For the 30 odd years of my life I've been an introvert, a facet of my character that I have tried very consciously to run away from. Recently I was in Africa for work and that work involved meeting a number of unknown people and attempting to build relationships with them. I felt very tired in the evenings. Not physically, but emotionally. The entire hypersocial experience of adjusting to new coworkers in a new office, meeting new people and building relationships was tough for me as an introvert. And of course, I couldn't hide behind intraversion so I built up a bit of a facade of extraversion to keep at my work. And it's amazing that over the years, despite my strengths being reflection, introspection and contemplation, that I was intimidated by the fact that I was in a role that was individual than as part of a team. I should have been happy in a way, but somehow years of feigning extraversion seem to have done me in.So yesterday when our Managing Director shared this video with me, I was excited. It was Susan Cain speaking about the power of introverts. I'm quite certain I'll pick up her book and read, but in the mean time, I can't deny that there are several points she made that were epiphanies for me and learnings that our most important institutions - schools and workplaces can learn from. At the very least for introverts, I hope it'll help you feel a lot more at ease with yourself.A few thoughts that I think employers, teachers and individuals can ponder over, from this rather excellent talk:Is your school or workplace architected for extroverts? Do introverts get safe opportunities to be by themselves, intute, impute, introspect, reflect and contemplate their work? Is there an unspoken taboo against introverted behaviour?Do introverts face a natural disadvantage in the way your institution runs? Do they get routinely overlooked when it comes to leadership and career advancement? Across the leadership of your organisation, do you have enough introverts who are allowed to be that way?Are the role models in your institution mostly extroverts? If there are introverts who have the freedom to be introverted, do people know their stories? What's the story of the introverts who do grow in your organisation? Do you bring in people in the image of the organisation itself - focussed on gregariousness and extraversion? Do you value quiet contemplation and individual work too? How individualised is your system? Individualisation isn't the same as being individualistic. Nor is it about devaluing the collective.Does your institution have enough low-key environments that are inviting for introverts? Or do they have to 'fit in'?As a leader do you allow ideas to run a life of their own, or do you stamp your personality on them? As a leader do you display empathy and step back from offering your opinions - preferring to reflect on occasion? This is an important question for corporate and educational leadership. Do conversations always have a logical end? Or are you willing to go back and reflect on things you may have learned or not totally understood?Have you ever rejected a person who is quiet or introverted as not being a team player, or as someone who won't 'fit in'? How does your institution look at intraversion vis-a-vis your said or unsaid entry criteria?Is there an unspoken assumption that all brainstorming, creative thinking and ideation needs to happen in groups? What examples do you have of people having a free rein to explore and express their ideas without being subject to groupthink?Are magnetism and charisma the most valued leadership traits in your institution? As a leader do you expect your people to be able to sell their ideas vocally, or do you routinely investigate what they're upto and create an environment for them to succeed?Do people need to win arguments or convince others to move forward with their ideas? If you're the person they're having to convince as a extroverted leader, how willing are you to set aside your own thinking and biases and let your people do their thing?Would you consider anyone asking the questions I've just asked, to be anti what your organisation stands for? I'm sure there are other thoughts this talk provokes and I'll be sure to watch it a few more times for it all to sink in. This talk was amongst the most inspiring and liberating ones that I've heard this year. Susan Cain's been through her own journey of being an introverted public speaker - one that I've been on myself. She's developing an online course on 'Public speaking for introverts' and I've signed up for the updates on that - do so if you're interested. And if anything, I hope you're that much more empathetic to that introvert near you.© Sumeet Moghe

In the past, you may well remember how I have been putting together a good number of blog posts on a topic that I have grown to become rather interested in, and very fond of, over the course of time around the Circular Economy. You know, that kind of economic shift towards sustainable growth for everyone, even planet Earth. Well, it looks like there is a new one out there that I got introduced to, just recently, thanks to a Google Plus post by Luis Alberola referencing the excellent work from Charles Eisenstein and his rather intriguing book "Sacred Economics". Of course, I’m talking about The Gift Economy.  There is a lot of really good, well written, spoken, and inspiring literature around the topic of the Gift Economy. But perhaps the one that I have found the most transformational one is that one from Charles himself where he keeps talking about it in his new book Sacred Economics. This book, indeed, does look a little bit out of the ordinary, specially, when you go into the Web site and you find this rather uncompromising quote:  "In keeping with one of the main themes of the book, Charles has made the full text of the book available online as a gift. Click on the links below and enjoy. If you feel moved to send Charles a return gift, you may do so below" Of course, as intrigued as one can be, I decided to spend about 12 minutes on watching through the promotional video clip that was put together by director Ian MacKenzie and I doubt there would be anything more inspiring that you may have watched this week, perhaps this month, or, maybe, even, this year. What an absolute delight you will be embarking on if you start watching it. As a teaser, it kicks off with this absolutely stunning, and worth while living for, quote:  "We’ve all been given a gift, the gift of life. What we do with our lives is our gift back" - Edo Needless to say, that I would strongly encourage you all to watch further along the video, so that you can see what are some of the main key statements that Charles himself postulates not only on the video clip itself, but on the book as well. Topics like ancient gift economies, modern capitalism, the role of money on how it’s contributed, tremendously, towards "alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth". How money is just an agreement; how it just doesn’t have any value per se; and how scarcity is built into the money system, just as much as our traditional concept of growth. How our very own separate selfs have contributed into building a hostile environment for us as a species, in constant conflict with nature, with ourselves, with schooling (learning), with life and how we are already embarked on a ruthless self-destructive path difficult to revert back from. And in that context that’s where that gift economy kicks in. "We didn’t earn air, we didn’t earn being born, we didn’t earn our conception, we didn’t earn a planet that could provide food, we didn’t earn the sun" is just another superb quote that finishes with a rather mind-blowing affirmation: Inborn gratitude, where life is a gift and the natural response to giving / receiving a gift is gratitude. Naturally. The one we show every day. According to Charles, in a gift society, if you have got more than you need, you give it to somebody who needs it. That’s what gives you status, a stronger sense of security. If you build up all of that gratitude people are going to take care of you, too. If there are no gifts there is no community and therefore societies become monetised. Eventually, according to him, we just can’t have community as an add-on to a monetised society. We actually have to have a need for each other, which surely makes perfect sense from the perspective of how we, after all, are social animals, with a strong sense of caring and belonging to the group. Regardless.  His description on the video about The Shift and what it would entail is just priceless altogether on its own, finishing up with a quote that I thought was worth while mentioning over here as well, since I have mentioned it a couple of times already myself on where we are at the moment: "It’s going to be up to us, to determine at what point this wake-up plan would happen". Remember, Awakening 2.0? Just brilliant! Charles’ closing remarks from the video clip itself though are even much more profound ones on what’s needed to revert the tide, to aim at that significant change of how we do things, who we are as human beings, as community, and what we should be focusing on: "[…] We have been messing around, playing with our gifts of technology and culture. And developing these gifts. Now we are coming into adulthood. And it’s time to apply them to our true purpose. At the beginning, […] it’ll be about healing the damage that’s has been done. […] We are in the business of creating miracle around Earth. […] It’s necessary. Anything even less than that is not even worth trying" The interesting thing though is that for all of that to happen, for that shift to take place, and the sooner, most probably, the better, we may well need the current economic system to collapse and fail, big time, as my good friend, Dave Pollard, hinted out on a superb blog post under the title "Moving from Understanding and Protest to Direct Action", where he reviewed the book  and he concluded: "If we are hugely fortunate, when the industrial growth system starts to fly apart and collapse through its own unsustainable failings (a process that’s well underway for all the attempts to cover it up), some collective of smart, generous, articulate people might start to put some of Eisenstein’s ideas to a real-life test. But I wouldn’t count on it. When things start to collapse, panic, denial, blame-seeking and reactionary thinking are more likely human responses" Probably, but, on the other hand, recent signals are starting to come out and tell us otherwise, and with various multiple flavors that are starting to become rather difficult to hide away from the common public, regardless of what mainstream media, governments or whatever other public / privates entities are trying to portrait further. A couple of them have actually become my true favorites, mainly, because they have started to show what that Gift Economy would look like in the real, and, specially, in the context of the current financial econoclypse that we are going through over here in Europe, by demonstrating that, if there is a way, we can make it. It may take some time, it may take plenty of good effort, energy, and passion, but if there is a way that we can show and demonstrate caring and sharing for one another, specially in times of need, and I mean, serious need, we will eventually find it, embrace it, apply it. Live it.  Yes, indeed! Welcome to the Gift Economy! Where sustainable and profitable growth for everyone, including planet Earth, is now finally becoming a reality. Our communal reality. And where businesses take a new meaning in life by co-sharing that responsibility with the community to do things right and where money may no longer be the only ruling principle in town. Exciting times, my dear friends. Indeed, very exciting times …  Have a good one everyone! [Oh, and in case you are wondering, here's how the gift economy would work… Charles' book on Sacred Economics can be read entirely online for free, but I felt so inspired watching through the video, learning tons along the way, getting really excited about it, that I just purchased a copy of the book for my Kindle, as a token of gratitude for the inspiration. It *does* work!]

