If you're wondering why I'm not live-blogging, it's because I have an awful battery in my computer - it conks off in less than 30 minutes and is at 30% health. Not too great. What I'm doing however,... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

After enjoying another gorgeous summer weekend back at home, and while I am starting to prepare things for the next upcoming business trip to Boston, MA, to attend & present at Enterprise 2.0 conference event (#e2conf), as well as sharing a series of posts with highlights from the Social Business Forum event in Milan from last week, I thought I would get things started with another week @ work with that inspiring video entry I have been sharing over the last few weeks. This time around, probably, making it even more special than ever. And you will see what I mean in just a few minutes… Have you watched Amo La Vida? No? Well, if you haven’t, please *do* so today. I can guarantee you it will change your life for good! Yes, indeed, it’s that inspiring! Once again, my good friend David Gurteen keeps finding golden nuggets that are sure a treat for everyone’s lives. This time around he shared across a short video clip (A bit over 10 minutes long…), over at KarmTube, from filmmaker Nic Askew, which is a black-and-white interview with Julio Olalla. And where Julio comes to talk about a good bunch of things with such natural charm, delight and spontaneity that’s probably going to leave a mark in all of us difficult to erase, nor forget. It’s one of those video clips that will surely get you to shed a tear or two of pure joy filled with humanity, of what it is being a human being and behaving like one. Julio gets to talk about gratitude and why we need to get it back into our day lives by sharing one of those moving stories that will make you think for a long while. He gets to talk as well about wisdom and how much different it is from knowledge itself, about the lost art of conversation, about what real friendships are all about. His sense of touching & embracing life is remarkably inspirational and one that permeates wisdom throughout, as well as being far too difficult to describe it in a single sentence or two over here without having my fingers tremble at that failed attempt. I know for certain I wouldn’t do any justice to it, so I better leave it down to you folks to go and listen to it further with just one thought: "Amo La Vida": Video from KarmaTube (I told you… mind-blowing altogether, one of the most touching video interviews ever, that I can remember, to say the least, and what a wonderfully superb way of starting a new week, don’t you think?)

My favourite session until now at XP2010 has been the Agile Suitcase session by Martin Heider and Brend Schiffer. I don't think it created any ground-breaking insights, though it was an excellent,... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, here I am, once again, putting together this particular series of articles detailing some of the various highlights from the recent Social Business Forum event held in Milan, Italy, on June 8th, that I attended and presented at. Now, I won’t be able to detail most of what happened during the event, since there were lots of things taking place all over, but I am hoping that these few notes would help folks get a glimpse of what it was like, what I learned during the event and what I thought were some of the best keynote and breakout sessions altogether. To kick things off, this blog entry will focus though on my overall impressions of the event itself and what I thought about the whole atmosphere altogether, and if I were to summarise it in a single sentence I would probably say that the #sbf11 event has just redefined, for me, the way conference events should be like. In a single word: Converse. That’s right! Over the last few years I have attended quite a few technical conferences and time and time again the main issue I keep bumping into is not having enough time to converse with fellow attendees to continue learning from one another. So whenever I am given the chance I go ahead and take it. I mean, what are the chances of meeting up the same group of smart, talented folks at another tech event like that one? Very minimal, to say the least! So I was very glad to see how the good folks over at OpenKnowledge took good care of the details and decided to give enough importance to the whole concept of entertaining conversations for those attending the event. For us, keynote and breakout guest speakers, it all started the previous evening, as we were all invited to an evening reception, where both the food and beverages, as well as the venue, were rather accommodating and inviting. Perhaps, too inviting! (I still remember very fondly that delightful white wine and the gorgeous food coming along with it!). The end result was, eventually, meeting up with folks who I have known for a long while and with whom it was fabulous to catch up with again, but, more interestingly, meet up new friends who share a common passion, like most of us, for Social Business and the Social Web. And that’s when it turned out to be rather interesting and exciting to get to know them a little bit better and find out that we are not all of that different altogether at all, regardless of the company we may work for, and have the perfect evening arranged to confirm that! How come very very few other conferences do that for guest speakers? There is probably nothing more accommodating than receiving a nice and warm welcome when you arrive in a foreign city to deliver a presentation the next day, I can tell you that! Even more, when a good number of the conversations I had provoked multiple follow-up ideas that shaped a few last minute changes in my own presentation incorporating a good number of new thoughts, ideas, and mind-blowing concepts that are still lingering in my mind… Priceless! Then we move on to the day of the event itself … Now, I *do* realise how the conference wi-fi was not there as pervasive as most folks would have expected from a technical event, for whatever the circumstances. And contrary to how I would usually react in previous occasions, it didn’t bother me this time around. At all. Ha! Yes, can you imagine me saying that after all of what I have said and written about in the last few years? Well, I came to the conclusion, and rather interesting ah-ha moment, that not having wi-fi allows you to talk more, face to face, with people who are right in front of you waiting to engage. Physical interactions are still irreplaceable. No doubt! I mean, conversing over the Social Web is just such a wonderful thing that we have all have gotten so accustomed to it that we have been rather spoiled altogether. Yet, there is nothing like talking to people and participating in conversations, right there, as they happen, and you get to interact with others. Well, the Social Business Forum event allowed for plenty of that and so much more! To the point where I came to