In a rather insightful blog post ("Fear of Freedom") my good friend Euan Semple quotes: "Our old worlds of corporate stability are crumbling - the job for life, status and authority from a fixed place in the hierarchy, individual certainty at the price of loss of soul. Many feel at sea and unsure of how to proceed. The old world is broken but we can’t see the shores of a new one yet" as perhaps one of the biggest challenges that corporate knowledge workers keep facing in today’s business world. Then, in another couple of short articles ("Feel the fear" and "Changing the world one word at a time") he comes to confirm the power of the word in the Era of Social Computing as the key trait to overcome such fear and start becoming that agent of change, for the better, through openness and transparency. And, while reading through all three of those articles, which I can strongly recommend reading along, I just couldn’t help thinking about another key element in that equation that not only should we be inspiring employees to thrive in and excel on, but, over time, it’s going to become quite a quintessential key trait of how we share our knowledge and collaborate successfully: critical thinking. The thing though is if you look into the corporate world at large, we have been immersed in a rather long and tedious path of not voicing out our opinions, our thoughts, ideas, concerns and whatever else inside the firewall, and probably outside just as much, in fear of losing our jobs, our prestige, our reputation with our colleagues and bosses, our quiet hard work over the course of the years, you name it. it actually takes us a whole lot of effort and energy to stand out, and when you do there is this tendency that rather the business itself, your boss, or even your own colleagues will remind you that if you become far too vocal they will succeed in quieting your down, eventually. So much so that, over time, what we have thought was, originally, good for us, that is, keep a low profile, it turns out to be rather the opposite, because there is a time where continuing that way we stagnate without looking out for another opportunity to continue to grow, both in our own personal career and as businesses. And I guess that if you look into how tough things are becoming in certain parts of the world with the financial turmoil we are starting to pay the toll for it. And sadly, big time.  But there may well be a way. In fact, there is a way. Back again to critical thinking and, specially, doing plenty of it in an open and constructive manner. That’s the reason why today I’d want to point you to one of those incredibly inspiring, and mind-boggling TED Talks that you may be watching this year. It’s a rather short one, but a brilliant one altogether, because I feel that it has got a major key learning that we need to start embracing, becoming more comfortable with it, and practicing it quite a bit to get the best results of what we excel at: daring to disagree. Indeed, under "Dare to Disagree" Margaret Heffernan does a superb job at convincing everyone, and in a very smart and elegant manner, that "Openness alone cannot drive change". How, instead, we need to inspire and provoke the creation of conflict around theories; basically, she encourages all knowledge workers out there to come forward and through that act of daring to disagree keep challenging the status quo of how things have been running in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. Never mind the assumptions already pre-established from the past, where that kind of constructive dissent, if anything, allows for a much purer, inspirational, trustworthy and resourceful collaboration environment where partners are not just part of their own echo chambers, but, instead, keep driving change through that same constructive dialogue.  She encourages us all to find people who are very different from ourselves. To actually seek out people with different backgrounds, disciplines, experiences and try, really hard, to find ways to engage with them. I guess that’s leaving your comfort zone at its best, specially, when you may not know much about those people. It will certainly require lots of patience and energy, but, here’s the kicker, It’s all a signal of love, as she states, because you care about that act of critical thinking and dissent with your work partners, because you are starting to realise that you are both after the same common goal: do your jobs better. Become smarter, in a way.  The interesting thing from her dissertation is that when we extrapolate that act of daring to disagree in organisations she comes to question "how do organizations think?". Well, according to her, and for the most part, they don’t. And it is not because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. People inside them are too afraid of conflict. Afraid to raise issues, constructive feedback, to be embroiled in arguments they couldn’t manage. It’s just like we all want to be seen as rather nice to our colleagues and become just perfect workmates.  The trouble is, just because of that, organisations can’t think together, therefore we can’t get the best out of them. And what Margaret tries to encourage us all to do is to develop the skills we need to apply plenty of that critical thinking. We need to think and then become very good at it. Goodness! Talking about rather controversial and polemic statements. Right there, that one would be as good as it gets, because I can imagine how time and time again you may have refrained yourself from saying something out loud in fear of what may be said about it, or acted upon, or just simply in fear of hurting other people’s feelings. Just think of it, when was the last time that you had a heated, but constructive, conversation inside your company about a particular topic? My last one was earlier on today and somehow I seem to have developed that habit of having, at least, 3 to 5 of those discussions on a weekly basis, internally, that is. And the best part is that it certainly does take time to adjust to that new raging dialogue, but, once you go through the first iterations, you actually get to acknowledge how powerful they are in allowing you not just to learn plenty of new things while on the job, but at the same time it gives you plenty of opportunities to fix what may be broken in the first place.   Margaret says, and I couldn’t agree more with her, that you need to find your allies and come together, gather around a table (Or a virtual space for that matter), be creative, and change things. She calls those folks whistle blowers, more than anything else, because they are passionately devoted to the organisation and the higher purpose it’s bound to. They do dare to speak most of the time, rather than keep silent and it’s rather fascinating how those very same folks turn out to be the strongest brand advocates of your own brand, just by giving them an opportunity to challenge that status quo of things and see how they could improve the overall business performance of a company. Goodness! Talking about raising a new generation of leaders… A generation of leaders that’s more than ready, and well better prepared than anyone else in a corporate environment, to stand up to authority and engage in meaningful debate. She encourages that not only knowledge workers should be encouraged to have these skills, but she also mentions how they should be taught to young kids at school as well, as part of that essential curriculum of soft skills that are just as critical as anything else to engage at work, collaborate and share your knowledge with a purpose. Just brilliant! And I couldn’t have agreed more with her… Information should not be secret, nor hidden, but available freely out there; that’s why we need to dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, that’s when we create enough conflict to enable ourselves, and people around us, do our best thinking in addressing and fixing whatever problems. Apaprently, we, human beings, have been made to dissent, to fight constraints through meaningful dialogue, and be critical thinkers about the day to day stuff that we embark on, knowing that we are always aiming at improving things, because that’s part of our nature as well.  Finally, Margaret comes to my favourite piece from her dissertation where she mentions how open information and open networks are wonderful and rather critical to the business; but, at the same time, we need to ensure that we have got a chance to build those critical thinking skills, talent, habits and the courage to use them in a wisely manner. Contrary to what most people think, and I had a big ah-ha moment myself, because I never thought of it in such way, openness is not the end, it’s the beginning. And critical thinking will be the major driver of our interactions and, in a work environment, it will be how we would get work done eventually.    It’d just be a matter of time for us to want to come to terms with the fact of whether we would want to shake off that fear of being rejected, or frowned upon, or told off by our bosses, our colleagues, or even ourselves, and start standing out a bit more, daring to disagree with an argument, if we feel we can drive that change for the better. It’s going to require a lot of effort, hard work, and energy, but if there is something very clear that I got from watching Margaret’s stunning presentation is the fact that it’s up to each and everyone of us to take a stand and decide for ourselves whether we would want to be open enough to allow dissent around us, to find those allies to encourage that discourse, to build further up on that constructive feedback and try to solve of all of those business problems that have been with us for far too long! I’m all up for that… and you? Ready to take open, transparent critical thinking into the next level through our use of social technologies? Willing to dare to disagree and get away with it? If not, what can we do to shake off that fear to make it happen? I hope anonymity is not the answer. Because if it is, I guess that would be a worrying sign that you, or me, or whoever else, is working at the wrong place. And it would be a good time now to move on …  Once again, our choice to make.