There are plenty of times, throughout our very own lives, when we bump into some wonderfully inspirational reading material(s) that, while going through them, reading them at a slower pace, with a smile on our faces, savouring each and every single word of that written piece, letting your mind go wild into deep thoughts of how profound the impact of that article may well be not just for you, but equally for those around you, that you just don’t want to finish it off any time soon, you get to realise, at that stage, that you may be reading perhaps the Top 3 article of your working lifetime. Yes, you know, that kind of impact; that single masterpiece that will slap you left and right to wake you up, to transform your working life for good, for better, for everyone’s better, to show each and everyone of us not only why we do what we do, but also who we are for what we do. Every single day. Well, I think I may have just bumped into such crown jewel and, in case you may not have read it just yet, I would suggest you stop everything you may be doing on the side, right now, while multitasking, and read what I think is probably one of the most truly inspirational readings you would be doing this year, perhaps even in the last few years altogether. Please allow me to point you all to what I would consider an indispensable read for all of those knowledge workers out there, who would need to go for a little bit of a reminder of their own identity, as workers. Please go and enjoy reading "The Labor Day Manifesto of the Passionate Creative Worker" by John Hagel. John, along with a bunch of really smart collaborators, has put together what I would consider some seminal, foundational piece of work on defining not just the concept of the (traditional) knowledge (Web) worker (Driven, in most cases by passion, creativity and collaborating with others sharing their own knowledge openly), but that one of the Workplace of the Future at the same time.  To go ahead and reproduce the entire Manifesto wouldn’t probably be a smart thing to do, but I think I’m going to take the liberty of grabbing a few bits and pieces over here, so that you folks can see what I mean with foundational piece of work. The purpose, if anything, is more along the lines of paying a tribute to a genius piece of writing that is already hanging on my wall, right across my laptop, to remind me, everyday, why I come to work and why it matters. So I have decided to quote each and everyone of those mantras, highlighting some of the keywords that I have felt identified myself with all along, for years, and which I am hoping they would serve, as well, as a small teaser that would encourage you to read the rest. It’s also an exercise I want to do for myself to internalise each and everyone of those principles, so that on those weak moments that we all get exposed to every now and then, I can remember, treasure, rejoice, reabsorb, restart, and re-inspire myself to keep pushing the limits forward, because that’s what we have been rather good at all along. We just didn’t realise it till now. So here we go:  Live our lives, not someone else’s: "We are the arbiters of meaning in our own lives"  Blaze new trails: "There is no established path to greatness [ …] We challenge the status quo, and in turn, seek out things that challenge us" Prioritize learning over efficiency: "Mistakes, while the enemy of efficiency, are the fuel for learning" Share knowledge freely: "We see each person’s enormous potential to contribute to our global knowledge base […]" Recognize that institutions exist to serve people: " We don’t exist for institutions, they exist for us" Quit jobs that we hate: "There are too many interesting things to do in this life to waste time on things that don’t matter" (This is one of my favourite principles from the whole list put together!) Escape the trap of wasting time by being busy: "Being overscheduled, even with the best things, will cause us to miss the important things that can’t be planned, and will rob us of the most valuable opportunities of our lives" Live life for the adventure: "Life is as amazing as we make it" Stay on the edge: "The people who change the world are out at the edge of their field, pushing back the boundaries of the unknown."  Continually reinvent ourselves: "We know that passion is the key to personal growth" Never settle: "Never. Ever. Not even once […] Let us join forces and help each other along the way to become better, far better, than we ever could alone" I am really hoping that such a teasing exercise would help you drop over John’s Manifesto, but at the same time take the pro-active approach of leaving a comment or two, singing up for it, making that formal commitment that you would be living your work life from here onwards embracing and celebrating each and everyone of those principles, so that we, together, can continue to up the game into bigger, greater, more meaningful things. In short, the workplace of the future. Our workplace. I am sure at this point in time you may be wondering whether there are any examples out there that would be fully embracing and breathing the true powerful inspiring spirit of this Manifesto itself, you know, moving from the theory into the practice, and since we are talking about this in the context of business and our working lives, I thought it would be worth while sharing, perhaps, a couple of examples that have certainly made me think, a lot, about plenty of the key messages from John’s masterpiece. More than anything, because both of them truly show the potential of what we could achieve together. As one.  The first example is another manifesto, The Holstee Manifesto Lifecycle Video, (Big thanks to my good friend Stephen Collins for sharing it along!) which is currently portrayed in another superb, rather short, video clip, that I can certainly recommend everyone to go through. It lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes and the way it introduces itself across to everyone is with a single one liner that I am sure we can all relate to and would sign up for time and time again: Do what you love. And do it often. The Holstee Manifesto Lifecycle Video from Holstee on Vimeo. "Life is simple. Life is short. Live your dream and share your passion" are also some of the mantras that you will see permeating throughout the video clip, which is just perfect, because they are going to help me introduce the second example that I wanted to share with you today. This time around shared by another good friend, the always insightful and thought-provoking Dave Pollard, who pointed us out to Doing it Ourselves, where you will see a beautifully crafted, rather smart, witty and mind-boggling video clip of about 12 minutes under the suggestive heading "What the Economic Crisis Really Means - and what you can do about it", which would sound very fitting for the current econoclypse and financial turmoil we are going through and which, once again, managed to get the Hippie 2.0 side out of me. Here is the embedded code of the video clip, so that you can see what I mean. It’s probably one of those brilliant clips that you would want to show everyone out there to explain why we are where we are, but also how we can all start reverting the tide, realign and change, for the better, on what really matters: our mere survival at this point and here is why:    Finally, in a recent article, If You Were the Next Steve Jobs…, Umair Haque keeps challenging us to think different, to tackle good old known problems with new eyes, new insights, new ways of working, of solving those issues, together, as one, highlighting what I feel are some of the most prominent challenges that Social Business is facing in today’s corporate world. Basically, finding a new purpose, a new meaning of wanting to do things different, a new way where sustainable and responsible growth becomes the new norm, our latest mantra; this time around though to stay with us for a while, a long while, because, after all, we have always known what to do, and how to do it. We just needed the trigger to ignite and wake up our knowledge workforce once again and bring them back to life; then the rest will come up rather easily, on its own… How? Well, how about by fully embracing and living "The Labor Day Manifesto Of the Passionate Creative Worker", as a good starting point?  Something tells me, perhaps my Hippie 2.0 side, once again, that we wouldn’t be that far off from where we would want to head towards to in, say, the next 30 to 50 years. Don’t you think?