the conclusion of not worrying about wi-fi at conferences any longer from there onwards. If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, let’s talk face to face and enjoy the ride! I bet it will be much more interesting and fruitful eventually,… At least, it was for me! The conference event took place at the Marriott Hotel in Milan, Italy, and, once again, I would have to confirm how important and critical it is to have the perfect venue for it. This hotel was just it! Absolutely wonderful! But not only because of the lodgings and the logistics, but also because of the superb catering service. This is one of my big pet peeves at conferences, how over time and as the years go by the quality of both food & drinks has deteriorated quite a bit to the point where it’s almost non-existent… And this is just such a missed opportunity. Now, I *do* realise it may well be just my Mediterranean / Latin side of things, but having the right catering service is not only going to be very beneficial for us all (Why would we need to give up on our own health and healthy habits, while attending events! Right?), but also for the overall conference. Having the right combination of food & drinks, both during lunch and breaks, is going to help people become more comfortable, more chatty, more at ease with the environment they are immersed in, to the point where they would engage much more in those already on-going conversations. Why not embrace it, like the #sbf11 folks did? I mean, as an example, I extended, on purpose, a good number of great conversations while I was enjoying that second, extra creamy, white coffee going beyond the senses! I guess what I am trying to say with all of this is the conclusion I came to towards the end of the event that perhaps it’s time for tech conferences to slow down a bit. And let us enjoy the pace of being humans again, while we talk to other fellow humans, face to face, without having to rush off to the next scheduled session. Now, I know that some of the breakout sessions hardly had any space to mix and mingle along the lines I described above, but overall I think the pace of the event, as well as lunch and coffee breaks were just right. And wish other conferences would take example and further notice and allow their attendees to see and witness the world slowing down a bit for a change. Somehow I feel we would all be much better off altogether! And come back for more! I surely will … Ok, by now I am sure you have realised how this blog post with some of the highlights on the event itself have got very little to do with both the content and the speakers. Yes, that’s right! I thought I would get things started talking about looking after the details of making a great event a superb one. And that’s exactly what I witnessed four years later after my first, back then, Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Italy. Emanuele Quitarelli, Rosario Sica and their wonderful entire team at OpenKnowledge hosted a fantastic event, even though it’s not their specialty! I wish others, whose entire specialty is that exact same one, would pick up on some of their ideas to help revolutionise the way we engage and participate in tech conference events. To me, eventually, it all felt like being part of a big family of good old & new friends, with a shared common passion around Social Business wanting to network, connect and converse with one another, learning from each other, without double agendas, second intentions or whatever other hidden purposes; just basically, conversing and sharing for the sake of wanting to learn more. And the fact that the evening of the event got a bunch of us together going out for dinner and a drink or two clearly indicates how most of the times it pays off being in good company, engaging in real conversations wanting to find out and learn plenty more about that person sitting right next to you, instead of trying to find a good excuse to go and grasp your mobile gadget to snoop around a way to make a move and leave that space. That’s not us; that should *not* be us; we need to start humanising conference events once again. Forget about big, impersonal, mass media driven events. They are just so passe. The Social Business Forum has just shown us, if anything, the way we all have got ahead of us… Hope other tech conferences would do the same… and take their lead… (Not to worry, on follow-up blog posts I will be cutting to the chase and focus plenty more on both content and keynote / breakout sessions… This one was just a little bit of an appetiser… hehe)

Apart from the sessions I've written exclusively about, here a quick synopsis of the other sessions I really liked. I'm going to be quick about it, so let me just jot down the high level notes from... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Or so they say… I still remember my first day at the company, as if it were yesterday. January 20th 1997. There I was, standing by the main entrance door at the IBM site in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands, wondering whether I made the right decision to enter the IT world or whether I would be regretting it for life. There I was, a non-techie, English graduate, who still hates computers today, looking forward to start working for that computing giant that had continued to make history throughout decade after decade, not knowing how it would all work out eventually, or whether he would be able to stick around for a while… 14 years later, things haven’t changed much. The excitement and willingness to make a difference are still there, as if it were the first day. The aversion for everything related to IT is still there as well, however, the fondness and pride of being surrounded by a wonderful group of talented and very smart folks, as my work colleagues, are still very much there, too! And, if anything, it’s what has kept me going over the course of years. Like in almost any business, I am sure, the people who build and shape them! Happy 100th year anniversary IBM! Indeed, this year, and, in particular, this week (Today), IBM is celebrating its 100th year anniversary. 