as that! Sleeping enough hours day in day out will surely help you increase your alertness, focus, attention, motivation, speed of execution, etc. etc. And the magic here is to figure out how many hours would be good for you to help you function properly, but once you hit that, stick to it. For good! In my own case, and after trial and error over the course of the years it looks like 7 hours is good enough for me, although I have seen and read plenty of research suggesting to go for the 8 or 8.5 hour mark of daily sleep. That would probably include power naps as well, which seem to gain plenty of popularity as of late. But the important thing is to strive for that good night sleep that can help you function properly the day after. Now, I do realise about that saying that "Sleep is for the weak"; well, it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s the weak the ones who don’t get enough sleep in the first place! Jessica Stillman, over at GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily wrote, not long ago, "Why the Web Worker Lifestyle Is Good for Your Health" and I can highly recommend its read. Very insightful and powerful piece at the same time, specially the additional resources included. After going through it, and after reflecting on the 9 years I have been a remote knowledge (Web) worker, I tend to agree with its overall sentiment that, perhaps, indeed, our web workers lifestyles might be good for our health as employees after all; it feels like that to me. At least, I am happy with how its flexibility and freedom, amongst several other things, have been working out for me so far. And you know what they say about happy employees and employee engagement, right?

Now let me confess, I didn't know of Lou Russell until I joined the Training Mag Network. That's because I often overlook authors from some of the books I casually pick up. Lou's better known in the... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

One of my all time favourite social networking tools for informal learning, as well as information discovery, on a good range of interesting and relevant topics, and specially Enterprise 2.0 / Social Computing and Social Business as of late is Slideshare. I could spend hours and hours in there diving through slide deck after slide deck digesting some of the most amazing content people have been putting together over the course of time and never get tired of it! Can you imagine saying that about presentations? Goodness! That’s what I thought, too! Anyone on Presentation Zen? I guess Slideshare has brought back to presentations, to some extent, the sexiness they once had, before we all got obsessed with them without remedy! No, seriously, you know what I mean, I even have got a lovely notepad text document where I keep filing some of these worth while slideshare links that I know at some point in time they would be having a mention, and a space, over here in this blog. That’s why today I would like to introduce to you a couple of them, in case you may not have seen them just yet: Why Social? and How Social Software Helps Get Work Done. Both of them would be worth while going through, for sure, as much as keeping them in mind whenever you would want to reuse them for your upcoming speaking gigs. Yes, indeed, they are both that good! Both of them have been put together by a couple of really good friends who are very well versed on this whole topic of Social Business, Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing. The first one, Why Social?, was put together by Stu McIntyre and in it he covers, very successfully, the whole landscape behind Social Collaboration going from the problems it aims to address (Finding and connecting people, sharing information, contribute to the collective intelligence, informal serendipitous knowledge discoveries, etc. etc. pretty much the same ones traditional KM used to aim at back then), to the value / business benefits inherent to it (Business growth, deepening customer business relationships, innovation around both old and new ideas, a much more effective knowledge workforce, etc. etc.), to the implications of a collaborative organisation (And how to get there if you business is not that keen yet on true open collaboration). The highly recommended part of Stu’s slides is coming towards the end where he shares a bunch of them around the topic of Where do you get started? No, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil it for you, you will have to go through the slides yourself to find out plenty more about it. But one key message you will see permeating through all of them is the confirmation of how we are finally shifting gears, making a huge leap forward, and leaving both technology and tools far behind us, focusing on the business, or, rather, the people behind the business! Yes, I know! About time, too! Why social? View more presentations from Stuart McIntyre The second Slideshare presentation I would want to share over here with you folks is coming from Alan Lepofsky and it is titled "How A New Generation of Software IS Helping Colleagues Work Together". Another worth while deck where Alan covers some very interesting and relevant topics, like the evolution of collaboration, its inherent changes at work and some "best practices" (Ok, ok, we will forgive