This afternoon in the closing session we have the very accomplished Sheena Iyengar - author of The Art of Choosing. I haven't read her book but I hear she's pretty awesome. I'll believe it - I'm all ears.  Sheena has been studying choice for several years and her book explores several questions. Why do we choose? What affects our choices? How can we improve our choosing experience and outcomes? Sheena asks the audience if they're having a good time - loud resounding clap! Sheena takes us into a story about the Draeger's Grocery Store. They had 75 different kinds of olive oils from all sorts of places. Awesome eh? Sheena went there several times but bought nothing! She asked the manager if the choice was actually working for them as a business. They didn't know. So they set up 24 Jams in one place and then another place with 6 Jams. Which place would people buy more jam? While 60% stopped at the 24 Jam store, 40% stopped at the 6 Jam store. However, 30% bought from the latter while 3% from the former. This - if you do the math is a 6 time increase in sales. The paradox of choice documents this phenomenon. Turns out that more choice usually ends up confusing people enough to postpone the decision.Today you have more choice than ever before. You are confronted by 3 trillion bits of information in the air! 15 million possibilities for a soulmate on match.com - brilliant eh? Not so much. This is choice overload. There are three main consequences of too much choices:People usually stick with the status quo - people choose not to choose. No one wants to commit to one choice. Let's look at 401k plans in the US - more fund choices seemed lead to less people participating and hence less savings. It reduces decision quality. Medicare - it's the same story; people are unhappy with the choices they make and a lot of people want to buy directly from Medicare and would love fewer choices. I have the same problem with the new age of social media platforms. The market is so saturated with choices that it's making life worse and fragmented.We're less satisfied with our choices. Think of how much TV programming that's available. You watch a program and then you're unhappy with what you missed. So what's going on here? George Miller (psychologist) came up with the notion of a magic number 7 (+/-) 2. The paraphrasing of the law is that the average person can usually hold 7 (+/-) 2 objects in working memory. So more choice than that is usually a detriment to decision making and choosing. Think about it - when you start a game of chess, you have more choice available (as combinations) than stars in the galaxy. If you have expertise then you can chunk this information and break it down into specific lines of attack. So do you have enough information available to you to make a decision? For example the car you want to buy? SUV, cruise control, automatic transmission, etc - will narrow down your choices and make life easier. Unfortunately you're not an expert and the market is designed for experts.So here are four choosing techniques that help:Cut: Remove the choices. When P&G reduced the number of their shampoo choices, they increased their profits and this is the case with several product lines. Think of Apple - the only choice you have is the iPhone! Don't boggle the mind with extraneous choices. Sheena tells us about leadership perceptions. When a manager gives no choice, the engineer group surveyed rates them badly. When the manager gives them two choices they rate them highly. When the same engineers get 6 choices they again rate the manager badly. You want to give people choices but you don't want to overwhelm them. If you only had one option what would it be? If you can't justify the options then don't put it in there. Concretise: How can you make the consequences of your decision explicit? Why is my credit card always maxed out? Potentially because it doesn't feel as real as spending real money from the bank. To make decisions what you need is not only information but also a feeling of the consequences. It's like in Indecent Proposal when Robert Redford offers a million dollars in return for a night with Demi Moore and it's a hypothesis the reaction is different from when the money becomes actually real. Good example, eh? I came up with that all by myself.Categorisation: Experts are able to categorise information. That being said, a choice provider can be the expert and categorise for the consumer or decision maker. After all, it's perhaps in your interest to help people make a choice. Think of a magazine rack. If 400 magazines were laid out in front of you in 25 different categories you'd be more likely to make a choice. As it turns out our brains are also more equipped to handle categories than choices. So you're more likely to make choices from 25 categories than say five.For example look at the wine categorisation technique that specific cellars use to categorise the hundreds of wines that are available to us.Condition: If we can approach things in a methodical fashion, we're more likely to arrive at a choice than by just the accident of finding 'the right furniture' in Joe's used furniture store. Sheena gives us the example of a German car manufacturer that allow users to custom make their car by breaking down various choices available ranging from certain decisions that have low choice (4) to high (56). Now people that advance from high choice to low make less purchases than those that advance from low to high. Also satisfaction is higher for those that move from low to high choice. People's excitement for choice usually increases with each step and the fact that you build up the condition makes them more excited about the product itself. Start shallow and get deeper. Why does Apple do so well (something I wrote earlier)? Small choice vs heavy choice and people understand their choices much better.Wow, this was a great session on design though not so apparent on the surface. I think there's a lot of meat in there for community managers, leaders, marketeers, sales-people, designers and anyone offering an experience to take a lot out of this session. This lady is brilliant. Sheena maybe blind, but she is helping us see. If you need to use the learnings from this session in practice then check out GLEAM - Global Leadership Matrix (coming soon). This will include several tools with video clips alongside - this'll help you learn about yourself and design solutions that actually make sense. Also, everyone who comes to the website, you'll be able to participate in Sheena's research. Be choosy about choosing. Follow Sheena on twitter and check out her website! © Sumeet Moghe

Over the course of the last couple of years I have developed that habit of watching the recordings of the presentations that I give myself at public speaking events. Not because of having such a huge ego that I would want to see what I looked like or whatever else, but more than anything else, because, apparently, it’s a tremendously powerful learning tool to improve your own body language when you are delivering your next dissertation. And although, I must admit, at the beginning, it was quite a bit tough to watch oneself, once you shake off that awkward feeling of seeing yourself in front of an audience making  some weird moves, it’s a rather reassuring experience of how you could improve your public speaking skills for that next time.  