100 years of history in the making and still going rather strong. The only IT company in the whole world that’s been there for that long. The only IT business who has kept reinventing itself over the course of decades and still going strong. Rather strong! And as I get to reflect on this post on what that has meant for me over the years, I cannot imagine how someone like me has been able to stick around for over 14% of that lifetime achievement, when over 50% of today’s IBM population hasn’t been in the company for more than 5 years. Do I feel old? No, absolutely not! I just feel privileged! Privileged to have developed a career that has expanded for those 14 years doing what I love doing, i.e. my dream job; and still keep going at it. Back then I started working as a customer support representative for the mainframe, from there onwards I moved into training and education, to then further on start working around 2000 in the areas of Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Online Communities, Learning and the last few years around Social Computing. All of that expanding four different business units, three different countries, 5 different projects, hundreds of business trips, meeting thousands of very smart, interesting and insightful people (Both clients and fellow colleagues!) from whom I keep learning day in day out throughout all of that time. Not too bad for a dinosaur, archaic, computing based, rather strict business, don’t you think? Yes, indeed, I, too, doubt it would get better than that: privileged to have the flexibility to shape up not only my own career, but the company I have been working at for the last 14 years and going… I am not too sure how much longer I will be here, since you never know what may be happening tomorrow or the next day. You all know how it goes… What I do know though is that, regardless of whatever it may be happening, having worked for this company for that long has certainly meant a whole new world for me; it’s shaped tremendously this person you folks know today; it’s helped me age and grow both intellectually and mentally to be who I am today. From my younger years to the not so younger years anymore. In fact, I never thought I would be making it this far, since I am still very inclined towards my teaching and education background and I know that, at some point, I will be going back to my origins. However, for now, I’ll continue to rejoice, experience and live through the Centennial celebrations of that company that has given me the opportunity to shape up my role and contributions to the same. Something that I will always appreciate and treasure quite a bit, specially as we all keep humanising the corporate environment we work at with all of this Social Business stuff. That’s why today, and like almost every day, I will keep drinking a bit more of kool-aid, or, better, I will keep drinking our very own champagne, knowing that it’s always much much better to do it in good company, with those fellow colleagues who have moved on from being just my peers to become my good friends, my partners in crime, the ones I will keep treasuring for how they keep taking things into the next level when delighting their clients and the ones that I know, long after I am gone, will help me remember all of these years with plenty of fond memories. Yes, of course, there have been tough times throughout all of those 14 years, but one has come to realise that it’s those difficult times they ones that allow you to grow further, to become better at what you do, to continue making a difference, to be better for your customers and for those around you, to be just you, which, at the end of the day, is what really matters. And to that extent, I can only add plenty of words of gratitude and appreciation to this company, IBM, who has decided to employ me for that long and for allowing me to be part of that 100th year legacy that I will remember for what’s left of my life. Yes, I know that things could change, and they would eventually change, but they won’t be able to take away what I have learned, and lived, and experienced with my colleagues over the course of the last 14 years and still going. That’s mine. That’s ours, eventually. It’s our human experience that no-one can touch any longer. And to such extent, that’s the main reason why this year, in order to celebrate that 100th year anniversary I will be pledging over 100 hours of community service where I will be volunteering my time to help others in various different areas, although perhaps with that special focus on the Academia world, which is, basically, where I come from in the first place. It’s always good to go back to basics, I suppose. If you are a fellow IBMer, and if you are reading this blog post, I, too, hope you will be pledging some hours to those special projects you always wanted to work and contribute to, but didn’t find a good time to engage. Even if you are not an IBMer, you can still pledge some hours to contribute back to your own communities. Perhaps now it’s the time to go ahead and do it. And that way help prepare for the next 100 years… You and me won’t be there, for sure, but our legacy will. Regardless. Just like the folks on this wonderful video clip have witnessed over the course of the years… (Ever onward!, and on to the next 100 years, my dear IBM! May you keep growing and show the world what a sustainable and smarter planet business can do to make a difference for us all … and for this world altogether… THINK!)

Tips for Effective Presentations Over the last couple of days I've been training the new trainers at ThoughtWorks University. Those who know me will be aware that I'm extremely passionate when it... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Continuing further with that series of blog posts detailing some of the major highlights for yours truly from the recent Social Business Forum conference event in Milan, Italy, I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks today the next installment where I would focus on the first part of the day, the one with all of the keynote speaker sessions, detailing some of the major key learnings and ah-ha moments I experienced throughout that morning. Then in later blog posts I will share some more thoughts on the various breakout sessions I attended and perhaps I will put together one final blog entry where I will link to the recordings of the presentations, once they are all made available. So, let’s get things going! How can I summarise an entire morning of inspiring keynotes in a single sentence or two. Let’s see… How about Social Business is not something entirely new, we already knew about it from before. Welcome to the 2.0 Awakening of Business! Yes, indeed! That would pretty much nail it, as far as I can see, for those couple keynote speaker sessions that kicked off the event to a great start! At first, we had Emanuele Scotti and Rosario Sica (From OpenKnowledge) who spent a few minutes going through a fancy and elegant Prezi presentation ("Social Business on the Shoulders of Giants") where they quoted a good number of great thinkers from our recent history, going as far back as Newton (Stayed tuned, because this reference will come up again!), sharing further insights which mimic, almost too close, plenty of the main thinking behind Social Business from all along, even for Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0. With a couple of those quotes as some of my own favourites. Like Fernando Flores’ "Trust is the main ingredient necessary for creating and sustaining a solid business relationship" or that other one from Rita Levi Montalcini: "Above all, don’t fear difficult moments. The best comes from them". That short session clearly highlighted how plenty of the same thinking that has been inspired and provoked for Social Business has got plenty of