him this time around for using such *cough* old business school terminology *cough*). Instead, we would stick around with rather good practices or next practices. Anyway, moving on to some of the most thought-provoking slides he shared across. Let’s start with slide #6 that sets up nicely the landscape of the evolution of collaboration over the course of decades. Simple, easy to digest, straight to the point. Priceless! From there onwards you will embark yourself on a rather enjoyable and pleasurable trip, with some excellent imagery used to illustrate plenty of great points and exploring the real impact these social technologies are having in the way we work, collaborate and share our knowledge with others. Very inspiring altogether as it then finishes off the presentation with plenty of reflections and helpful insights on those good / next practices. However, the key remarkable thing you will notice as well from Alan’s deck is, once more, the confirmation, along with Stu’s presentation, of how the conversation has evolved from that rather tenuous and everlasting focus on tools and technology to try to address and fix all of our business problems to eventually focus on the business itself as the major driver for fixing those problems altogether. And that major driver? Yes, I know you know where I am going… Of course, once again, the people! Because businesses *are* people. People who, actually, *do*care! Or like Seth Godin brilliantly put together just recently under "Caring": "No organization cares about you. Organizations aren’t capable of this. [...]  People, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of caring. It’s part of being a human" with one of the most amazing conclusions that I am going to shameless steal, errr, I mean, reuse and insert over here in this post, as I feel it’s spot on in helping us fully understand why social is now more important and critical than ever in helping us knowledge workers work together much more effectively and efficiently than ever before, and how every organisation or business that tries to put a stop to it and not embrace it, but neglect it will eventually suffer from it, sooner rather than later: "If you want to build a caring organization, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way. When your organization punishes people for caring, don’t be surprised when people stop caring. When you free your employees to act like people (as opposed to cogs in a profit-maximizing efficient machine) then the caring can’t help but happen" How Social Software Helps Get Work Done View more presentations from Alan Lepofsky I think you would agree with me we are reaching that point where we would need to decide for ourselves, not for the business, but for us, people, whether we would eventually want to care … or not. And live by it. Doing so will help us transform, for the better, not only the organisations we work for, and with no way back, but also the way we conduct and do business in the 21st century. Doing so will help us, essentially, become better at what we already do naturally: Connect people to people (And people to (relevant) content) to do real, meaningful, responsible, sustainable good business. Ultimately, and, like usual, the choice is all ours. Have you decided yet? (I have…)

A few days back I ordered a large meal at a restaurant. Unfortunately, the food tasted awful - really awful. My first thought was to curse the chef - not for one moment did I think of complaining... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

If you would remember, late last year, over at CommunityBuilders, one of our IBM internal communities of community facilitators, we had the great pleasure, and true honour, of having with us guest speaker Rachel Happe, co-founder from The Community Roundtable, come and present, along with Jim Storer, on The State of CommunityManagement 2010. That session was one of the most commented and interactive we had throughout the whole year and, of course, we decided to go and come back for more. So I am pleased to share over here with all of you "The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe". That’s right! A couple of weeks back we had the opportunity of inviting Rachel again to come and talk to us about the absolutely wonderful piece of work by The Community Roundtable folks on the yearly free whitepaper "The 2011 State of Community Management". And, once again, another rather popular session with lots of interactions and great conversations on the side. So after things have quiet down a bit, specially with my crazy travelling schedule as of late, I am really happy I am finding an opportunity now to come and share with you folks over here some further details on how you can get a copy of the slides that Rachel used, as well as the recording of both audio and video of the event itself. As a starting point, you can download the slide deck from CommunityBuilders - The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe and the recording from this other link. The replay lasts for a little bit over one hour, so you may want to go and watch it over a cup of coffee / tea, or two. At the same time, and as a teaser to what you will be able to find on that education session, Rachel pointed me as well to this Slideshare presentation they have which covers