Some seven years back, Sir Ken Robinson delivered a landmark speech at TED, citing how schools kill creativity. It's one of those talks that sparked my own interest in public education. In his inimitable, humorous style, Robinson launched a scathing attack on schools. Some of his quotes remain stuff of legend.I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it.If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatised. When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. But now ... you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.More recently, Sugata Mitra made his inspirational TED prize talk, following up his landmark speech about his hole in the wall experiment. Mitra made a case for a school in the cloud - self organised learning environments (SOLEs) where children can explore and learn from one another. And while he helped us look ahead to a time of joy and amazement in learning, his subtle attack on the system of schooling was fairly evident.We don't even know what the jobs of the future are going to look like. We know that people will work from wherever they want, whenever they want, in whatever way they want. How is present-day schooling going to prepare them for that world? The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it's threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishment and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, "Perform.I think what we need to look at is we need to look at learning as the product of educational self-organization. If you allow the educational process to self-organize, then learning emerges. It's not about making learning happen. It's about letting it happen. There was a time when Stone Age men and women used to sit and look up at the sky and say, "What are those twinkling lights?" They built the first curriculum, but we've lost sight of those wondrous questions. We've brought it down to the tangent of an angle.So after watching these amazing gentlemen speak about how school and the public education system is the perfect killer for the joy, amazement and self directed learning journey we call childhood, the third talk is ironic to say the least. A young Maasai boy, Richard Turere from Kitengala in Kenya had found a solution to lion-human conflict at Nairobi National Park. A child from a cattle herding family, Turere often lost his cattle to lions from the park. As is Maasai custom, an act like this has no forgiveness - the marauding lions have to die.Through his own journey of self discovery, Richard learned that lions were afraid of moving flashlights. A few experiments and failures with his electricity supply and a few games with LED lights gave fuel to his invention - Lion Lights. Richard's now fitted a series of LED bulbs facing outwards from his cattle enclosure. He's wired them to a box of switches and a solar powered battery panel. Every night, these lights flicker intermittently just as a flashlight would if a human were patrolling with it! Ever since, his family hasn't lost a single animal to lions and Turere has now become a mini celebrity amongst the Maasai at Nairobi National Park.What this boy did, was a consequence of the natural joy and amazement of childhood. No one taught him electronics. He learned it himself. He just had a big challenge, his own little quest, "I had to look after my dad's cows and make sure that they were safe." This seems to resonate with what Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra seemed to say about creativity and learning in their respective talks.So where is the irony? Richard's reward for his natural genius is that good people with great intentions have now placed him in one of Kenya's top schools. So Richard wears a fancy uniform everyday and will join the rat race of academic achievement alongside several other children who are learning to be cogs in an industrial economy. I hope for Richard's sake that he retains his genius despite school. Chances are though, that as Robinson laments, he will get educated out of his creativity. And when the lions figure out the lights, the Maasai won't have Richard there to figure out what to do next. I hope I'm wrong. I want to be wrong. I can't help but lament the irony of this case. If I get the time, I do want to meet Richard on my trip to Kenya in June. I keep my fingers crossed that we hear more about his astounding achievements in years to come.© Sumeet Moghe

A few days back Scott Edinger put together a very insightful article on the topic of whether remote knowledge workers are more engaged, or not, than people working at the traditional office. The interesting thing though is how the whole concept of teleworking has been all along with us for several decades now, specially, since the emergence of groupware, collaboration and knowledge sharing solutions came about. And it looks like with the opportunity of embracing social networking tools for business that we are enjoying nowadays, there is a new rush in trying to figure out whether social technologies can finally free up knowledge workers from the yoke of the traditional office, resulting, if anything, on what I feel has been one of the main mantras behind both Social Business and the future of work meme: work is no longer a physical space, but a state of mind. Work happens, indeed, wherever you are, whenever you need, with whatever the tools you have at your disposal, with whoever the connections you may collaborate with in getting the job done. Never before have we been capable of realising that dream of the fully empowered knowledge worker to work virtually in a more than ever distributed world than thanks to the emergence of all of these social networking tools. To the point where, finally, we are starting to see how it’s helping employees become more engaged, more participative, more collaborative, taking on a fair bit of co-ownership and responsibility for their work to levels we haven’t seen in the past just yet. And it makes perfect sense, specially, if you take into consideration how initiatives like BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) have taken the corporate world by storm. However, there may well be perhaps a couple of other additional reasons altogether than those Scott has talked about on that article itself that should probably be added into the mix.  But before we go into that and explore it a bit more in detail, and perhaps as good background for this topic of discussion, on teleworking, that is, we should not forget about the huge amount of literature, in the form of blog posts , articles, studies, research, infographics, white papers, etc. etc. that we have seen over the course of the last few months talking about the various different benefits, the perks, the advantages, the good practices and lessons learned of working remotely thanks to the extensive use of social networking tools. It’s definitely noteworthy to state how it’s perhaps, finally, moving forward in the right direction, raising the right questions: does remote working help you improve your productivity and effectiveness at what you already do? The answer seems to be on the positive side of things. Yes! And I would wholeheartedly have to agree with that assertion, at least, based on my own experience as a remote knowledge (Web) worker from over the last 10 years and counting… We have seen as well though a few folks talking about some of the various disadvantages; nonetheless, if there is anything clear out of the whole discussion taking place is that working remotely, while remaining productive and effective enough at what you do, still raises questions, concerns and whatever other issues that have certainly kept challenging the relevance of the traditional office as well as the potential place for the virtual workplace of the future we are moving forward to. This time around, nothing to do with technology, apparently, as it’s just an enabler, as usual, but more from the perspective of culture and how in a good number of different environments teleworking not only doesn’t it get promoted nor encouraged, but eventually it gets turned off, to the point of not tolerating it, because both knowledge workers and managers have got that presumption that if you can’t see, or can’t be seen, you can’t be productive, you can’t measure the results. You see? Apparently, we are still very much inclined to measure our productivity by our sheer presence at the office rather than the results and deliverables you produce, in whatever the timeframe, wherever you may well be. Well, that presumption may well have its days numbered, thanks to the emergence of these social networking tools, because if there is anything out there that they are very good at is at helping generate enough visibility, openness and transparency to continue working out loud, narrating your work. In short, becoming comfortable with observable work (a.k.a. #owork) by which we are seeing a fundamental shift from measuring individual performance by your mere presence at the office cubicle to measuring network / community / team performance based on the results you get to produce in a collaborative and open manner. And this is, indeed, when work is no longer considered a physical place, i.e. the traditional office, but more that state of mind: work happens around you and your networks (physical or virtual) who collaboratively share your knowledge to achieve a common goal. That is, getting the job done.  However, with all of that said, I still think Scott missed a couple of interesting insights that I have seen over the last few years in that transition towards adopting and embracing teleworking. The vast majority of knowledge workers who are still skeptic about it are mainly so, because they haven’t experienced it themselves. They keep saying that they wouldn’t be able to do it;  that they need to be in contact with other people face to face, that they lack the discipline to stick to work related stuff, they would instead do the shopping, or the laundry or just keep the kids buzzing around. They just can’t possibly see themselves working remotely, never mind their managers, specially, those who are still living that illusion of command and control or those other managers who thrive on micro-managing their employees. Yet, they keep feeling that way, because, in reality, they haven’t tried it out themselves for a good number of weeks, months. Versus just perhaps a couple of days.  Yes, indeed, you would need plenty of discipline, motivation, encouragement and commitment to make it work. There is no denying that. It’s not easy. Just like commuting to the physical office, one has got to set one’s mind up towards understanding that work is work and the rest is … life. And this is exactly what I think Scott is missing from his article. Two of the main key motivators for which remote workers excel at engagement, participation and collaboration with their fellow colleagues, customers and business partners: flexibility and work / life integration.  Flexibility from the prospective that the traditional 9-5 work schedule is a thing of the past. Long gone are the traditional 8-ish working hours per day (Although we know that every knowledge worker works, sadly, more than 8 hours per day, contrary to what studies have shown as the perfect work week schedule) and instead knowledge workers, through the use of these social networking tools have become more flexible, understanding that depending on the kind of work at hand there would be times when they would be chipping in 14, 15 or 16 hours of work, but then there would be other times when things may be slowing down a bit, and they may just work 2 to 3 hours. And it would be totally fine, because thanks to that flexibility they just focus on the task at hand, versus having to keep working even if the task is completed already. That flexibility is a huge motivator and incentive for remote knowledge workers, because right there they are starting to grasp the notion of how they are in much better control of their workflows, according to their needs & wants and those of their networks. Eventually, working together to finish the job even faster and with perhaps much more quality, thanks to that network effort.  With regards to Work Life Integration, there is very little that I can add, since I have blogged about it recently as well. But I can certainly add one other key aspect related to such integration. Notice how I am no longer talking about work life balance, since I think it’s a myth. It’s always been a myth. It’s never worked. Despite corporations trying really hard for knowledge workers to embrace such balance, in almost all cases there isn’t such a thing: work always wins. Regardless. However, with integration it is different, very different. Because what you introduce into the equation is a new key concept that’s finally making its way into the business world: choice.  In particular, your choice to become a remote worker. In the vast majority of cases, it’s the knowledge workers themselves the ones who request from their managers and their day to day work to become remote workers. They are the ones who have got that initial urge to become remote employees. Some times it doesn’t get granted easily, depending on the nature of your job, whether you have got direct customer exposure, or not, whether your team is all collocated, etc. etc. Whatever the reason. But the vast majority of times it is granted. That’s when flexibility kicks in. That’s when the motivation is huge! That’s when micro-managers become servant leaders helping facilitate interactions and connections, even remotely, in order to facilitate more openness, transparency, trustworthier exchanges, etc. etc. to get work done even more effectively. And it just works! Why? For something that most people don’t seem to realise just yet. And that’s the fact that those remote knowledge workers are the very first ones who are truly interested in being allowed to continue working remotely in the first place. So they are the first interested party in keeping up that status. For their own good, never mind that one of their teams, networks or communities. They are the first ones who will work really hard on it, because they realise that thanks to that very same flexibility and work life integration they are much more effective and engaged employees than as if they would be working from the physical office. That’s why whenever someone asks me how I can keep up working throughout my work week from Gran Canaria, you know, paradise island, they are still surprised they can reach me any which way thanks to those various different social networking tools, instead of, say, just being on the beach. Yes, I know, I could well do that, but then again, for how long? How long would you think I would be allowed to keep such status if I weren’t the first interested party in remaining a fully empowered, networked, engaged, motivated knowledge worker? Even more, do you think I would be allowed to work remotely, where I live, by just making use of corporate email, instead of Living "A World Without eMail", by making an even heavier use of social networking tools? I probably wouldn’t. And understandably given that lack of openness, visibility and transparency that email provides. That, on its own, is the main reason why I keep walking the talk on becoming an engaged remote knowledge (Web) worker, because thanks to that very same flexibility and work life integration I get to enjoy, every so often, things in life like this …  And that’s not too bad for a professional, remote, networked knowledge worker, don’t you think?