deeper roots, throughout the years, in how business used to run in the past, but that we seemed to have forgotten, or neglected, in the last few decades altogether. Great refreshing reminders that confirm how we may not be inventing anything new in here, maybe just an evolution, but perhaps going through that full awakening stage of reminding us all who we really are and what we do for business on a daily basis. Good stuff! Here’s the embedded Slideshare deck, so you can catch up with some of the remaining quotes they shared across: Social Business on the Shoulders of Giants - Emanuele Scotti & Rosario Sica View more videos from SocialBizForum Moving on into the next keynote session we had the great pleasure and true honour of having with us Bill Johnston, Director of Global Community at Dell, who under the very suggestive title "Paving the way to Social Business" did a fabulous job at describing how Dell has progressed from pretty much ignoring social media to become a full powerhouse leading the way in the consumer space in just over 3 to 4 years. I told him (half jokingly), at the end of the session, how much I enjoyed it, to the point that if it weren’t for the OS running in Dell machines I wouldn’t mind purchasing one myself just to experience their customer excellence! Indeed, the set of slides that Bill put together were amazingly insightful and very much spot on in helping define what are some of the main challenges and great opportunities for businesses with a common goal: delighting their clients. And he basically shared plenty of insights on how they go about it over at Dell. You can have a look into the slides over at Slideshare as well and I strongly recommend you spend a few minutes going through them, specially, check out slide #6 on a rather inspirational holistic approach towards networks of value, which I am sure is going to resonate, quite a bit, with those folks who advocate, very vehemently, where the final frontier for Social Business is at the end of the day. Or check slide #8: one of the most brutal slides you will see available out there and which describes, pretty nicely, how Dell came on board the whole social media bandwagon to be one of the industry leaders in this space at the moment. It’s a rather bold move to come out there and share stories like that one from that slide and how that evolution on wanting to become better will require an extra effort and lots of learning. Pretty much along the very same lines that we, over at IBM, experienced with Jams, back in the day. Just brilliant! The rest of the slides are pretty interesting detailing as well several of the Dell initiatives they have got in place, like SMaC (Social Media and Community Team), or the Social Media and Community University, which comes pretty close to the same beliefs behind our very own BlueIQ Adoption and Enablement Programme, IdeaStorm, etc. etc. Worth while looking into! Just as much as the part dedicated towards the holy grail of social media; of course, I am referring to figuring out the ROI of these social tools as well as some very interesting piece of advice on "Planning for Social Media & Community Engagement", where Bill shared plenty of good practices on how to get things started with plenty of pragmatic approaches and sound advice (Check slides #22 to #26). However, if I were to highlight the one favourite slide from his presentation that would be, without a doubt, slide #10 where Bill just mentioned how critical listening is for any social media strategy. In fact, to Dell it’s "The Heart of our Social Strategy". As it should be, for sure! That’s what we keep on insisting ourselves, social computing evangelists, as well that before you dive right in, check out what’s happening out there, listen to what people are saying, get to learn and absorb how they interact and from there onwards figure out and find a way that would suit not only you and your own needs, but those of your customers, which is what matters at the end of the day. And active listening is the perfect activity to get the ball rolling! Here you have got the embedded code of Bill’s great presentation, so you can quickly flip through the charts and get a glimpse of what you can look forward to whenever the recording of his keynote becomes available at a later time: Keynote from Social Business Forum 2011 View more presentations from Bill Johnston And, finally, the last one from the morning keynote speaker sessions. This time around with the rather provocative, but very insightful Andrew Gilboy, Oracle VP E2.0 EMEA, who covered "Social Business, it’s also about the Processes". And I do realise I am describing his session as rather thought-provoking and eye-opening from the perspective that anyone out there who may be involved with the whole concept of creativity and the arts, i.e. musicians, authors, play writers, filmmakers, etc. etc. must go through the first few slides (From slide #8 to #slide 20) to find out, in a very helpful manner, the state of their own industry and how if they continue to think along the lines of the 20th century business models they are bound to suffer quite a bit, if not disappear altogether! And all of that through a wonderful trip down the memory lane of the music industry in the last decade! A must-go-through, for sure! From there onwards, Andrew covered that important aspect of identifying new social business processes that would apply not only to the music industry, but to multiple other industries as well. Just loved his distinction of how those (social) business processes have been working out their magic for both "left" and "right brainers" (Slide #23) to present a rather interesting and immersive landscape that no business should ignore, nor neglect. Finally, another worth while paying attention section from his presentation was that part where he covered Opportunities and Threats with plenty of examples from other businesses who have already taken a potential threat and converted it into a huge opportunity, helping define the landscape of how business will be conducted in the near future. Really worth while having a look, if only to check out how those other businesses are becoming, and living, social. Here is the embedded code of Andrew’s slide deck, so you can have a look into it right away as well: Socialising the Enterprise: it’s also about the process - Andrew Gilboy View more presentations from SocialBizForum And that was it from me for now! As you can see, plenty of great food for thought on what it means to become a successful and sustainable social business with lots to digest and think through. But overall quite a line-up of rather relevant, interesting and inspiring keynote speakers who definitely helped set the stage for a good bunch of great conversations we all had throughout the day. But that would be the time for another blog post, where I can talk about the remaining sessions, as well as those other conversations on the side … Stay tuned for more to come!