Another interesting way though of improving your own public speaking skills is to, every now and then, hunt down articles, blog posts, hints and tips, and whatever other tricks from other folks (One of my favourites at the moment is this article on "Storytelling tips from the experts at Pixar" which, through an infographic, describes, quite nicely, how to get the most out of sharing stories and / or telling good stories. Of course, it’s Pixar, right? ) who are very well versed on the topic of public speaking and learn from the masters. So much so that when you go through such learning curve you just can’t stop jumping from one ah-ha! moment to another thinking "Ohh, nice one! I could use that one next time around!" or something of the sort. So I thought I would drop by over here today and share with you, folks, two of my favourite resources that I have bumped into just recently as being fully packed with good practices, lessons learned, and plenty of know-how on what it is like being a successful public speaker. Plus a bonus tip… The first one is coming from Ned Potter, who, a couple of weeks earlier, put together this absolutely stunning presentation under the suggestive heading of "Good Presentations Matter", packed up with plenty of incredibly helpful hints and tips, tricks and lots of good practices on how to fine tune your upcoming presentation and where he includes plenty of insights on how to get visuals right! Something that for someone, like myself, who has now become rather PowerPoint averse, I have found them very relevant and resourceful to the point that perhaps on my upcoming public speaking events in September and October I may be using some of them eventually. Ned shared the materials over at Slideshare, so I thought I would share the embedded code over here, so that you would have an opportunity to hit Play and go through them. I can certainly recommend having a look. Specially, the super-advanced MEGA tips:  Good presentations matter from Ned Potter Another really helpful resource on public speaking tips is that one that Tara Hunt (a.k.a. @missrogue) shared as well over at Slideshare not long ago and which seems to have been making the rounds, lately, quite a bit and rather understandably, since it’s just a brilliant source on the practicalities of working your way around the stage and how to overcome all of those potential fears we all have experienced at some point, along with plenty of tips on what to focus on when putting together your presentation and your speech. Another worth while looking into resource, for sure:  How to Rock an Audience: from stage fright to stage presence from Tara Hunt And, finally, to complete this round of, hopefully, relevant resources that have helped me tremendously in improving my public speaking skills, I thought I would finish off this blog entry with the bonus tip, with the one and only, Ze Frank, author of the stunning and always witty A Show, who a couple of days ago put together this 5 minute video clip that’s just pure genius. So packed up with helpful tips that you would probably have to watch it twice, or thrice!, just to be capable of absorbing it all. Yes, I know, that good. And if not, judge for yourselves:  So, there you have it. People keep saying that public speaking is an art, an art that takes years and lots and lots of iterations to get it right and master. It’s a continuous learning experience that helps you grow intellectually as well as emotionally, but one thing for sure is that we can all help accelerate those years by sharing across and learning from those who have already mastered those skills and who have, gracefully, shared their best hints and tips, tricks, know-how and extensive experience without asking much in return. Something to always be rather grateful for, don’t you think?  Thanks ever much, Ned, Tara and Ze for showing and demonstrating how good presentations to rock an audience with a touch of humor and wit do matter after all. Time to get ready for the next one … 

I'm not a tiger expert like Valmik Thapar. I'm not an activist on the field like Vidya Athreya or Dharmendra Khandal either. I am not pretentious enough to consider myself an armchair tiger crusader either - unlike Diya Banerjee. I'm just another Indian who loves the natural history of this country to bits, especially the tiger. I've said this earlier, I'll say this again - there's nothing quite like seeing a tiger in the wild. To photograph it with a stable hand is something else. I have seen the lazy elegance of the lion. I've seen the feline grace of the leopard. There's something about the tiger though that sets it apart from its peninsular cousins. Is it the swagger of the beast - a gait that's quite contrary to its acquired fear of humans? Is it the tiger's beauty? Is it about how elusive it can be in the wild? I can't tell, though I know that to see tigers the wild has been amongst the best experiences of my life till date. I've rarely done anything cooler. "A tiger is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated - as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support - India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna." - Jim Corbett As I write this post, the Supreme Court of India is hearing a petition by Prayatna - a Bhopal based NGO led by prominent activist Ajay Dubey. The petition, amongst other things seeks to ban tiger tourism in the country as it exists today. The alternative they suggest is for tourism (read safaris) to happen in the fringes of the park, making the core zones of our tiger reserves 'inviolate'. The rationale behind this is that if traditional forest dwellers have left their ancestral land to give the tigers solitude and peace, how can tourists still have access to these woods? There are theories which state that the tiger cannot breed in the constant presence of humans and therefore tourists should stay out. After all the Sariska tigers have not bred successfully since their reintroduction in 2005 - a reason for this (probably) being the presence of villages in the forest. Tourism doesn't also bring too many benefits to local communities. Krithi Karanth's 2011 study titled 'Conservation Letters' revealed some startling statistics - local residents get less than 0.5% of the revenues from wildlife tourism. Even more startling is the revelation is that the park itself gets less than 5% of the revenues and close to 95% goes into private hands.There's anecdotal evidence to say that the presence of tourists does disturb the tiger's life. I shot this tigress at Jim Corbett National Park - named after the legendary hunter turned conservationist. She's a beautiful female just separated from her mother, learning to live the solitary life of a tiger. Look at the picture carefully. Do you see how her tummy's gone well inside? Well, we were responsible for that. Let me explain. A day before I shot this picture, we'd gotten news of her presence in the Dhikala grasslands. We turned our vehicle around from where we were and headed there for a view. The news was right - she was there, stalking wild boar for a morning meal. We waited patiently for her to move across the grassland and grab her quarry, but alas that was not to be. Within minutes, tourist elephants ferrying tourists who wanted a 'closer view' invaded the grassland. The hunt was all over - the tigress stood no chance of making a kill in that commotion. When I saw her the next day (at the time of this photograph), she looked frail and hungry and a part of me regretted what had happened the previous day, though I wasn't directly responsible. So then, shouldn't we ban tourism? It seems to bring no benefits to the local community and it disturbs the tiger. If anything it seems to encroach on the tiger's last strongholds. As it turns out, my view is quite the opposite. The tiger is India's national animal. As Steve Winter would put it, the tiger is 'our bald eagle'. The beauty of tiger tourism in this country is in the fact that anyone with ₹500 ($9.17) can share a vehicle with other people and stand a chance to see the charismatic beast. People can't feel the desire to protect what they can't see or experience. If seeing a tiger in the wild becomes the privilege of just a handful of experts, it will probably mean an end to the love and passion several Indians feel for the beast and its protection. Last I checked, spreading the word was amongst the top few things one could do to save the tiger. When no one can see the tiger anymore, what word do you spread? That there's a mythical beast in the woods which incidentally we don't have access to anymore? "Nobody will be interested in protecting something that they are not allowed to see or experience. Banning tourism in National Parks and sanctuaries will be disastrous for the tiger in particular, and an open invitation to poachers and the timber mafia." Belinda Wright A few days back watchful tourists reported the presence of two suspicious youths in the core area of Tadoba Tiger Reserve. My friend Chirdeep wrote this rather sorrowful story of Maasti - the tiger with an amputated leg. The truth is that Maasti perhaps wouldn't even be alive today had it not been for a watchful wildlife enthusiast on safari. Tourism gives tiger conservation the third eye it woefully needs. In the current situation where patrolling is so ineffective that tigers get killed despite a red alert in the state, tourists end up being free watchdogs for the forest department. This is a service that we can't snub. We can't wish away the issue of disturbance to tigers from tourists. That being said, we have to look at Tadoba and Ranthambhore - two of our most visited tiger reserves. Over the last year the tiger population at Tadoba has gone from 53 to 69. Ranthambhore has a