It's a provocative title isn't that one? It'll probably set the alarm bells ringing among proponents of the right to education. I guess it may have incensed feminists as well. Some of you may call me a crazy parent. I'm quite happy to take all of the criticism as long as you have the patience to read to the end of this article. Before I put you through that misery though, let me share my basic premise. Education and school are two distinct and often non-overlapping concepts. I personally believe that the institution of school is counterproductive to the journey of education and to the irreplaceable experience that is childhood. I want my daughter to grow up as a beautiful human being. I want her to enjoy her childhood, to embrace the confusion of teenage and to follow her passion. I'd like her to learn deeply and question status quo as she grows up. School is unlikely to give me any of that. And by the way, when I say "school" I mean school as we've always known it. I'm happy to accept newer definitions for that institution. Yes, you may disagree with me. If you do, I'd love to learn from you. If you thought my article promotes illiteracy or misogyny though, my disclaimer may just prompt you to read further.What is education?An interesting question to ask ourselves as parents would be, "If governments across the world banned certificates, diplomas and degrees then what would we consider as education?" I find it interesting that Wikipedia describes education this way:"Education in its general sense is a form of learning in which the knowledge, skills, and habits of a group of people are transferred from one generation to the next through teaching, training, or research. Education frequently takes place under the guidance of others, but may also be autodidactic (self-driven). Any experience that has a formative effect on the way one thinks, feels, or acts may be considered educational."- WikipediaWow! Does it surprise us that no part of that definition has school or university in it? To me education has two very simplistic sets of goals:Utilitarian: the acquisition of skills so that children can grow up and make a livingSocietal: the addition of great human beings to society so they make the right decisions. This is even more important in our day and age as the impact of small actions at an individual level has far reaching consequences. So how does school do on each of these goals? Let's see.Imparting skills - how does school fare?If you were remotely interested in this post, I take it that you've seen Ken Robinson's brilliant talk about how schools kill creativity. If not, do watch it. The talk from 2005 was path breaking in that it brought into public cognisance what we'd always said about education. Sir Robinson, in the space of 20 witty minutes tore the education system into shreds. He called out the absurd hierarchy of subjects, the process of academic inflation, and the need for multi-disciplinary thinking. He illustrated through examples how the system stigmatised bright people, simply because they didn't conform to the mould of school. Ken Robinson was neither the first nor the last to speak about this loss of creative potential but the talk did open up a proverbial Pandora's box.Now, you'd imagine that if school is getting rid of "the creative types" and if you had the illusion that some children aren't creative, then well - school should do well with the remaining folks. Nothing is further from the truth. Let's look at millions of India's engineers and quiz them about the application of Boyle's law in real life. You'll find that several struggle to even recollect what Boyle's law is. Take the topic to organic chemistry or calculus which some of us spent four to six years of our lives studying. The lack of intuitive understanding for these topics is striking. As people how Gandhi's declaration of Swaraj relates to independent India and I doubt you'd receive much more than blank stares. The fact is that the factory of school is meant to do one thing - maximise pass percentages. The "good schools" pride themselves on creating "toppers" - children who can get great grades in exams. Frankly this is a worldwide plague. And yes, I know Finland has a great education system but it'd be foolish to compare a country of 5.4 million people with little or no diversity amongst them to a country of over a billion that speaks 800+ languages. When one designs a school system to maximise grades then true learning falls by the wayside and the pressure for success in exams take over. Don't waste your time with lenses - the syllabus for the exam is just about mirrors. Stop reading that blogpost about environmental justice, it's time for you to focus on math. Why do you want to learn about germination now? It isn't part of the exam papers until next year! Why are you interested in learning about communist dictatorship when the teacher's asked us to study Tughlaq? Unfortunately we don't really learn in that fragmented fashion. We learn through a deep immersive passion for things. We learn through joy, amazement and wonder. Despite their best intentions, teachers with 30-50 pupils each in dark, prison like rooms, operated through a sequence of bells, are only able to focus on maximising exam scores. Guess what children learn from this factory like environment? They learn how to obediently follow narrowly focussed orders. Passing exams with good grades is only a head fake for this hidden curriculum."If you sit kids down, hour after hour doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget." - Sir Ken RobinsonIn addition, schools and teachers have gotten increasingly protective of the institution as the world has moved on. Back in the day, the notion of school may have made sense given knowledge was scarce and one had to "go to school" to learn from a teacher. Today, with the advent of IT, knowledge and means of skills acquisition are everywhere and yet, most teachers haven't woken up to the world and its possibilities. I don't think technology is a panacea for learning, but it surely does change the notion of what an educational institution is meant for. And by the way, what are the eventual results like? Across India and the US, high school completion rates are often less than 50%. School has done nothing to bring generations out of poverty. In fact, industrialisation and modern schools have only created a bigger divide between the rich and the poor. A million engineers each year are unemployed in India. China has a rising number of unemployed graduates despite being one of the largest economies out there. And the US has half of its college graduates working in jobs that don't need a college degree- over 50% of graduates under 25 were without a job. One in three American graduates believes that the education system didn't prepare her well for real life! So much for the glorious promise of jobs that follow 16 years of formal education. One may point out the odd success story and the story of how their child became a fantastic professional because of school. I argue that the statistics reveal this to be the exception and not the rule. Most children that "succeed", do so despite school, not because of it. Things are just-not-working.School and the History of Injustice"Once he is educated, he will leave this mountain and learn this lifestyle. He will sell our land to the company. At these schools, they don't teach how to live with nature, they teach how to live by exploitation." - Tribal Sikuka Sani on why he doesn't want his son in schoolTo understand the social impact of school, we need to understand its origins. Now I don't want to deny that we had some form of schooling even in ancient and medieval times in the form of gurukulas and universities like Nalanda. There is a stark difference however, between the very principles of modern schools and these institutions. We can probably touch upon that in a separate post. The modern, western school is by design an instrument of injustice. The reason for that particularly in the Global South countries, is the inextricable link between school and colonialism. The European colonialists followed a very repeatable pattern. They invaded native lands and killed people indiscriminately. They took over the land and resources to exploit for their own benefit. Following this, the missionaries arrived to tell natives that they were heathens or pagans and that they needed to embrace a new god. Alongside, the colonialists set up schools to train entire generations of natives in lessons of obedience and to destroy their native way of life. The idea was to create a people that would be so conforming to the white way of life that they wouldn't see the white man as foreign. No wonder the inaugural address of the Carlisle Indian School said, "Let all that's Indian within you die".    The story has repeated itself across the world. In India Lord Macaulay sought to create Macaulay's children, "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect". In the Philippines, after a civilian massacre by the American forces, school teachers moved in swiftly to civilise the survivors. In Africa, the Europeans applied more brutal means through slavery and eventual Bantu schooling to serve the needs of the elite. Across the countries of the global south, the agenda of education has been quite similar. I'd like to believe that some people were acting in good faith. They believed it was necessary to civilise these brown and black people. The white man's burden was to educate indigenous people in their self proclaimed superior ways. "You do it my way, by my standards, at the speed I mandate, and in so doing achieve a level of output I ordain, and I’ll pay you handsomely for it, beyond anything you might have imagined. All you have to do is take orders and give up your way of doing the job for mine." - Fredrick Winslow TaylorAt the very same time 250 years ago, the Industrial Revolution was changing the world in a way that 500,000 years of human existence had never imagined. Machines had made means of production incredibly sophisticated and yet, the pace of production growth was limited by a major bottleneck. The effectiveness of the machines was almost undermined by skilled craftsmen who wanted to do a job well over doing it quickly. Their skills and deep thinking for their craft were no longer applicable. Post the industrial revolution, we needed people who followed orders. Obedience, not skill was the primary characteristic for employment. And so the workers sacrificed their creativity and skill for obedience, thereby making a deal with the devil. This has led to the system of schools that is modelled after factories. Back in the day workers sat on benches, in neat rows. That's what schools look like today. They operated in schedules dictated by a ringing bell. That's how schools operate today. They obeyed narrow orders without context. That led