You may remember that I had written a blog post about Microsoft's illustration styles that can help you create a consistent look and feel for your presentations and elearning courses. Unfortunately... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Today is *the* day, indeed! Today marks the end of the first 100 years of the company that has employed me for the last 14 and still going strong. Today is IBM‘s 100th anniversary (Check #ibm100 on Twitter to see how folks are celebrating such massive achievement). So, to keep the celebrations going, I thought I would follow up a recent blog entry I wrote on this Centennial celebration by putting together this rather short one pointing folks to a couple of interesting resources worth while having a look at, just to check out how fellow IBMers are celebrating online, as well as offline, such remarkable milestone. I mean, how many folks do you know that have worked for an (IT) business that’s lasted for so long and still growing healthier, more and more, by the day? … 100 years later… I don’t know many of them, to be honest, which is why today, specially, I have got a stronger sense of pride and privilege for sticking around throughout all of this time. Yes, I know, lots of kool-aid coming along, folks, so I will try to keep it short and straight to the point. Let’s get started, of course, with the IBM100 Web site, a dedicated space for everyone to dive into some of the major inflection points in IBM’s history, and probably that of the world’s, too! Happy 100th Year, My Dear IBM! I am sure you may have seen, or noticed, how a whole bunch of articles are coming along detailing what some of the main achievements have been for IBM in those past 100 years. My good friends, and fellow colleagues, Ed Brill and Andy Piper, amongst several others, have put together rather insightful blog posts as well that detail, a little bit, the richness of the interactions and experiences they, too, have lived over an extensive period of time. Worth while reading, for sure. I know as well how plenty of folks all over the place were commenting on why the "main" IBM Twitter account was dormant for a little while; well, as you may have seen already, the wild duck is out and about, once again, and that account is now active big time celebrating as well such a special date as today’s. Go ahead and start following it, if you would want to be in the know of what’s happening out there in the IBM world. Now, I can imagine you may be wondering about the intriguing "wild ducks" mention I just did on the above paragraph, right? Well, not to worry; it’s the title on another one of those brilliantly inspiring video clips that has been released, just recently, to celebrate IBM’s Centennial, along with the 100×100 or the "They Were There" ones. At the same time there is a new book out there, that I just can’t wait to get my hands on the Kindle version, that describes pretty much that lifetime of success and innovation around IBM, including as well the tough times that always allow one to redefine and grow further on your own core beliefs, under the title "Making the World Work Better" with this lovely and inspirational legend: "The Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company". Perhaps I couldn’t even have put it in better words than @ibm‘s bio has just done: "By becoming a very different company from what we were just a few years ago, we have become much more like the company IBM has been for most of its history" Ok, I know that this blog entry may just be bordering on the über-kool-aid effect, but I *do* hope you can understand where I am coming from; today’s IBM 100th anniversary is quite a remarkable event that cannot just go by un-noticed. Either way, I will probably talk a little bit later on in time about the Memorabilia that I just got myself a couple of weeks back and that I’m enjoying quite a bit so far and that you could also go ahead and enjoy! For now, though, you may want to go ahead and download the .PDF IBM Centennial Essay and embark yourself on what promises to be quite an interesting read. Or you may want to go ahead and dive into the Celebration of Service Day and pledge some hours to help your local communities and favourite NGOs. Thousands of IBMers have already pledged over 2.5 million hours, and counting! Yes, I know, there will be always something out there for everyone to go ahead and enjoy further while celebrating IBM’s Centennial. And as I am reaching now the end of this blog post, I thought what a better way of doing that than making the connection with that, recently released, IBM Centennial Film under the heading "Wild Ducks - Celebrating 100 years of Visionary Clients", which is just so remarkably inspirational and beautiful that would make for a wonderful mid-afternoon coffee break of 15 minutes of pure gold, seeing how some IBM customers prove what Smarter Planet has been aiming at for the last few years: a better, smarter world, where sustainable growth, and good health, of both our businesses and societies will help shape the next 100 years! Happy 100th Anniversary, my dear IBM! ("You can make wild ducks tame, but you can never make tame ducks wild again" - Thomas Watson Jr.)

There's a worrying trend in Bollywood these days. Producers have started to believe if they follow numerology and spell their movie names with an extra character or two, they'll happily get to a hit!... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Once again, I am on the road on to another business trip. This time around to Boston, MA, to attend and present at *the* Enterprise 2.0 event of events. Of course, I am referring to the Enterprise 2.0 Event, a.k.a. #e2conf. So over the next few days you will see how this blog, once again, is going to go a bit dormant, as I doubt I would have some spare time to keep writing some articles; you know how it goes for these kinds of live events, face to face social networking will trump all attempts and efforts to go virtual this week, at least, for me, so I think I’d rather focus on attempting plenty of live tweeting while the event takes place, reporting further on the various sessions I will be attending, and then on my way back home, and seeing how I don’t have any other business trip coming up any time soon I will do a proper catch up on the blog about the event posting another series of highlights entries. But, for now, I thought I would go ahead and leave you folks with that other article from the series of the Social Business Forum event that took place in Milan a few days ago, and which I was due one last update. The remaining breakout speaker sessions and one final keynote. Thus let’s go ahead with it. Let’s do it! After the break from the first initial round of keynotes, the breakout sessions got kicked off into three different tracks: Employee Empowerment, Customer Engagement and Open Innovation. Obviously, I couldn’t attend all of them, since I had a couple of customer commitments and press interviews I had to attend to, but from the ones I attended I learned a great deal of new and interesting sites and thought I would go ahead and share those over here. For the remaining sessions you will probably have to wait for the recordings to become available to get a glimpse of how they went. I, too, would be looking forward to those! I got started attending the excellent presentation from