baby boom despite the drones of tourists that visit the park. There's circumstantial evidence in Kanha, Pench, Bandhavgarh and almost every other park that tigers are multiplying in the core zones despite tourism. Yes tourism needs regulation. Illegal constructions on the banks of the Kosi river need to stop. We need unhindered tiger corridors and if there are resorts that block this area, we need to bring them down. We need a strict clampdown on boorish behaviour in parks. Guides, mahouts and drivers need education to keep the interests of the animals first. We need to pay them well, so their livelihood isn't just dependent on the tips they collect in the seven months that the parks are open. As tourists we need to draw our own line of ethics. Do we want to do all it takes for that tiger sighting or are we willing to let go every now and then?There's no point in slamming the elephant assisted tiger sightings of Central India - they are perhaps the most organised and well behaved viewing opportunities for tourists. Under the supervision of park rangers, the elephants ferry tourists four at a time for a five minute, regulated view of the tiger. The tiger is free to move into the woods and if it moves in too deep, the elephants don't pursue. The mahouts keep the tourists in check. The tourist safaris are a different kettle of fish though. The guides and drivers are too scared of losing their tip to admonish ill-mannered guests. While that is the reality of today's situation, every tourist in the wild has a responsibility to self regulate.Last but certainly not the least the forest department needs to relieve the pressure of tourism by creating alternate opportunities for visitors. The buffer zone safari at Tadoba, the promotion of Magadhi and Khitauli in Bandhavgarh, responsible fringe tourism by resorts like Camp Forktail Creek are all steps in the right direction. The tourism industry also needs a fair bit of transparency. The opaque, fax based booking system at Dhikala and Corbett's forest rest houses needs to go. The nexus of the Kosi lodges and the forest booking clerks (read this report) needs to break and make way for responsible tourism. The agent dominated safari booking system at Ranthambhore needs to go - it needs transparency in booking zones and vehicles. The whimsical allotment of prime routes to the tourism mafia needs to stop. The more we can weed out corruption from the wildlife tourism infrastructure in this country, the more accessible we make it to the common man. And after all, we can't save the tiger if the common man doesn't care about it. "Wildlife tourists carry cameras, not axes. They do not poach, do not submerge forests with dams... They are being unjustifiably blamed for killing tigers." Vishal Singh - TOFT I sincerely hope that the Supreme Court acts wisely in its decision on the Prayatna case. Tourism when well regulated can be a great tool for conservation. I can't express in words how it has opened my mind and enriched my life. I hope this doesn't remain a privilege I speak of in the past tense. The next generation of Indians deserves to still enjoy our wilderness just as I have in the past few years. © Sumeet Moghe

I have been in the IT industry for well over 15 years now and for a good number of them I have been relying on multiple different systems. One of them being Windows. Fast forward to today, and as most folks out there would know, if you have been following me on any of the various social networking sites, I have been using Apple products (Macs, iPhone and iPad) for nearly 6 years now and, just recently, I have finally come to terms with the main reason why I made the switch back then and have never walked back. My levels of productivity and effectiveness have never been the same anymore. And it’s just too funny that it’s all due to having watched a recent video clip in Wired from a never-aired Apple commercial in 1983! Yes, 29 years ago some folks over at Apple truly understood and fully embraced the Power of Social. Who would have thought, eh? I am sure you are all wondering what I am talking about, which video is that one that I am referencing above, what difference does it make that I have moved to the Mac nearly 6 years ago on how I view my own involvement with social networking for business and how I’m more and more convinced they may have provided us all with that tipping point of why there is hope that the Social Enterprise concept will stick around for a long while, if we pay attention to how plenty of large enterprises and businesses are looking closely into the potential impact of Apple devices inside of the workplace (Despite some horrifying experiences that we have bumped into just recently as well).  Well, I am referring to this piece in Wired, under the title "Former Apple Engineer Posts Unseen Mac TV Ad From 1983", which references this Google Plus post by Andy Hertzfeld where he quotes an Apple commercial for the original Macintosh that they did in the fall of 1983, but which, apparently, never aired and I think I can see why! Although it is not the main sentiment that Andy mentions on the Plus post. Here it is the embedded code, so that you can play it. It lasts for a little bit over a minute:    Noticed something different in that advertisement? No? Really? Don’t worry, I’m not talking about the discourse of how the Macintosh came together in the first place, but about something a whole lot more subtle that has escaped most people’s perceptions on the repercussions of such bold statements. Specially, my favourite one. The one from Mike Murray, the Director of Marketing of the Macintosh division back then, who just basically stated the following:  "And I think what you are going to see is that the balance of power is going to shift. The balance of power from companies running people to, hopefully, people running companies" [Emphasis mine] Does that ring a bell? Specially, in the context of Living Social in the workplace? You bet it does! And this is where I came to realise what making use of Apple products has meant for me over the course of the last few years, as I got more and more heavily involved with technology and social networking tools, for that matter, to get my work done. That’s the fact that technology is no longer a hurdle for yours truly. There are no more headaches, no more screams, nor yelling, at the screen b*tching about why a certain action didn’t take place when I did everything correctly. No more demotivated and frustrated things don’t turn around on the screen just right, as you would have expected. Finally, it all eventually falls into place. It all just works! And beautifully. And that’s certainly the beauty behind that powerful quote from Mike, because, if anything, it allows us to do something that would be very much needed at this point, which is forget about technology, use it as a tool, as a means to achieve a goal and focus on the behaviours, on the mindset, on changing people’s habits, on helping them understand you, too, can have a wonderful experience, i..e. eventually, becoming more effective and efficient at what you already do, without having to suffer from the odd technology hiccup, just like that, allowing you to focus on what we would always need to focus on: the conversations. The conversations with people regardless of where you and they are, regardless of the device you are using, whether mobile or not, and regardless of the nature of the interaction. Just converse. Who would have thought that, 29 years ago, the vision was already there! Who would have thought that those folks portrayed on the video clip were on a bigger mission: helping shift corporate dynamics from a rather heavy technology focus / fetishism, where people were just resources, towards that much more liberating, creative, inspiring, collaborative and knowledge sharing prone environment where people were, still are!, people, interacting with the tools to get something out of those interactions, because tools will always be tools. Yes, some times it would be hard to explain. But then again, that’s where play kicks in. We do need more play at work. Specially, for all of that stuff that we find difficult to justify and explain, but that it’s essential to every single business. Something that people, human beings, have been excelling at for many millennia. And for plenty more to come along! Yes, I almost became an instant #fanboi. Almost. but what a powerful one-liner, don’t you think? One that can certainly change the world. For the better. Our little corporate world and the larger one for that matter, too!