a similar set of slides you could peek through: The 2011 State of Community Management View more presentations from The Community Roundtable So, what else can you expect from watching the replay? Well, as a starting point you would be able to get a good reminder, and a refresher, of the excellent Community Maturity Model along with a good dive into the main key themes from the 2011 study / research: "Social Business Becomes A Strategic Imperative Interest in Community Management Has Increased The Community Management Discipline Is Evolving A Lot of Confusion Remains" From there onwards, Rachel, once again, did a great job in describing how those new findings translate into a really nice bunch of good / next practices for each and everyone of the various elements from the Maturity Model, which would mean it would give folks a great opportunity to learn some new tricks on the art of community building, as well as find out some pretty interesting nuggets on how leadership stands with regards to Social Business and Community Facilitation, from a recent survey they conducted as well. Truly fascinating, specially, the data around culture lagging… Now, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil it for you any further, since otherwise you wouldn’t need to listen to the recording any longer hehe. Just hope these teasers would give you enough ground to go ahead and take a look, as we are approaching the weekend and have perhaps a bit more time to go through it than through the regular week at work  I can tell you though that it would be worth while your time. Every minute of it. From here onwards, I would just want to take the opportunity to share a special Thanks!! with Rachel for being with us, once again, and we surely look forward to further interactions in this fine art of managing and facilitating online communities. Later on, in its due time, I will share across another blog post where I will comment further more in detail about The State of CommunityManagement 2010 full report, which I can surely recommend you have a read, if you would want to learn plenty more of the traits behind successful community management. That is, learning new tricks right from the horse’s mouth, The Community Roundtable, if you would ask me…

Aah! I finally made it to this one. Had a busy afternoon till now, but now it's webinar time. Today's LSG webinar is by Jane Hart, one of the world’s leading experts in social and collaborative... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

As you may well remember from a couple of recent blog posts I put together over here, this week, on June 8th, the yearly Social Business Forum will be taking place in Milan and it will be a great honour for me to be able to attend it as well as go and present on the topic of "Communities or Organisations? - The New Collaboration Ecology", where I will be sharing some further insights on IBM’s various experiences with regards to the wider adoption, enablement and empowerment of online communities through social software tools and how traditional hierarchies and teams are transforming themselves, as a result of it, into a new, richer, more complex, more dynamic and agile Collaboration Ecology. I’ll be sharing some initial reflections as well on an absolutely wonderful piece of research done by the IBM Almaden Research folks with Tara Matthews leading the efforts in this very same area of figuring out the next generation of the collaboration landscape. There will be, as usual, plenty of live tweeting from my side over at @elsua under the hash tag #sbf11 and a couple of follow-up blog posts with plenty of highlights from the overall event as well, but that would be the subject for another blog post or two. For now, I would want to reflect on something that I have noticed it’s starting to happen to me more often than not and so far it’s proved to be a challenge to put it down for good in order to reflect further on it to see where it would finally go. So I thought that today could be the perfect opportunity to air it out and, at long last, get it out of my chest. Yes, indeed, folks, it looks like my Hippie 2.0 side is coming out again, and this time around in full force and with a sweet, long lasting vengeance after putting it in a dormant status for far too long! They keep saying that a good personal business blog is that one that has struck that perfect 80% / 20% balance; 80% business and 20% personal. Funny enough, I have always felt that most of the content I have shared over here, in this blog, has been, for the most part, business related, with the odd personal entry here and there. However, and over the last few weeks, I have been putting together a whole bunch of various different blog entries that I wanted to share across, but that never made it, because they were exceeding that 20% big time. I know they would need to get out at some point, but somehow I am kind of not very keen on re-converting this blog on something far too personal. It wouldn’t be the purpose of what I envisioned for the blog right from the start. And, certainly, creating another one, separate from this one, is not an idea I would want to contemplate just yet. Thus how do you get to compromise? Do you actually need to compromise in the first place? Should you? Will people walk away and never