Phillip Schaefer, Head for IDEO Munich, on "Driving innovation through collaboration and connecteness", where he talked about the various different challenges that distributed organisations face when trying to collaborate and share their knowledge effectively and how good design thinking could help address some of those various different issues. In fact, he focused on describing, and quite nicely, I must add as well, five different principles for collaborative tools that work in any context, in any environment: Build pointers to people Reward individual participation (Which I guess I was hoping to see some progression from the traditional issues that have always come along with rewards and incentives in a knowledge sharing culture, but didn’t) Demand intuitive interfaces (Which surely confirmed how knowledge workers should never get tired of demanding for better quality products when interacting with social tools, on the contrary) Take the road more travelled Iterate early and often Overall, quite an interesting session and a very nice job well done by Phillip, specially, when he mentioned that one of the key elements from collaborating effectively was to make it fun and I couldn’t have agreed more wholeheartedly with him on that argument. It’s the fun part of work what makes work worth while, not only, because of the huge potential of facilitating better relationships and connections with fellow peers helping increase trust levels and social capital, but also because fun@work should always be the main trait from any social business out there; the alternative, as we have seen over the course of decades is rather ugly and should be avoided at all times. It’s now a good time to realise that not doing that is just basically helping us all waste more than one third of our lives not having fun and that’s something that I am not sure about you folks, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it. At all. Why neglect, when you could embrace it fully and get the most out of it? Here is the embedded Slideshare deck from Phillip, so you can have a look into it and watch through the slides: Designing Collaboration: Building Systems that Really Work - Philipp Schäfer View more presentations from SocialBizForum The next breakout session that I attended was conducted by my good friend Cordelia Krooss, who spent a few minutes talking about one of my favourite customers, BASF, describing their fascinating journey of becoming a social business with "Connect.BASF. The Online Business Network". Indeed, to date, the BASF story continues to remain one of the most inspiring out there, because it details a few things that most social businesses need to realise in order to embrace such social transformation. As a starting point, the fact you no longer need to be in the IT industry to become a fully integrated social business. the BASF folks have done it; in fact, just recently, they celebrated their first anniversary from when connect.BASF was born and still going rather strong. Secondly, they continue to prove how becoming a social business is a task that involves every single part of the organisation. Not just the IT department, or Marketing, Communications or HR. It involves all of them. It involves a new kind of leadership where you inspire changes to take place in order to provoke such social transformation from your entire business by empowering every single business unit of your organisation ensuring they all share that co-responsibility of wanting to make things right, which, in my opinion is as good as it gets and why I keep saying that Social Business is not owned by anyone, but by everyone, in equal parts, sharing the same responsibility of wanting to make a difference and drive that change. Thus, without much further ado, and in case you may not have seen the excellent slideware that Cordelia put together to describe such a wonderful journey for BASF, here is the Slideshare embedded code, once again:   connect.BASF: The Online Business Network - Cordelia Krooss & Dr. CheeChin Liew View more presentations from SocialBizForum After a couple of customer commitments and the lovely lunch that followed, it was time to come back to the next round of breakout sessions. This time around it was my turn to deliver a presentation on "Organisations or Communities -The Socially Integrated Enterprise", which I will take the liberty of talking about it, more in detail, at a later time, once the recording becomes available, so that I can continue adding some additional nuggets that would explain how networks and communities are starting to become the new state of the workplace, i.e. how work gets organised and done, versus the traditional hierarchical structures we all have gotten so used to. Too bad I missed the always insightful, and good friend, Sameer Patel on "The Connected Enterprise", as both our sessions were taking place at the same time. Well, another good reason for me to catch up with the recordings whenever they are ready From there onwards, the next breakout session I attended, at least, half way through before I had to deal with some press interviews duties, was one I was really looking forward to as well, specially, since it was coming from one of the folks from whom I have learned the most, over the course of the years, around the topic of Learning & unLearning (Social Learning, even) and that we, finally, had the chance of meeting up face to face after all of these years following each other on the blogs and tweets. Yes, that inspiring speaker, and good friend was George Siemens who talked about the topic of "Analytics in knowledge and learning". In that presentation he covered how the "crazy abundance" we have been calling Big Data from all along is changing and shaping up the way we learn nowadays, even more when that growth is exponential with the continuous exposure to the Social Web. His perception of sensemaking in such abundance and complexity was brilliant (Check slide #20 for more on that topic!) and surely quite an incentive for me to catch up with the rest of the recording, as that was the time when I had to step out, but certainly the way he described how learning happens nowadays, trying to make sense of it all, is no longer yesterday’s Learning methods. Quite the opposite! And all of that influenced by the huge impact of Social Networking tools, whether internal or external. In fact, my all time favourite tweet from the entire conference came out from his session, as it was beautifully captured by Cordelia over here: "@gsiemens at #sbf11: If you are on facebook, you’re the product that facebook sells: information on you provided by you or your network" Just brilliant! Then it was the turn to tune into one of the most interesting panels I have seen in a long while. This time around with  Bertrand Duperrin, Keith Swenson & Mark Tamis on the topic of "Exceptions are not exceptional. Organizing for Unpredictability", where they engaged with the audience on a fascinating conversation on the topic of Social Business and Adaptive Case Management, which reminded me of this absolutely masterpiece on ACM by the always rather resourceful John Tropea. I would need to come back and revisit this particular topic on ACM and how it relates to Social Business, but I can surely tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed the various connections made around the topic