10:30 AM, 21st February, 2012. Time to get off a rickety rickshaw, and get going for a bumpy and dusty ride to Kaziranga National Park. This was leg 2 of our 9 days in paradise (remember Nameri?). When I say bumpy and dusty, you've got to take me seriously. Now, how bad can a 65 km drive be? Well, the answer is, "It depends...". Depends on what - you may ask. Well, it depends on how good your driver is and whether or not you can pull up your windows, turn on the AC and be immune to the dust around. We didn't expect it to be too hot in February, so we'd gone for a non-AC vehicle. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Let it suffice to say that when eventually we washed our faces at Wild Grass Resort in Kaziranga - the basin was full of brown water!That incidentally was the story of our entire stay at Kaziranga. February is right at the end of the dry season in Kaziranga and the forest is a proverbial dust bowl. The fine dust is pretty similar to what we'd seen on the banks of the Jia Bhorali back at Nameri, so this wasn't a new experience. That being said, it wasn't exactly how we'd pictured it. Speaking of pictures though, Kaziranga has to be amongst the best places in the country to photograph big mammals. A savannah more African than Indian, Kaziranga's landscape is dominated by tall elephant grass. And through their blades emerge some of the largest mammals you'll see in India. The Asiatic wild buffalo, swamp deer, the Asiatic elephant, the Royal Bengal Tiger, the Asiatic leopard and the mascot of the park  - the one horned rhinoceros, all take turns to throw visitors into a photo frenzy as they suddenly materialise.But beyond megafauna, the grassland habitat, marshland, and moist tropical forests play home to over 500 species of birdlife. Add to that smaller mammals such as otters, mongoose, jackals, foxes, cats and pangolins - Kaziranga is an absolute jewel of India's wilderness. Try not to get killedLet's count our odds. Kaziranga is home to 80 odd tigers, some 140 leopards, about 2000 elephants, a similar number of rhinos and more than 1600 wild buffalos. Dangerous enough? To protect these animals, the guards have very strict rules - no one walks around the park on foot. If you do, there are no questions asked - you first get shot. If you stay in your vehicle, you're likely to stay alive. As a measure of the risk you've got to know that about seven guards lost their lives to wild animals last year, despite being armed.I of course like to learn my lessons the hard way. As a lot of you will know, I love birds - and photographing them. Nameri hadn't given me much joy on the photography front, so I decided to exercise my shutter finger a bit extra in Kaziranga. So in search of birds we finally found a beautiful brown fish owl. Right on the side of the road. As it happens when you have four people with long lenses in a vehicle, we were indecisive about what the best angle for photographs would be. A little to the front and little to the back - the bird lost patience and flew to a less flattering perch. I was undeterred. That day we had a forest guard with us - I took his permission and decided to try and photograph the bird on foot.Picture this. I get off the vehicle and walk about a 100 metres back to where the bird was. The forest feels unusually calm. As I get to the bird I pull up my camera and take a few record shots first. Then I decide to try a few different compositions. Even as I make up my mind on how to make the most of tricky lighting and a bad perch, my friends wave frantically to get my attention. "Is there something even more exciting to see?", I think to myself. And then, I see the guard leap down from the vehicle and pull out his gun. "Come back, come back.", he says as he runs towards me. "This can't be a photography subject...", I say to myself as I run back towards the vehicle, sensing some urgency. As I begin my leisurely jog, I see what everyone is worried about. Hardly 50m from where I am, a two-tonne male rhino is waiting to cross the road. Phew! That's a close one! I have to say, I didn't feel scared at the moment, but in hindsight I realise how close I was to dying - quite painfully. Rhinos of course have very poor eyesight and that's what worked quite well for me - it smelt me and so was tentative about whether to cross. At the end of the day, I've got to count the big guy as a really gentle being - one that preferred to wait and avoid conflict. That day taught me an important lesson - regardless of how calm things may seem, never take things for granted in a forest. Rhinos like cows?"We'll see so many rhinos, that you'll equate them with cows.", that's what Raji had said to me when we started out in Kaziranga. Ok to be fair, her friend said that to her and she repeated the statement back to me. I'm sure several others may have had exactly that experience, but I can't say I was tripping over rhinos. We saw our fair share and we definitely got some really good photographs. That being said, how many rhinos you get to see depends purely on your luck and the ranges you choose to visit. Kaziranga National Park has four ranges - Kohora (central range), Bagori (western range), Agoratoli(eastern), Burapahar and the Panbari reserve forest. The eastern range is a birder's paradise - not surprisingly we spotted more than a 150 bird species during our stay, most of them in that range. The western range is a great place to spend your evenings with large mammals. The central range is a best of both worlds. Tall trees make for great raptor perches and the proximity of grazing landscapes makes for great encounters with the bigger animals. No one wants to go to the Burapahar range and the Panbari forest which needs special permission was closed when we went to Kaziranga. Our decision to split our time across the remaining three ranges paid off - I think we got a good sampling of what Kaziranga has to offer; though I must say I'll have to go back and spend some more time there to get to know the forest better. And who knows what mysteries this forest hides that I haven't yet experienced? How many tigers?I usually have pretty good luck with big cats. I will say this though - don't go to Kaziranga if you want to spot a tiger or a leopard. The grass is so tall that sometimes you have to struggle to spot an elephant. Secretive, solitary hunters like tigers are difficult to photograph unless of course you're Steve Winter and can set up camera traps all over the place. Go to Kaziranga for the birds and the large herbivores. If a tiger's what's on your mind, pick another park. We came tantalisingly close to spotting a tiger - but it gave us the slip. All fair and well though, since we didn't miss the big cats at all! Travel TipsIf you're planning your trip to Kaziranga here are a few tips that'll come in handy.The best time to visit Kaziranga is between December and February. This is a relatively dry season, there's good light; the forest department also burns the grass during this time which makes for relatively unhindered wildlife viewing. Plus, it's absolutely brilliant weather for the most part.Kaziranga is quite close to Jorhat airport. As compared to Guwahati which is about 230km away, Jorhat is just 80km from the park. If I had to go only to Kaziranga, I'd perhaps choose a flight into Jorhat.We stayed at the Wild Grass Resort. Mr Manju Barua (+91-3776-262085), the owner is a very knowledgeable man and extremely hospitable towards wildlife lovers. The manager, Dilip Gogoi is a bit of dead-fish by appearance, but don't get fooled by that facade. He quietly makes sure that he caters to all your needs.We got a pretty good deal from Wild Grass. All four of us stayed in one huge room at just ₹1300 per night with breakfast included. Our meals were an additional ₹750 per person per night.There are several other accommodation options too. The Assam tourism lodges are perhaps the most inexpensive, though I'm not sure of the service. There's lodges like the Dhansari eco camp and luxury resorts like Iora that complete the picture. From the number of homestays and small hotels I saw on the road, I can't imagine that it'll be too difficult to backpack into Kaziranga either.Wild Grass will arrange your safaris too. We got a rate of ₹3200 for two game drives a day from them which is about ₹400 less than that of the gypsy association at Kohora. That said, the side facing vehicles at Wild Grass didn't feel very photography friendly for a group of four. I can imagine they'll be fine for two people, but for four of us with telephoto lenses, we got front facing vehicles from Kohora.Wild Grass has some amazing guides. Kunwar, Palash and Naqeeb are perhaps their most talked of guides on the blogosphere, but I'm pretty sure that their other two guides are also pretty good. I'd recommend Wild Grass most highly just for how knowledgeable their guides are.If you'd like to go on an elephant safari, you should plan your morning drive at Kohora. The elephants set out for an hour at 0530 in the morning and the ride costs ₹325 per person. While you don't always have the best photography angles, the elephants give you a good chance of getting very close to the rhinos and swamp deer. Your best bet of seeing a tiger is also from atop an elephant. We of course, almost fell off the elephant in the excitement of seeing a Siberian Rubythroat.Wild Grass arranged our pick up from Nameri for ₹2500 - I suggest asking for an AC vehicle if you're coming in from there so you can beat the dusty roads. The drop back to Guwahati was ₹4000 - this seemed like a reasonable rate.The Hoolock Gibbon Sanctuary is just a stone's throw from Kaziranga - home to the Hoolock Gibbon; India's only ape. I strongly recommend a visit - more about that in another post.Most importantly - if you want to photograph, be mindful of the dust. My friend Chirdeep's 100-400mm lens stopped functioning mid-way through the trip. Of course, he'd been through similar hell in Kanha and Bandhavgarh in 2011, so it may not have been entirely because of Kaziranga.© Sumeet Moghe