to the way we learn in fragments and follow teachers' orders today. You could choose not to believe me but there's significant literature out there to articulate how school was an institution established to benefit few at the cost of many. In that, the system of school that we follow promotes the same injustice that it sought to create in the times of its inception.So what does school teach after all?With all this said, it's important to ask ourselves what children actually learn at school and I've come to the realisation that school is not just ineffective for young citizens of the global south - it's highly dangerous. Let me enumerate to you what children actually learn at school. And while this list isn't comprehensive, let me share with you ten deadly aspects of the hidden curriculum of school.West is Best: School teaches our children that the western model of life, is the paragon of humankind's potential. So our children grow up idolising Western cities - they've been sold on the idea of the west being so awesome, that they want to live there and work there. The accept everything that is western as superior, despite the fact that the west has serious problems with inequality, ecological balance, employment, women's rights, racism and other social issues. We look at our ways and our lives through the evaluative lens of the west. Whatever the west denounces, we denounce. Whatever the west approves we approve. No wonder every great city in India is losing its character in its quest to look like a Western equivalent. English rules the world: In Indian schools, children receive punishment if they speak in their regional languages - even on the playground. They're taught that English is a ticket to the high life. That no one will respect them if they speak their local language. As a consequence, parents too speak to their child in English if they can. This leads to a huge loss of culture through the loss of languages. India has lost 220 languages in the last 50 years - partly due to this mindless promotion of English over its true value as a link language. Language isn't just words and grammar - it holds the key to culture. Tribals in New Guinea and the Western Ghats can identify dozens species of birds by their songs; traditional healers can identify thousands of medicinal plants and how they affect the human body; the Andamanese tribes have the knowledge of how to sense natural disasters like the tsunamis. Every language we lose, eventually leads to the loss of rich culture associated with it.Your family's ways are backward and primitive: As children learn about the western world and its ways, they start to look at their indigenous ways as backward and primitive. Already, people look down on Ayurveda and glorify allopathy. They consider western dairy farming to be superior to our far diverse approaches. They think of mechanised industrial farming as a way to create better yields though traditional organic farming is far more sustainable. Children don't want to use local materials for their home any more because they're messy and awkward. Bio fuel from dung is despised because despite it's sustainability, it feels primitive. At the level of elders, this creates great inferiority as they start to believe that they know nothing and that school is a panacea for their children to experience happiness in life. Academic failure = failure in life: As Manish Jain of Shikshantar says, "One of the things that is most disturbing to me, at a level of justice and morality, is that you have an institution in place globally that is branding millions and millions of innocent people as failures." Is failure to succeed in school really the only indicator of a human being's potential? Haven't we learned from the likes of Beethoven, Tagore, Lincoln, Akbar, Edison, Einstein, Eminem, Jackie Chan, Sachin Tendulkar and several others that non-conformance to the institution of school is no measure of a human being's potential? And yet, every year we have millions of children who will not jump through the hoops of school and hence identify themselves as an "8th class fail" or something like that. How can any of us who think of social justice accept such an institution that is binary enough to say that those who conform to it are successes and those that don't are failures?Conform and get rewards: A corollary to the above learning what children learn about conformance. Those that obey the teacher's orders are those that get rewarded. Those that jump through the hoops of exams are the ones that come out on top. The learning of conformance comes from the act of wearing similar uniforms, mingling only with people who are in your age group. If you have an interest that isn't part of the syllabus, you'll most probably get no encouragement. On the other hand if you finish your borderline clerical homework the way your teacher wants, you'll receive a pat on the back. Conform to rules, conform to the bell, conform to the time table. If you play for longer than the time table allows (so what if you're a child), be ready to stand on the bench or kneel down or sit outside class and be the subject of ridicule. Worse, get caned.  Initiative is over-rated; wait for orders: Amongst the most dangerous things that school does to children is take away the boisterous enthusiasm of childhood. Someone lays out your day in a time-table. Someone decides what you study and when you study it. Someone decides who you can play with. Someone decides when you can play. If you try to do anything different, god save you. Guess what we get at the end of 16 years of such indoctrination? We get a society that takes no initiative and is ok with everything that happens around them. Let's not blame India's middle class for being apathetic to every social issue. School taught them to be that way.Be fiercely competitive: Don't get me wrong - I have no problem with competition. Certain spheres need competition - sports is an immediate one that comes to mind. Competitiveness becomes a problem when it becomes a way of life. Teachers and parents are obsessed with getting children to score the highest grades possible. Take a look at this commercial to visualise the pressures children face today. It's no surprise that children respond to these pressures by being fiercely competitive. Winning is everything - irrespective of the cost. So what if cheating is necessary to maximise your grades? Should you cram instead of learning? Why not? Especially if that boosts your scores. A central focus on competition makes for very bad decisions. Add to that the fact that schools usually are more obsessed to fill classrooms than to create great learning environments. Play spaces are small and pitiful. Hundreds of children compete for one basketball court. Guess who gets the court? The big, strong bullies? What learning does that reinforce in children?  The Triple Bind: I admittedly stole this from Stephen Hinshaw but this is primarily for the girls. I obviously care for my little girl and the advent of western education has created a new set of pressures for our girls as they hit teenage. We still want girls to be caring and nurturing. If we don't raise them this way, society looks at them awkwardly regardless of which part of the world they grow in. However the western focus of school and it's glorification of western media brings with it the pressures of looking a certain way. Girls also face this new pressure to "beat the boys" and be number one. So by the time our girls reach teenage, they have to help their moms at home, be involved deeply with the family, look drop dead gorgeous, be athletic, get super grades all while also being a size two. No wonder Hinshaw says, "One girl in four by the age of 19 will have developed serious depression, suicidal behavior, binge eating, cutting - etcetera." I believe Indian society isn't there yet, but we'll quite likely be there in another decade by the time my daughter is about to hit her teens. Massive consumption represents success: We've embraced the western economic model as our own and at the heart of the western model is the story of stuff - consumption. School by design glorifies everything including the western economy, globalisation, free markets, et all. Children, over years of education learn to value material objects deeply. Who has the latest iPad? Whose dad has the biggest car? Who has the coolest bungalow? They look down on others who may not have as much. Being mindless consumers means that you don't relate how many lives go in vain for that diamond ring or how much blood stains the coaltan in your phone or how many people were displaced for the aluminium on your motorbike. This creates a set of people that have a very different relationship to the planet than what we need in the next few decades. Nature is not an externality to the way we live our lives. All our wealth eventually comes from scarce natural resources. The forces of this world have enough firepower to destroy the planet a few times over. Our only hope is our next generation - one that questions mindless consumption.Working with your hands is stupid: The biggest bit of social injustice is what I save for the end. I work in a fancy IT company. I sit at a computer for most of the day and hardly move around. I actually have to run long distances each day to burn off the calories I eat. Society gives me a very high place - much higher than the farmer that feeds the nation. Wait - isn't that absurd? A person who slogs away to create food for the nation is lower in social hierarchy to a person that creates virtual 'stuff' in an air-conditioned office? The way we've architected our society reflects itself in how we teach at school. Children learn that working with your hands is for the lowest strata of society. They see no dignity in manual labour. The repurcussions of this are far reaching. The lack of interest in agriculture, the loss of indigenous professions, health, respect for people in society - the list could go on. And hey, I haven't even bothered to brainstorm any further than this list. I'm sure if we thought this through, there'd be several other problems we'd be able to articulate with school's performance on social goals. In effect it's easy to see why the world isn't getting any better despite about 300 years of modern schooling.What's the alternative then?My daughter is just five and half months old so I have a lot of time to think this through. I realise though, that I'd be very unhappy if my daughter ended up having to suffer a factory school. Do I have a clear alternative in mind? Frankly, no! I know that my family may have preferred factory school because of the 'formula' it provided. They did the best they could for me. Today, I realise that the formula isn't working and really, education is a dynamic activity which we can't boil down to the simplistic progression structure of school. I'm exploring