of social business and how much it relates to business processes, unpredictability, embracing of failure, just as much as success, knowing and embracing your limitations, delighting your customers, etc. etc. Lots of meat on this one to digest further. Watch out for the recording whenever it comes out! And, finally, the last session that I attended at the Social Business Forum was that keynote session from Keith Swenson where he talked about "Enabling quantum organizations as a new level of effectiveness", where he introduced a new kind of organisation under the concept of "Quantum Orgs" that I can surely relate to big time! He defines them as orgs dominated by the "Pull" model, vs. the "Push" model from previous decades. Once again, Newton came up (See Slide #7) to help reintroduce the topic of how we are moving from Newtonian Orgs. to Quantum Orgs (Slide #13 displays a beautiful comparison chart that is worth while every single word!). Those Quantum Orgs. are actually defined by limited precision, turbulence (Which, I agree with Keith 100% is a healthy behaviour!), relationship based and unpredictability. And they clearly separate the newtonian orgs. which are mostly labour based, from the quantum orgs, which are mostly knowledge work based. His description of what a knowledge worker is in today’s social computing environment is just wonderfully inspiring and, if anything, a really great guide of what will shape up the next generation of the workplace, if not already: The Knowledge Worker 2.0. And his conclusion slide #38 is a must-see to understand the challenges we are going through to explain that social transformation I mentioned above. But I will let you go ahead and watch through them on this Slideshare embedded code: Enabling Quantum Organizations as a new level of effectiveness - Keith D. Swenson View more presentations from SocialBizForum And that would be it, for me, folks, for now; hope you have enjoyed this series of highlights blog posts that I have put together for the Social Business Forum event that took place in Milan on June 8th and there is still one more entry to come along, which is the one where I will point you all to the links for the recordings of the various presentations, so that you can replay them all at your leisure. Hope you have enjoyed the ride reading through these just as much as I did attending the event. And, for now, get ready to take a short break of a couple of days and come back again, as I get on my way through the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to capture plenty more new insights, key learnings, new relationships, continue to nurture good old ones and a whole bunch of other stuff. The vibe is pretty good so far. The conference will be *even* better  … And I will be more than happy to share further thoughts on it for those folks who may not have been able to make it this time around! Thus stay tuned for more to come along shortly … and, once again, a special Thanks! to the Open-Knowledge folks for their kind invitation to the Social Business Forum event! I’ll see you all next year!

This is a really tiring, exciting and fulfilling time of my professional life. I'm in the thick of ThoughtWorks University. ThoughtWorks University (TWU) is our graduate induction program where we've... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Once again, it’s been a little while since I put together a blog post over here, but this time around for a very good reason. As most of you folks know by now already, I have just returned back from my last business trip, one of the longest this year so far, for sure!, as I got to attend the Enterprise 2.0 conference event (a.k.a. #e2conf) in Boston, MA, the whole of last week. One of the most wonderful experiences I have enjoyed so far in attending a tech conference. And I do realise that I keep saying that very same thing year after year, but this time around I can certainly confirm it 100% it’s been one of the best I can remember and for a good number of reasons! Yes, I am now back to work, back to the social grid, back to carry on with my usual blogging mojo. And that means it’s time to kick off another series of blog posts where I am planning to share some of the major key highlights from the overall event itself, as a way of sharing with you folks a few glimpses of what I found the most interesting this time around. Thus from here onwards, and over the next few days, I’ll be putting together a series of entries, where I will talk about the conference itself, i.e. keynotes, breakout sessions, workshops, networking opportunities, etc. etc. And will try to mix it all with a few other interesting things I have bumped into over the last couple of weeks, so it won’t bore most of you folks. I will also share with you all some links of the phenomenal live blogging that happened throughout the event, specially, coming along from very talented, and good, friends like Mary Abraham, Emanuele Quintarelli and Bill Ives. And at the same time I will be pointing you to some of the great highlights and write-up blog entries that a bunch of other good friends and thought leaders in the 2.0 space have been putting together in the last few days. It’s going to be a busy time, but with plenty of good fun! However, before we go into all of that, I thought I would resume my regular blogging activities sharing with you folks the inspiring video clip of the week mixed with what’s been one of my major highlights from the overall Enterprise 2.0 conference event for yours truly: the offline social networking interactions! Indeed, if there was a single key highlight I would want to stress out from the event itself, is how, once again, the offline networking was absolutely fantastic! Superb!  … To the point where I think it was the very first time at a tech conference, that I can remember, that I spent more time talking offline to folks than being online, both, before, during and after the various speaker sessions I attended. And that’s a new one, to be honest, because time and time again I always had that urge of wanting to check things online, see what people were thinking and commenting on, catch up with blog posts, etc. etc. And it surely was quite an exhausting activity. Well, not this year! That’s right! A couple of days before the event I decided I was going to change things slightly on how I would approach attending the conference. So, except for the live tweeting I did for the various presentations I attended, I was basically offline for most of the time, talking and connecting with people in the real world! And, boy, was that such a wonderful experience?!?! My voice struggled quite a bit trying to keep up with the pace of conversing with some many good old and new friends. I am also ok with the fact that I gained a few extra pounds after all of those wonderful conversations over coffee breaks, lunches, networking gigs, dinners, after dinner drinks, late night drinks, etc. etc. It was totally worth it! Big time! That’s something that I should probably be grateful to the Social Business Forum event, held in Milan, Italy, a few weeks back, because, once again, it showed me how important, and critical, it is to converse, share and learn from those around you, face to face, at such events. It’s amazing how the Social Web can take you away from those offline interactions, just because you may want to be