A few days back, my good friend, Bertrand Duperrin, put together a rather interesting and intriguing blog post under the suggestive heading "Employees don’t have time to waste narrating their work" where he shared some very thoughtful insights on the potential burdens behind the whole concept of narrate your work, working out loud or observable work (a.k.a. #owork) that have always been highlighted as perhaps some of the major key benefits from using social networking tools for business in a corporate environment. But it looks like, apparently, there are some potential risks along the way: mainly, knowledge workers not wanting to participate (through blogging or microblogging, as primary examples) due to lack of time, since their day to day workflow seems to be interrupted abruptly due to that lack of integration of social technologies into where the real work happens. Bertrand brings up some really good and excellent points that I can certainly agree with to a great extent, specially, this particular quote: "And don’t forger that separating the tools where problems are from those where solutions can be found is not the best way to improve the performance of your organization". That’s just such an absolutely spot on assessment of perhaps some of the main issues we are currently seeing on why not enough knowledge workers start making use of social technologies to help them improve their productivity and effectiveness. But if we take a look closer, then we are going to find out that perhaps the tools where problems are, and therefore where knowledge workers get work done, may not be the right tools in the first place. And that’s, on its own, another big issue that needs sorting out.  Indeed, if you get a bunch of knowledge workers out there and you ask them openly where they spend the vast majority of their "working time" they would tell you that, right now, it would be down to two different spaces: e-mail and meetings. To the point where from a typical 8 hour work day, and we all know those have ceased to exist many years ago, despite current research indicating how beneficial 40 hour work weeks are, a large chunk of that workflow is dedicated to rather processing email or hop around from meeting to meeting (Even virtual ones!) to no end. Or even both!, accounting in most cases for 7 to 9 hours per day, every day, just doing that: processing e-mail and attending meetings.  The mind-blowing thing is that we all know how pernicious and damaging it can well be to one’s productivity spending too much time just handling your email, recent research quoting how we spend up to one quarter of our day just doing that, making a fine total of 650 hours per year on it. And yet we don’t seem to complain, or would want to complain!, much about it! Talking about the unbeatable status quo of e-mail in the corporate world as just something that everyone takes for granted, including wasting everyone’s time on it. Well, except for "A World Without eMail", of course, which is one of the reasons why I got things started with it over 4 years ago. Ohhh, and I think it’s probably a good time now that I start working on another massive progress report to show and demonstrate where we are in challenging that status quo of corporate email. Thus stay tuned for plenty more to come along! The thing is that meetings are not doing much better either! Plenty of people keep stating that meetings are essential, if not, critical, for every business, yet, we keep bumping into a good number of resources, cites, quotes, articles, blog posts, research, etc. etc. that state how ugly meetings are nowadays due to how good they are at killing our very own daily productivity, despite the several good attempts we have seen recently on sharing good practices, hints and tips, techniques, and best know-how of hosting effective meetings. Yet, it hasn’t happened. We keep taking them for granted, yet we do seem to want to do very little to challenge their own status quo, even though in most cases those meetings are now being seen as a useless power struggle, an informal gathering where nothing happens, a bullying tactic to dominate the workplace, a pastime, in short, a complete waste of time. Perhaps, what we need is #lwwm - Life Without Worthless Meetings. Or maybe not. Maybe what we would need to do is take back our own productivity and effectiveness, as knowledge workers, and stop using those time wasters from our day to day work, so that we can continue getting the job done effectively. Essentially, what we would need to do is to start, if you haven’t done so already!, challenging the status quo of those business pain points that we all seem to know what they are and how they are affecting our productivity, but that we reluctantly won’t do much about it. Well, now we have the perfect use case for addressing those pain points: using social technologies to keep narrating our work. Basically, social networking tools like blogging, or microblogging, that Bertrand mentioned above as examples, to open up our interactions, to free ourselves from the email and meetings yokes, to become more transparent on what we do, because as he mentioned on that article he put together, the more open and transparent we become in the workplace working out loud the much easier it would be for everyone else to help you when you would need it. This is, exactly, what I have been advocating for myself for a long while, along the lines of this quote: "How can I help you, if I don’t know what you are doing? How can I help you, if I don’t know you, your work, and what you are trying to achieve? Help me please to understand your work, so that I can do my fair bit and help out where I can".  The rather interesting thing from making that switch into becoming much more open, public, transparent on how you work is that, contrary to what most people seem to think, it’s everything, but a waste of time. By shifting gears, and changing mindsets into a new set of habits one finally realises that you no longer have to fight the corporation, you no longer have to justify your work (since it is out there readily available to everyone!), you no longer have to keep distrusting your colleagues and bosses since they don’t know what you are doing and you don’t know what they are doing, you no longer have to put up with all of those frictions in meetings trying to make your point across, so that you have something to say. And the list goes on and on and on. Now, by making the shift to social technologies all of that extra baggage on having to justify both yourself and every bit of your work is now gone. Imagine the time savings! Imagine if all of a sudden you get to save 3 to 4 hours per day of not doing emails but instead using microblogging or activity streams, for instance, where networks and communities continue getting work done without worrying too much about all of that stuff we know we can do without from the traditional hierarchical, overstructured, much process / technology driven corporate world. Imagine if all of a sudden you stop attending meetings you are not supposed to, or reject those other ones where they are asking for your information and contribution when all of that data is readily available out there. Yes, social networking tools for business will take some of your time, but if you look into your current business pain points and how social technologies could help you address those, I bet that you would be saving a whole lot more time by living social than by having to reply to, yet again, another chain of emails or prepare yourself mentally for that meetings galore to happen throughout the whole day.  Frankly, I prefer to live social, thank you very much. I prefer to receive 15 emails per week, as part of "A Work Without Email" that I have been doing for over 4 years now, and attend about 10 meetings per week on a good week, which is the average I am doing at the moment, as part of that effort of "Life Without Worthless Meetings". In short, I rather prefer to take back my productivity, having finally succeeded in addressing my business pain points and, instead, get out there, mix and mingle with my networks and my communities, learn from them, share my knowledge with them out in the open, participate in the conversations, become better at what I already do excel at and, eventually, get my work done openly, networked and interconnected, which is what matters at the end of the day, really, but with one key difference: I am now in control of my own productivity through social technologies. Something that I couldn’t have said before when I was relying far too much on both email and meetings. And you? Still think that social networking tools for business are a waste of time, even if they are not integrated into your day to day workload just yet, pretty much just like email or meetings have been over the years? You may need to think about it again and start questioning whether you could become even more effective and efficient at what you do with your productivity, because I am certain that social networking tools would, indeed, help you save, and reinvest much better all of that precious time to work then on far much more fascinating work. Isn’t that what we would all want to achieve at some point … ? 