come back if you start becoming a bit too personal? A bit too close? Hummm, questions, questions. Choices, choices. Not an easy answer for any of them, don’t you think? I am sure though, at this point in time, you may be wondering what has triggered that sudden change and that re-emergence of my Hippie 2.0 side, right? Well, you are probably not going to believe it, but it’s mostly been a rather hard and sudden touch with reality that has provoked an awakening, like no other, for yours truly in a couple of areas that I never thought I would see coming along after all of this time being on the Web: mainly that one of being a critical thinker while being a good citizen / netizen. And I am sure you know where I am heading with this … It’s been an awakening that I am finding it harder and harder to tame and control over the course of time, to the point, where, in some cases I have hinted already that certain change is already in the making and happening altogether. Back in 2001, when I was first exposed to social software tools, there were a number of different guidelines I decided to put in place and abide for myself; mainly, stating there would be three different subjects that I wouldn’t touch much *ever* in any online Web form. Mainly, politics, religion and sports. So far I think I have been doing pretty well, since I hardly ever get to share any content in either of those three subjects. However, things are changing and somehow I feel there is no way back. Involvement is a very powerful word, indeed. And that touch with reality that I have experienced over the last couple of weeks surely has marked the time when that involvement may be much tighter and much more direct than whatever was happening in the past. At least, for me. Yes, that’s right! For a long while I have stayed away, on purpose, from the whole world of politics, more than anything else, because I know, along with religion and sports, it’s one of those visceral subjects that often keeps getting misinterpreted time and time again provoking even more trouble than helping out in the first place. Yet, when certain things like this one happen far too close to home (I was there just the same morning that set of events took place!) one starts to question whether you can let it go, just like that, hoping that it will be forgotten, when you know exactly that’s not going to happen. They call us internauts, bloggers, twitterers, facebookers, social networkers, freaks, you name it. When in reality we are just like them; citizens taking advantage of the tools available to us to try to make a difference. It bugs me. It bugs me big time that my social computing evangelist bubble has burst just like that, so easy. It bugs me the huge amount of fear and apprehension there seems to be out there, from all over the place, towards the Internet, specially, that thing called social networks, where no-one seems to have the control over them, as if they are the last resource of freedom, or revelry, the world has got left out there. It gets me how, now more than ever, I keep ending up having rather engaging discussions where I end up trying to justify a social behaviour that’s been with us for thousands and thousands of years and that’s finally finding its natural path: that one of showing how interconnected we all are with one another. Regardless. You see? I told you. My Hippie 2.0 side is back! Ha! I knew it would eventually be happening, but I never expected that it would be coming back in such full force… To the point, where, even if my 2.0 evangelist bubble has been burst and smashed in hundreds of pieces in the last couple of weeks I’m now more motivated than ever to do a better job at evangelising around the subject of social networks than ever before, wanting to reach out beyond the original focus within the corporate, business environment and directly into our societies as a whole, because, after all, that’s all it matters, isn’t it? Who we are and how we are connected with one another. And if I can help open up a few more eyes and ears, why not? Wouldn’t it be worth it for all of us altogether? I mean, what are we, social computing evangelists, doing to help those around us understand where our passion and motivation for these social tools come from? Why don’t we try to make a little bit of an extra effort and pledge to make a difference with those evangelism efforts? Well, I do realise that this is not the typical blog entry you would be expecting to read over here. And that’s fine. I wasn’t expecting it myself either. I meant it as an article reflecting on some personal changes I am seeing, AND experiencing myself, that I cannot longer control (Not even sure anymore I would want to control them in the first place!) around the potential impact social has way beyond just a business context. I do hope you understand though where I am coming from. Where that touch with reality has made me realise there is now more work ahead of us than ever before! Specially, seeing recent global events in multiple countries, I doubt we would ever have a choice anymore to ignore it. In fact, I am starting to think I don’t want to ignore it any longer. I have done so for over a decade and I am starting to have enough of it; enough of having to justify how I live the Social Web, just because people don’t