several different options, including alternative schools like those from the Krishnamurti Foundation or the Steiner Schools. I do have a few things in mind that I want my daughter to get out of her education - and I'm particular about these to the extent that I'm more than happy to homeschool her if necessary.Enjoy her childhood and grow organicallyDevelop a respect for natureExperience the dignity of labourBuild respect for tradition and indigenous livelihoods; learn extensively from themGain mastery over all our family languages - Hindi, Bengali and MarathiPursue knowledge for its own sake - not for curriculumDiscover the ability to follow her passion without fearQuestion the status quo of the current worldLearn to work with others, not against themApply her learning in real life through inter-disciplinary challengesAnd this journey isn't going to be straightforward. I expect to face new challenges every day. That's why I'd like to go along and learn on this journey with my daughter. This is not a well charted route - I don't know how to begin or how this will end up, but isn't that what parenting is all about? Isn't it far better to look at every day as an adventure than to give up your lives to the predictability of an institution? I surely would prefer the former.Over the last few years I've grown more passionate about education than corporate learning and development and about social and economic justice more than just the business of IT. So pardon me if the bent of my posts seems very different from what I've posted earlier - maybe even contrary. I don't expect to keep the pace of posts I once had on this site but I do intend to post more about the issues that interest me right now. I hope you stay with me on this part of the journey as well and please feel free to tell me what you thought of this post.© Sumeet Moghe

In last Friday’s blog post you would remember how we talked about the huge impact of social business and social technologies in helping us adapt and embrace a new model of work, where in a world that it’s now more virtual and distributed than ever, work itself stops being a physical space alone and instead it evolves into becoming a state of mind. Again, "work happens, indeed, wherever you are, whenever you need, with whatever the tools you have at your disposal, with whoever the connections you may collaborate with in getting the job done". There is no denying that in order to make that new mantra a reality within the business world there is one other massive component that we should be bringing up into the mix in order to bring forward that flexibility and work life integration that we mentioned earlier on: mobility. And it’s just too funny that I am mentioning that today, as I’m just about to get started with a new round of business travelling where I am beginning to get the feeling that I will be taking the whole concept of work mobility into a new extreme. Over the next few weeks I will be visiting Brussels (5 hours stuck at the airport, which I think is worth while noting already!), Nice, Amsterdam, Zurich, Brighton, Montpellier, Washington D.C.,Valencia, Amsterdam (Again!), Madrid, and a couple of other cities that I’m still waiting for a final confirmation… As you can see, pretty close to a European tour with the odd visit to the US, once more for this year. And I’ll be taking with me my iPhone, my iPad and my MacBook Air, as my favourite weapons of mass mobility! Along, of course, with that lovely VPN connection to the IBM network, my company’s Intranet. Nowadays, when I travel, I usually get by with just my iPhone and my iPad, but this time around I’ll be taking the MacBook Air as well, as a couple of those events will involve some heavy computing. I am just hoping, and perhaps a bit of praying, too, that I will be capable of experiencing the future a little bit more this time around, so that I can truly confirm that mobility in the workforce is now more of a reality than a distant future. Keeping fingers crossed… And while I actually do that, you may want to take a look into this absolutely wonderful blog post by my good friend Oscar Berg under the title "What’s your mobility strategy?", where he exposes, quite clearly, the state of mobility within the corporate world, or, at least, he gives us plenty of good glimpses of where we are heading already, starting off with a rather brief description of what mobility means for all of us, knowledge (Web) workers, and also what it means for the organisation as business benefits. And making the great point that when looking into bringing mobility into your workforce it’s probably best if you look into it from both a strategic and tactical points of view, highlighting one of my favourite quotes from Peter Drucker that I have taken the liberty of quoting over here as well with an additional explanation from Oscar on what it actually means for him (For me, too!). Isn’t it pretty amazing the huge amount of brilliant quotes we keep bringing up from Mr. Drucker every time we would want to highlight a point on why Social Business makes perfect sense? Well, this would be another one!:  "I personally prefer Peter F Drucker’s simple definition "strategy is doing the right things, tactics is doing things right." A strategy is a strategy if it answers what you need to do and why to achieve a certain business objective. Tactics are the detailed maneuvers you need to do to realize the strategy. Strategies must come first, then the tactics" [Emphasis mine] And from there onwards Oscar gets on a roll to continue with this rather brilliant observation of how to make it work, how to get both strategy and tactics working together as one to achieve maximum results. To quote:  "When it comes to how mobile devices can be used to improve business performance, I really see that as tactics. What an organization should have is a mobility strategy. Developing such a strategy should be about making informed decisions about what to mobilize and why in order to achieve business objectives" [Emphasis mine] Indeed, right on the money! Organisations should work on putting together that mobility strategy and us, the knowledge (Web) workers, will get down to business and make use of the mobility tools at our disposal in order to keep being effective and productive while on the move. If you ask me, the best of both worlds; if you ask me again, I can actually summarise it all with a single keyword: empowerment. Best part of it all? That perhaps with BYOD glowing in full force for the last couple of years there may well be no way back at this stage and we are continuing to witness a rather massive consumerisation of IT in the Enterprise, as my good friend Dion Hinchcliffe has brilliantly pointed out in a couple of highly recommended articles. At IBM, we are fully immersed on building, shaping up and putting together that mobility strategy, well, the organisation is, for that matter, while a bunch of us have been enjoying the full benefits of going tactics, while on the road, and take the most advantage of using both smartphones or tablets to continue working whenever and wherever we would need to. There have been plenty of news items on this very same topic and how IBM has become incredibly flexible in this regard to the point where there is probably now a much richer environment of devices connected to the IBM network than ever before in its entire history.  My good friend, and fellow IBM colleague, Chris Pepin, has been doing a fantastic job over the course of the last few months putting together a bunch of presentations on this very same topic, describing that fascinating IT transformation that IBM itself has been going through by becoming not only platform agnostic, but also device agnostic for its own employees, pretty much allowing each and everyone of us, with the proper security protocols in place, of course, to be a bit more in control of our very own (mobile) computing environment, which, if anything, I can tell you, it’s been rather liberating over the course of the last 6 years that I have been enjoying such bold move myself of trusting your employees to use your IT in a responsible and trustworthy manner: that is, get work done whenever, wherever, with whomever. Perhaps my favourite presentation that Chris put together and that details that revolutionary journey for yours truly, and for several thousands of IBMers as well!, is that one of Deploying Apple in the Enterprise, which is a case study of how fellow IBMers have been using Apple products, whether Macs, iPhones or iPads, for work related tasks without hardly any official support, but more than anything else relying on what has always worked the best: peer to peer support networks. But I can imagine that for today’s blog post folks would be much more interested in this other dissertation that he did at IBM’s Pulse 2012 conference event, under the suggestive title "The New Workplace: Unleashing the Power of Enterprise Mobility", which would help address a good number of different concerns people out there may well be having about their own mobility strategies. Nonethless, though, if we are about to look into not just strategy, but also tactics, folks out there may well enjoy this other presentation put together as well by Chris himself, which just basically details what you might need to kick things off: Becoming a mobile enterprise - Step by step.    Becoming a mobile enterprise: step by step from Chris Pepin There used to be a time when plenty of people kept telling me that I was very lucky for working at IBM, since technology was always a given and we always had the opportunity to work with the best IT at our reach. I kept telling them that perhaps 10 years ago that may well have been the case, specially, when social technologies were still in the making, and we were lucky, indeed, to enjoy that luxury of just being on the Internet. Fast forward 10 to 15 years later, 2012, and I’m more and more convinced that with over 50% of our total employee workforce being purely mobile, we are no longer talking about a luxury, or consider ourselves lucky, or just value that tremendous flexibility that empowers us to be more in control of our very own workflows. I’m starting to think that we probably don’t have much of a choice anymore. Mobility is here to stay. It’s changing the way we work, connect, collaborate, share our knowledge, be in the know, innovate together, you name it. And if there is anything clear out there from today’s mobility landscape is that we are at long last breaking loose from that technology fetishism of being attached to a computer or a laptop and instead we are, finally, grabbing the tools in our hands, just like in the good old times, thousands of years ago!, to do what we know best: collaborate, share our knowledge, get work done together. Whenever. Wherever. With whomever. A warm welcome to the mobile digital nomads! We salute you!