One of the things I remember reading about, early on in my enterprise 2.0/ social business journey was Andrew Mcafee's definition of what makes social software tick. He spoke of three characteristics - emergent, freeform and frictionless. Those definitions still ring true in my head. As I look at how enterprise social software matures it seems to be moving away from those characteristics quite a bit. To the extent, that enterprise social software loses the edge it promised to provide. Do one thing and keep it simpleOne of the features of consumer social software which in turn encourages enterprise use cases is the fact that most of these tools do one thing and they do it well. Take for example Twitter - 140 character status updates. Or Pinterest - create a digital pinboard. Or for that matter delicious - create a list of online, shareable bookmarks. Let's look at Path - share updates with your close friends. Each of these platforms keep things quite simple. One metaphor, really simple usage - so much so, that despite the fact that Twitter keeps its help hidden under an obscure menu, you don't miss the lack of instruction. Enterprise social bloatware?Compare this to a lot of the enterprise social software you see. Let's take cyn.in for example - I have nothing against the platform; it's great. I just need a scapegoat. Cyn.in is a wiki, a blogging platform, a file repository, a discussion forum, a social bookmarking platform - all at the same time. And more! So, do I create a document or a discussion or a blogpost? If Sheena Iyengar taught me anything - more choice is not always a good thing. People like to stick with the status quo and not choose anything. Is that really what we want as a consequence of enterprise social software? Let's be realFor a lot of us social media enthusiasts, life's a nice happy bubble. We hang out with other social media geeks, we network with them online, they sing its praises as we do and it seems the world has changed. Yes the world has changed, but only so much. For a large number of people and granted they may not be a majority, social media still isn't their bread and butter for communication. Complex social platforms that combine several features and numerous bells and whistles only scare them away. Think about it - if you're not social media savvy and you have to make a choice between a wiki, a status update, a blogpost and a discussion - what would you do? And what if you had to break through the most complex security system to access this platform when you can easily get to email on your Blackberry? (note I say Blackberry, not iPhone) Let's appreciate that there's a non-trivial audience size that fits this description and the only way social software wins is by being undisputedly easier and better. Back to the basicsWe need to rethink our strategy with social business platforms. We need simplicity - one metaphor, simple usage patterns. The more sophisticated we make the platforms, the more difficult the change, the more resistance the poorer the uptake. This is when people question change - if something isn't 10x better than the status quo, we naturally choose the status quo. Cisco seems to have thought this through with Cisco Webex Social by taking away superficial choices from content creation. Yammer's always been very good at this - they're a Twitter clone for the enterprise. I say that with great respect. Socialcast seems to be doing this right too. I can't say this however for the majority of the social business landscape. Let's remember the frictionless bit of McAfee's definition. I believe the future is bright, but not blingy. I fear that the focus for some social software giants is turning out to be bling, though. Please, for the sake of all we stand for - get back to the basics!© Sumeet Moghe

Back in 2003, Bill French coined the now rather popular quote "eMail is where knowledge goes to die" that’s been making the rounds all along and which over 4 years ago I decided to adopt myself (Or kindly steal, errr, I mean, reuse, if you would want to call it that way), as part of that new mantra of mine on Living "A World Without eMail". Well, nearly 10 years later, and only 6 after its birth, I think I’m now ready to declare something that I never thought I would be claiming, at least, not this soon, but I am afraid we have reached that point: Twitter is where conversations go to die. Sadly.  It took email over 30 odd years to reach that status where more and more people started to question its long-standing status quo within the corporate world and it looks like Twitter has accelerated that same perception to just a few years within the Social Web, without even entering the corporate world altogether!, but, based on what I have been seeing over the last few months I’m starting to think that we maybe well be a bit too late into the game and we may not be able to get back out it. Twitter has now become, once again, another messaging board system, like a good bunch of them out there of the once so-called social networking sites. Not anymore. And here is why…  I have been using Twitter for over 5 years now (I think I can track it back to around March 2007 when I created my main Twitter ID @elsua) and all in all I have been having one of those rather heated love and hate relationships with it, with its ups and downs, with its wonderful experiences, but also with its rather painful ones, with moments of pure brilliance and genius, combined with others that I am afraid I just can’t explain myself. The thing is that, almost right from the beginning, I knew that if I wanted to make Twitter work its magic for me to even become part of My Big Three social networking tools I needed to focus rather heavily on the connections, the relationships, the knowledge sharing activities, the collaborative interactions, the innovative and creative side of those wonderful conversations, the immersive, constant and rampant learning experience one kept engaging with time and time again spending, after all, countless hours just to keep up. WOW, boy, did we have a good blast?!? For sure! And a real one! I knew that I was not going to focus much on the social networking tool per se, more than anything else, because the experience, all along and throughout those 5 years, has been quite a horrifying one on its own, an appalling attempt to keep grabbing your attention, as if you didn’t have anything else to do!, with a rather poor performance, lacking scalability big time, with silly limitations with its API, capped, or better said, rather crippled searching capabilities, incredibly dull, boring and unappealing front end Web site, with huge amounts of spam making it rather difficult to even enjoy the tool any more and perhaps too many pretensions to try to reach a certain status that has never managed to achieve: indispensable. And this is the time we are now, where the user experience of the Web site, along with both its desktop client TweetDeck, or its iOS client(s), are still horrendous, and rather depressing, but where it looks like Twitter, the beast, the Kraken, has finally awoken from that ideal world we all thought we were living in, that one of being so powerful enough to change the world any which way, that it has, finally,  decided to kill the very main reason as to why it’s reached the success it has at the moment and over the course of the years: its entire unique ecosystem of developers AND end-users as ONE entity. How about that? I am sure by now you may have been reading the extensive amount of buzz that a recent announcement by Twitter itself has generated out there, on Twitterland, as well as blog posts, articles, news sites, etc. etc. Twitter has decided to start killing itself slowly, but steadily, by dictating a good number of rules of how that ecosystem should behave in order to make full good use of the capabilities available. And failure to do so would mean a cease and desist notice. Yes, it’s going to be a rather slow and painful death, because if there is a well known universal law out there in the Social Web is that if you would want to become a success in an already rather crowded Social Web space you need to count on that magic combo of both end-users AND developers, because if you don’t have such balance you are going to struggle and quite a bit. And Twitter is just about to experience that soon enough for us all to be reminded that social technologies are just that, tools, enablers, and that, as such, they come and go. Well, Twitter has just started its exit interview and it’s going to be rather nasty, as Martin Varsavsky brilliantly highlighted on this one single tweet a couple of days back:  What Twitter did, to use companies like Seesmic to grow and now killing them with their new API rules, is evil. — Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars) August 18, 2012   But, regardless of the implications of Twitter’s attempt to control its own environment and ecosystem, so that those who invested in it can be proved there is an opportunity to make big money by bastardising your core beliefs and founding principles, and become, all of a sudden, another publishing / media company on the Web, not even a social networking tool anymore!, there is something more worrying, extremely worrying, actually, that’s going to help accelerate its own demise and big time. And that’s us. Yes, only us. No-one else. We, the end-users, were the ones who made Twitter a smash hit back in the day and we are the ones who are going to help bury it and attend its funeral in very short time.  When was the last time that you had a bl**dy good conversation in Twitter? I mean, a real one. Yes, you know, a conversation of more than, say, 3 to 5 tweets on a single thread with one or more participants? When was the last time you were trying to catch up on a conversation from those wonderful people you decided to start following, because you felt they would manage to rock your world, if you would give them a chance (And, yes!, back in the day they surely did!)? When was the last time you were blown away by a short exchange of exhilarating blurbs of less than 140 characters that left you wowing like you have never seen before? I bet that’s been a while, perhaps far too long ago… The thing is that Twitter was never designed to keep up with conversations, it was never envisioned as an open, public social networking dialogue between passionate advocates for whatever the topic with an inner urge difficult to surpass to connect, collaborate, share your knowledge across or innovate on some really cool initiatives. Yet, we, end-users, with the superb help and support from one of the richest ecosystems of amazingly talented developers managed to tweak Twitter, to hack it around in ways never imagined possible, and build brilliance out of it. Remember @s (Mentions) when they weren’t Mentions, but Replies? Remember hash tags? Remember any of the hundreds, if not thousands of Twitter related Apps that allowed us to tap into those conversations with prime examples like Janetter or Tweetbot as of late? Ahhh, those were the times, indeed!  