understand it, as a result of the fear they have been accumulating over time from all over the place. You see? As my good friend and, fellow Hippie 2.0, Mark Masterson once wisely said, not long ago, "If you focus on fear, you’ll get fear. If you focus on humour, you’ll get laughs", I thought I would close this thinking-out-loud open reflection letting folks know that, somehow, this blog (As well as my overall online interactions in social networks) have just started a new phase where my new mission is that one helping focus on the humour and the laughs versus the fear. I know now why I put together Three Wishes at the beginning of the year. Started to hint it subconsciously right there! Basically, to keep evangelising on social computing, not just in a business context, but also as an integral part of our societies, as citizens, because, at the end of the day, we are not internauts, we are not bloggers, nor twitterers nor facebookers, we are just people with a strong willingness to connect, and stay connected, with those who we share a common affinity with and learn further insights from that knowledge sharing experience to help us all become better at what we already do. That’s why I am embedding this video clip over here, as part of the weekly inspiring series of videos, by Aleix Saló under the title "ESPAÑISTAN La Burbuja Inmobiliaria a la Crisis by Aleix Salo", which clearly marks, to me, what innovation, creativity and a touch of humour can do to help explain complex problems we are facing ourselves with simple solutions, whether work related or not. In this case, the latter. Something that affects us all… (Video clip in Spanish) I guess I am now, finally, ready to unleash the fury, the passion and the motivation behind my Hippie 2.0 side and let it spread around once again. Somehow I am hoping I won’t be the only one…

I'm a foodie and I find a lot of inspiration in my food. A few days back, I went to watch Shrek Forever After 3D at a multiplex. As you'd expect, after the superlative 3D show, I was hungry so my... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Yesterday I delivered two workshops at the XP 2010 conference in Trondheim, Norway. The run up to this conference has been awfully busy for me from a work perspective, so I'm extremely pleased that... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

What an amazing and exhilarating week altogether! I am now back from the Social Business Forum conference event in Milan (Check #sbf11 for some amazing live tweeting), that took place on June 8th, and my head is about to explode with plenty of new ideas, new experiences, and lots of great new stuff learned and acquired around Social Computing and Social Business, both with internal and external flavours, along with a whole bunch of new friends, as well as that token of gratitude and contentment of having met some good old ones and doing a proper catchup in real life with most of them and what they are doing. If you ever want to re-energise yourself or charge your batteries to keep living social #sbf11is a good one example of how it can be done! Highly recommended, for sure! No doubt! Now, as you can imagine, I have got a whole bunch of things that I would want to talk about over here, in this blog, not only related to the overall content and outstanding quality of the speakers, along with the connections made through that couple of days, but also from the perspective of tech conference events in general. Lots to share. Perhaps, a quick note to get things going, have a look into the Social Business Forum Slideshare channel, where you can find already a whole bunch of the slides used by the speakers (Here are mine, of which I will talk about shortly as well…). That would be a good starting point, indeed, while we are also awaiting for the recordings to come along. In my case, and while I’m putting some structure together into those upcoming blog posts with plenty of highlights of the event itself, I thought I would drop by over here today and share with you folks another gem that Erik Qualman has just released a couple of days back as part of the now famous Socialnomics initiative. Welcome to the Social Media Revolution 2011! As usual, it’s one of those fun and interesting video clips that lasts a little bit longer than two minutes, while it goes through, rather quick, some amazing trivia around the social media landscape and its impact within both the corporate environment and our society as a whole. The clip itself is worth while having a look at, specially, if you are thinking about using some of the many nuggets included in it for your next upcoming presentations. So I thought it would be the perfect intro, and teaser, for the next round of blog posts with those highlights from the Social Business Forum conference event, as well as a great start of the weekend over here as well, which is just around the corner! Hope you enjoy it, and do get ready for a massive update with plenty of good highlights from what I learned on one of the Social Business events I have enjoyed the most in the last few months, not only because of the content and the overall event itself, but also because of the networking and the various human elements behind it, and you will see what I mean with that very very shortly … Have a good one everyone!