As I have mentioned on yesterday’s blog post, I have just started my next round of business travelling that will be keeping me busy for the next few weeks. Summer is over, indeed, and it’s time to get back to work, as if we ever left it, right? Anyway, this week I will be going to both Nice and Amsterdam to participate at a couple of IBM driven events on the topics of Social Business and Adoption of Social Technologies. I’m currently en route to Brussels though, where I will be spending a few hours hanging out at the airport. Yes, I know the joys and glamour of travelling, in general. I guess, over time, you get used to it and you move on. This time around though, I have been thinking, and for a little while now, that I’ll be making a much more conscious effort of keeping up with blogging over here, since last time around I went through a rather extensive hiatus that took me quite a bit to recover from and it didn’t feel good. At all. So here’s my attempt at keeping things up and starting off right from the first day I’m away from my home office. Let’s see how far I can take the whole concept of moblogging. If you have been following this blog for a little while now I am sure you may have noticed how my blogging style is usually that one of writing relatively lengthy articles where I usually start off with an idea, then I dive into a whole bunch of research, start connecting with a bunch of other ideas and links to other blog entries, articles, news items, etc., see what sense I can make into it all and hopefully conclude with the same idea and what I learned from the whole process, giving an opportunity to learn as well from everyone’s thoughts about it on the comments, which is perhaps my favourite process from business blogging overall, because that’s usually when I get to learn the most out of the whole process of self-reflection and thinking out loud associated with blogging. Basically, an introduction of the idea, development of the same idea with links and interesting references to similar ideas, and share a conclusion as a result of it that will hopefully trigger some kind of reaction out there, anywhere, any which place, at any given time. Then, as time allows and conversation(s) develop, time to dive back and respond to comments people leave adding their additional input into the conversation. I have been trying to tame that process for my blog posts all along, specially, in the area of keeping them shorter, following great examples like those of Seth Godin and Euan Semple, two of my favourite bloggers and essential reads of the day, who always hit the nail right on the head with sharp, brief, but equally thought provoking bursts of pure genius. And yet, time and time again, I keep failing.  See? Like now, for instance. Point well made already, I guess. Either way, at some point I used to worry about it, thinking that people would not be really much interested in reading those lengthy blog articles, but, apparently, plenty of you folks out there do enjoy the reads, and keep coming back for more, leaving some absolutely delightful feedback comments. So I learned to live with it, accept it, embrace such blogging style, and do my very best in keeping up with those book-like chapters, as a bunch of you have suggested to me for a while already. Perhaps one day those blog chapters will turn themselves into full books, who knows. Well, for now, I’m willing to start a new experiment though and see how it would work. With the excuse of being mobile with all of this business travelling coming up and therefore having less time to create proper lengthier blog posts I have decided to give it another try at putting together shorter blog entries, on the go, where I will just point to something that I may have found rather interesting, worth while referencing and instead of just linking to a bunch of other related ideas and trends of thought I will just leave it at that pointing folks to that single idea that trigger that initial reaction. Then, whenever both time and work would allow, I plan to keep up putting together those longer articles hoping to still do a bit of that deep thinking that I think we all need to go through every now and then, instead of snacking around. I guess it’s just like with food. Some times we do enjoy and treasure having some lovely tapas and some other times we just rejoice at the prospect of a rather nice full meal with friends where the conversation is just as good as the company, never mind the food!  That’s it! That’s what I will be doing from now onwards. Worth a try, I can imagine. Perhaps this longer blog post helped me develop an idea that I have been having at the back of my mind for a while now and that I thought would be worth while sharing it across: make the connection between business blogging and food (Yes, I know, I guess that’s what #foodies do all the time, that is, associate everything with food! hehe) and consider that some blog entries would be like some of the gorgeous Spanish tapas I am sure you have had the treat of enjoying them any which place, any time and then some other blog entries as full meals where magic comes along in the shape of that absolutely brilliant conversation with friends, usually accompanied with good wine, or a after drink or two.   I am sure that at this point in time you may be thinking that I could well be doing that through social networking sites like my two favourite ones: Google Plus and Twitter. And you may be right, but then again I also thought that perhaps it may well not be such a good idea. Initially, because while I’m on the road, participating in a good number of events, I will be doing quite a bit of extensive live tweeting at @elsuacon and, secondly, for Google Plus it may well be a bit too much, since I have just gotten started with a new initiative in there that I’ll be blogging about next and which I think would help me diversify my interactions a bit. But more on that shortly …  I think it was my good friend, and KM mentor, Dave Snowden, the one who once commented about when talking about social computing and social networking interactions, and probably like everything else in life, one shouldn’t be putting together all of one’s eggs in a single basket, just in case, and I am guessing that’s essentially what I will be doing at this point, and, hopefully, from here onwards: blogging, Google Plus, Twitter, Flickr, etc. etc. will help me have multiple baskets where I can place those eggs without thinking I’m kind of missing out or something. Somehow, for a mobile knowledge (Web) worker I guess it could well work. However, I think folks would also need to understand that some times nothing may just happen, too! Work can get in the way, actually, it’ll always try to do so! Real life conversations, right where my favourite social networking activities keep taking place, will still have priority and just seeing the whole bunch of colleagues, friends, and people I have treasured over the course of time whom I will be meeting up over the next few week … Like I said, there may be some times where, for a day or two, I will go quiet. Fear not, I’ll be coming back. It’s just that at this point in time I probably need to strike some more for something that I have been feeling I have lost a bit of touch with, perhaps due to the summer vacation, in the realm of the Social Web: balance. Hope you folks would help me strike a good one keeping things going with this new experiment of combining social networking interactions with some blogging full meals & Spanish tapas, while I’m on the road for the next couple of months, so that we can keep up with those conversations, whether short or longer ones! And if there is a chance that we will be able to meet up face to face I shall be looking forward to go for a drink or two along the way! Reach out on the usual places and let’s make it happen! Thanks ever so much, as usual, for sticking around! It’s greatly appreciated! Let’s do it!