And I missed them, and big time! Because over the course of the last few months I have started to notice something that I never thought I would find possible, at least, not this soon. Nobody reads Twitter anymore. Better said, let me rephrase that in another way: nobody reads your tweets anymore! There used to be a time when we did though. When we took care of perhaps not reading the entire timeline to dig out all of those wonderful golden gems that made it totally worth it hanging out in Twitter, but a large chunk of them to make sense of what was happening around us. The good old Ambient Intimacy (coined by Leisa Reichelt, a.k.a. @leisa, back in the day) or Declarative Living (coined by James Governor, a.k.a. @monkchips). Fast forward to 2012 and we are just now far too busy with ourselves with our key, important messages, that we would want to blast out to our networks thinking we know better than them what they need, even if we haven’t asked them first about it!, because we all feel conversations are just that: sharing your messages never mind everyone else’s. Why bother, right? I mean, you don’t have time for that. You need to move on! You are just far too busy with things, right? See? This is what traditional marketing has been doing all along, i.e. finding new channels to keep doing the same good? old stuff without much care in between, and disappointingly enough traditional marketing is winning, because we are being used ourselves (by ourselves!) to behave in exactly the same way! "Twitter is where conversations go to die". Gosh, it really hurts when I write that down. It hurts even more when I come to think about it, specially, how we are the very same ones misusing, and abusing, even, this unique and wonderful opportunity to reach a global sense of connectedness. Of co-ownership. Of co-shared responsibility for one another, to help each other, to connect, collaborate and innovate together. And, instead, we have just made the switch and started blasting out our messages thinking, and believing!, that Twitter is just another messaging board system where attention is no longer required, because conversations are no longer taking place, so why bother, if I have shared the blurbs I wanted to share and can now move into the next thing. Ever look again into Trending Topics? When was the last time that you didn’t find anything related to watching something on TV, or a movie, or a sports event or a celebrity passing away (According to Twitter, at least!) or, you name it. You do know what I am getting at. In a way, Twitter has gone mainstream, but of the worst kind. Twitter has become industrialised. Once again, another social networking site biting the dust and become absorbed by that frenzy of becoming the new media. And annoyingly enough we seem to be pretty ok with it, because we are not doing much to revert it, in fact, we keep feeding the beast, and more and more by the day with all of those tweets we all know no-one reads anymore, but, you know, you have to be out there, because if you are not on Twitter you just don’t exist. People need to see you are actively engaging? with those 50 to 60 to 70, or more!, tweets shared across on a daily basis; you need to show people how your whole social networking strategy (Gosh, what a bunch of ugly words!) is based solely on Twitter, because that’s where everyone is, so you need to make the most out of it. Period. You still think it’s the platform that allows you to get the biggest gains with the lowest friction possible. I mean, everyone can tweet 140 characters or less, right?  Well, no! I refuse to make use of Twitter in that way! I want to fight back!! Please do allow me to fight it! I want the conversations back in Twitter. I miss them. And dearly! One of the reasons why over the course of the last 2 or 3 years I have performed monthly acts of Twitter hygiene by not following far too many folks, but enough to feel comfortable with, is because I read their tweets. Perhaps not 100% of them, depending on the day, and whether daily work, or business travelling, gets in the way, but I can certainly share with you all that I read the vast majority of them and every single chance I have to see the spark of a conversation I go for it! Why not? I want to bring back the user experience of what made Twitter a great social networking tool par to none.  Yet, folks are just far too busy with their own broadcasting of short messages, their own messaging board system, confirming the conversation is now long dead. Twitter is the new e-Mail, apparently. We are now spending very little time on Twitter, just processing our to-dos, as fast as we can, so that we can then move on to the next thing, whatever that may well be. Well, no! While I can understand, and fully respect, how plenty of people would want to do that, let’s not forget that’s the same road that is going to take us where e-Mail is today. Twitter used to be fun. It used to be that really cool hangout place where we all tried to learn something new every day, where we tried to help each other become better at what we already do: plenty of pretty awesome and mind-blowings things!, where conversations sparked thanks to a golden nugget shared or a brilliant blog post or just something provocative enough to ensure a healthy reaction towards opening an interesting dialogue. Never mind though how we have automated and industrialized our use of Twitter with silly famous quotes or funny tweets, smart phrases we just don’t know where they are coming from anymore, retweets from our followers telling us all how cool and how great and how knowledgeable we all are (I mean, remember? That’s why I am following you in the first place! No need for you to remind of that 3 to 5 times per day!), or how desperate we all keep begging and soliciting your friendly vote(s) for that upcoming panel for that über-cool conference event so you can hang out with the cool kids while you keep ignoring us after you made it. Or perhaps how we are now scheduling our tweets in the future, just like we do with our emails and follow-ups, ensuring we are no longer there to respond back to a potential conversation in a timely manner. Or how you have also automated your blog posts and whatever other feeds into your Twitter stream so that folks would know where to head to read your writing of more than 140 characters. See? These are just some examples. Examples that, from my own experience, are killing the conversations in Twitter big time today, right now, right as we speak! I am sure there are plenty more out there and I would love to challenge you to share your favourite misuses of Twitter from your dear following networks in the comments, even just to see whether the conversations have died for you, too, or not… Perhaps I should put together another blog post including them all, along with a good number of other ones that I can think of at the moment by reading diving into my Twitter stream, once again. Yes, I know that you may be thinking that there is an easy solution out there to fix this problem; i.e. unfollow everyone and start from scratch again. And perhaps that may well be the case, but I have been thinking about it for a while now and I don’t think it would solve the problem, because the people who I am really interested in following are not going to change their habits of how they use Twitter to kill the conversation, just because I have unfollowed them. They simply won’t know. I feel I need to find another way. Perhaps I may need some new friends, as a good friend of mine suggested after a rather interesting and fascinating conversation we had offline just recently on this very same topic, and maybe that’s the reason why I am loving Google Plus at the moment so much, mainly, because it’s providing me with an opportunity to remember, dearly, what Twitter used to be like not long: my favourite social networking tool, capable of allowing me to host some bl**dy good conversations on those topics I am truly passionate about, just like my network(s), without having to worry about that constant, and rampant self-promotion of one’s own marketing messages, so that your customers can keep coming back to buy your product: You! But the other main reason why Google Plus has now moved into my Top #2 preferred social networking tool, at the moment, is because, apart from being able to enjoy the conversations again on topics that matter to us all on whatever the common interest (For instance, Social Business and the Social Enterprise, along with Knowledge Management, Online Communities, Learning and Collaboration, for yours truly) I get to experience special moments that surely remind you how mind-blowing, über-cool, inspirational, incredibly humbling, truthful and humane technology can be to make this a better world. Our shared, networked and interconnected world:    When was the last time that Twitter made you feel exactly like you are feeling now, after having watched that short video clip with John Butterill? Just think of it, pause for a minute, when was it, exactly?  "Sharing a view… That’s a plus".  Indeed, it surely is! But I miss Twitter. I miss the conversation. I miss you, my network(s). Here’s hoping you will stick around bringing it all back to what it used to be back in the good old days of what once made Twitter such a huge success: Us. The networks engaging with one another in more meaningful ways than whatever we thought we could, or would. Ever. 

I recently spoke at ThoughtWorks XConf - an internal conference that we run in several parts of the world now. I stayed clear of topics related to work and spoke about my six week big cat trail instead and the conservation challenges that these wonderful animals face. Here's a video of the talk.On a personal note, if Tequila was alive today, she'd be 3 years and 6 months old. You may think I'd be over that tragedy, but I've never been. I miss her every day of my life and for some reason, I miss her a lot today. People who have dogs will empathise with the pain and the regret I have behind that loss. I might go to her resting place tomorrow and say hi. Enough of the personal bit, thanks for reading.© Sumeet Moghe