All along, and ever since I started making use of Google Plus, over a year ago, I have been saying time and time again how, to me, it is probably one of the most powerful Social Networking Sites available out there on the Social Web, allowing us all, knowledge Web workers, not only to live social, but also to get work done, never mind the huge amount of deeper conversations one can certainly host over the course of time and that we are starting to see more and more by the day now that a whole bunch of people are starting to realise the huge potential versus other social networking tools. The combination of multiple levels of interaction from a same single user interface is a killer. Public vs. private vs. dedicated interactions - through circles -, offline social networking through text, real-time with IM, videoconferencing with Plus Hangouts, one of my favourite features, without a doubt!, broadcasting events through Hangout On Air, a phenomenal mobile experience with stunning iOS Apps for both iPhone and iPad, etc. etc. are just a few of the capabilities that have made Google Plus escalate to number #2 position for yours truly of social technologies to enjoy nowadays. And I suppose I’m not the only one thinking along those terms. But I’m now wondering whether we may all have an opportunity to up the game for Google Plus and try to prove what’s really made of. Take it to the next level. Show and demonstrate how it can take productivity and effectiveness into new heights and how it can help you build your online reputation like no other social networking site may have done in the past, perhaps with the well known exception of your own personal business blog, as I have blogged about it in the past. Well, here’s what I am doing to level up Google Plus then for myself… I have always been fascinated by the whole concept of narrating my work, working out loud and observable work (a.k.a. #owork). I have blogged about them in the past already a few times and it never ceases to amaze me the huge impact each and everyone of them have been having in helping transform the corporate world as we know it, within the larger context of Social Business. Once again, nothing to do really with technology, but more with attitude (One of my favourite key terms when talking about corporate culture as of late. Isn’t it everything about attitude and what we do about it?), with that shifting of gears, of mindsets, of human behaviours, where knowledge workers become more open and transparent about their own workload, strongly believing that by doing that not only are they helping themselves to become more effective and productive by raising their visibility by demonstrating their subject matter expertise, but also helping others excel at what they are good at, along with helping their organisations build a huge amount of information and knowledge flows freely available to everyone, where before they were all trapped in a good number of corporate silos, regardless of the current excuse du jour.  Well, in that context of narrating your work, working out loud, I keep getting asked by folks outside of the firewall what it is that I do for work eventually inside IBM as a Social Computing Evangelist. And all along I have been trying to do my best in describing what I have been up to and what it is that I try to achieve at the end of the day. However, all along it’s been a bit of a challenge on its own, because in the vast majority of cases despite my eagerness to try to become more transparent and open on what I do to folks outside the firewall, external social technologies still keep presenting a good number of challenges: Twitter with the silly 140 characters limitation, amongst several others; LinkedIn because of the hugely aggressive Terms of Service which still continue to be a complete turn-off for yours truly; Facebook not much anymore since I deleted my account over 2 years ago and haven’t had a need to return back to it just yet (Doubt I ever will, since it’s kept that personal use flavour ever since I left it); Slideshare because of how heavy centric it is on presentation materials and a bit too tough when I no longer do them for public speaking; and a whole bunch of other starting social networking sites that bring forward lots of promise, but that they then end up being acquired by other major players and there goes all of the excitement.  Till we then bump into Google Plus itself, indeed! And that’s where it clicked for me a little while ago now, because the limitations  from other social networking sites are just not there. Quite the opposite. It’s got that unique opportunity to explore it for a good number of use cases from your day to day work and eventually see which one would stick out the most. I have got to admit that for a good number of weeks I struggled to keep up with it, having long periods of silence or sudden bursts that even me, I thought, were a bit too much over the top. All induced, perhaps, by some of the habits I have built up already over the course of years from several other social networking sites. But once I learned to build a new set of habits for my use of Google Plus things have finally clicked. And all thanks to a one single key concept that we all seem to be taking for granted, perhaps far too often, but that’s is critical to any good social networking behaviour: engagement. Yes, in Google Plus I no longer get to post as frequent as I perhaps do in Twitter. I’m lucky if I get 1 to 3 to 5 updates per day, depending on the context of what I may be doing. I am now totally fine with that! Just as much when a day, or two, or more! go by and I haven’t shared anything. That’s fine, too! I decided what I want to do is focus on the long term of the interactions, pretty much like with blogging and realise and embrace that some times you would have something to talk about and that in some others it’s much better to sit back, relax, enjoy the conversations flowing by and keep learning. In Google Plus I do care more for the conversations, taking the time to respond to each and everyone of the comments that come through, pretty much like I try to do on my personal business blog. Main reason being that it’s much easier to keep up with than with other social networking sites. I hardly ever share, broadcast any link, unless its content is just so powerful that I feel compelled to engage on a follow-up conversation with various people. I have built up the habit of sharing and commenting on links to other interesting readings, more than anything else as a learning experience for yours truly when interacting with others, build a bunch of food for thought which will then be reflected on upcoming blog posts, like this one. And so forth.  Essentially, what I decided to do with my Google Plus experience is to tailor it to be half way in between short bursts to connect with people all over the place, to then spark conversations on topics we both / all may care about and feel very passionate about and eventually develop deeper thinking about them that will see the end-result in blog posts. And over the last few weeks that seems to have worked incredibly well, to the point where one of the threads that I have started in there helped me prepare (Thanks ever so much everyone who participated in it!) the flow for one of the most important presentations I may be delivering in my lifetime next week Friday in Zurich. And this is where I feel narrating your work by working out loud with Google Plus would probably be my main use case for G+ from here onwards.  That’s right, from now onwards, I plan to continue making use of the following hash tags to share a glimpse, or two, of what it is that I go through at work as a social computing evangelist with the aim of inspiring some more observable work coming along. So, to that extent I will be using #elsuasworkbook #narrateyourwork #workingoutloud #observablework #owork plus whatever other hash tags related to the context of what I will be sharing. One of the other perks and advantages of doing so as well is to be able to capture plenty of the activities I’ll be involved with throughout the year, so when year end comes along I will have a good overview of what I may, or may not!, have accomplished throughout. And since it’s going to be shared out there in the open and transparently, I am hoping it would also benefit other folks as a result of it.  Thus, if you are just catching up now, and would want to take a peek of what I have been doing over the last couple of months, go ahead and dive into it, see how narrating my work is helping me become more effective and productive at what I do with Google Plus and I do hope as well some of that content shared may be compelling enough for you to drop by and share a comment or two and keep the dialogue going … I will surely be looking forward to it! Pretty much like I have been doing on this blog all along… Yes, I know what you may be thinking about … will Google Plus replace this blog over time, like it’s done for a good number of people out there already? No, I don’t think so. At least, not yet. My blog is still my blog, my voice, my online CV, my business card, my virtual self. Google Plus though is just about to help amplify and augment that voice one notch higher…

Dear Amazon,Many of us are glad that you've started your services in India. In fact, your presence has made our India e-tailers be far more competitive than they otherwise would have been and we, the customers have been eventual winners. We appreciate this. What we would appreciate more however, is for you and your marketplace vendors to treat your customers well and to offer the same first class service that your pride yourself on in the states.We recently received one of the most rude customer service responses ever - one that we'd have never associated with Amazon. We'd like Amazon and the readers of this post to decide what's fair.Now what does that screenshot from Amazon tell you? Exactly what it tells us - that the shipping is free! And that's all we expected. It also tells us that this order is Amazon Fulfilled. What you say this means is, the following:Orders are eligible for FREE Delivery and can be placed using Cash on DeliveryProducts are stored, packed and dispatched by AmazonOrder delivery tracking to your doorstepProducts can be returned easily by visiting our Returns Support CentreAmazon handles all customer serviceOrders containing items Fulfilled by Amazon worth Rs. 499 or more are eligible for FREE delivery.Note: For a limited time, there is no minimum order value and delivery is FREE for all items Fulfilled by Amazon.As it turns out, Aum Entertainment, the marketplace vendor selling this item ended up adding an Expedited Shipping charge of ₹52/- to our order. The cost isn't as much of a big deal, as the fact that on principle this is against Amazon's promise for "Amazon Fulfilled" orders. When we contacted Amazon about this issue, hoping that "Amazon handles all customer service", we got redirected to Aum Entertainment. When we explained the issue to them, they replied saying,"We have only Expidited service and use Amazon Easy Ship hence we charge shipping Charges we do not have standard Delivery option for your area."This of course is really lame claim. We are in downtown Bangalore! Amazon does ship to our location! Additionally, when you say "Expedited Shipping", the package better arrive in time. The package took 5 days to arrive. Most importantly we were concerned about the opacity of the charge. When we protested however, the vendor, not Amazon, responded very rudely saying,before you Place an order u have 3 times to see what u are ordering and what you are paying and before u click on buy now you again have the option to see what u are paying and what you are ordering in case you are not intd u can cancel the order . the fault is yours so Pls do not Blame the seller for your mistakes.So, dear Amazon here are questions for you:What happened to our Free Shipping? Why this exception on our order? Do you let your vendors make exceptions on Amazon Fulfilled orders?If you store, pack and dispatch orders, why are you delegating the response to the vendor?Do you take ownership of this customer service? Is a rude response like this what characterises your company?It may just be the question of ₹52/- but I hope you agree that you owe us an answer and at the very least a written apology! Otherwise, your reputation as "Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company" really takes a hit in my world.Thanks in anticipation,A rather upset customer© Sumeet Moghe