in the know, when what really matters, probably, in most cases, is those very same face to face conversations we do with people who share the same common passion we have for all of this social business stuff. It’s true that I knew I would be capable of catching up with the online Social Web thanks to the absolutely wonderful piece of work from Jim Worth who created, once again, the Enterprise 2.0 Boston Social Web Coverage June 20, 2011, but this time around I thought I would try to be as disconnected from the online world, as I could, specially, before and after the main agenda was covered and dealt with. And, goodness, did I make the right choice?!?! It was brilliant just hanging out with plenty of good friends whom you have kept in touch with through the Social Web over the course of time, as well as meeting a bunch of news ones during the event!, and do real, proper catchups! I wouldn’t change that for anything, to be honest! In fact, if there is something I have learned from that whole offline networking experience from last week is that I need to learn to become less dependent on the Social Web, and, instead, converse more with people in real life. Face to face interactions still do have a place, even in the workplace!, and they are critical for us all to build better, more trustworthy relationships, that we can then continue to nurture and cultivate online till we meet up again! And that whole experience was quite an eye opener to me, to the point where as I was coming back home, playing that catchup I mentioned above, I decided it’s probably a good time to start now break loose from the dependency on the Social Web and continue to enjoy those offline interactions, even while at home! Which is why I am going to make a connection with the inspiring video of the week to show you what I mean with this. Yes, you all know, it’s now summer time! The weather is gorgeous probably in most places where you are, but instead of enjoying it all going outdoors, mixing and mingling with other people, you decide to stick around your computer for that little longer, which, eventually, turns out to be a couple of extra hours, here and there! Well, not anymore! At least, for me! And here is the main reason why: You may be wondering why I am sharing such a lovely musical video clip titled Something Good Can Work from Two Door Cinema Club, right? Yes, I know! It’s not a summer song, by far, but, hang on for a minute, if you listen to it carefully and let yourself go for a bit, it does sound like perfect for the summer. Even more when you watch the video clip and you come up with some of those wonderful imageries, which is why I wanted to share this video clip this week, because the footage from the entire video, except perhaps the first few seconds, has been done in the island where I live: Gran Canaria! In fact, a couple of the places shown throughout the video clip are just like 5 minute drive from where I live myself, which, making a connection with the rest of this blog post, you would understand what I mean with spending a lot less time online than what I am doing now to enjoy those outdoors. Who wouldn’t, right? Well, they say that striking a good balance between work and life is perhaps one of the biggest challenges knowledge workers, specially, remote ones!, face in today’s working environment; there is no easy solution, for sure. In my own case, I have learned to switch gears and move away from that balance and, instead, strike for that work, life full integration. And I’m surely finding it somewhat ironic that I had to travel over 5.000 KMs away, to attend #e2conf, to realise what I really have been missing over here in the last few months with all of that frenzy happening at work and elsewhere on the Social Web… So a big highlight for me, from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, is a big Thank You!, to everyone I conversed with, learned from, shared common experiences with, etc. etc. yes, you know who you all are!! (Too many to mention all of you over here in a single paragraph! And to those other folks I never managed to catch up with, unfortunately!! Will need to fix that next time around!), who showed me how important and incredibly paramount it’s to nurture, cultivate and enjoy to the highest level possible, face to face conversations and interactions with those close to you. Even if that means on the way back (I enjoyed a delightful weekend in Madrid, in between, as well!), or even closer: at home!

Something beautiful happened at ThoughtWorks University today. For the first time we tried an Open Space format to facilitate informal learning in the group - which incidentally went quite well, I... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

It's been a really busy time which has left me with no time whatsoever for webinars, PKM, tweeting and everything that makes life on the internet really interesting. Anyways, I've spoken to my team... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Hopefully I'll have better luck with this webinar than I had with the last one. Without too much stage setting, let me get straight to the topic. Steve Ash, Director of LINE Communications will speak... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

During the course of yesterday, my good friend, the always insightful Ana Silva was wondering, over in Twitter, and in her own blog, too!, under the heading "The Cluetrain Manifesto on art, work and life", about potential new books to read during the summer vacation. A bunch of us dropped by and shared some suggestions that would surely make for quite an interesting and diverse reading. I mentioned a couple of them, but one that I really enjoyed reading for how thought-provoking, refreshing and liberating it was, to the point where despite the fact I finished it up a couple of months back, it’s still lingering there in my mind, was Steve Denning‘s "The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management". It’s just one of those books that’s very easy to read, with some great storytelling! (Of course, Steve is very good at it!), and lots of new, fresh thinking of the new role that leadership will need to embrace, if it would want to survive in the 21st century, but, most importantly, a new role management will need to embark on and live fully, if they would want their own businesses survive in the current knowledge economy for decades to come! Now, I will be putting together a much more in-depth review of the book itself and what I actually learned from it, while reading it, in an upcoming blog post, but I just wanted to share with you folks over here a video clip that tells a very powerful story and that, while going through it, reminded me of Steve’s book in setting up the stage of that new radical management and what that new generation of radical leaders would be like. The video, of course, once again, comes from the inspiring KarmaTube Web site; it lasts for just a few minutes, and it tells the story of Haruka Nishimatsu, CEO of Japan Airlines, describing how he "takes the bus to work, eats at the company cafeteria and buys his suits at discount stories". Not the typical CEO, you may be wondering, right? Indeed, by far! But it gets much much better. You would have to watch the video clip itself to find out more about another example, in my opinion, of what radical management is all about and why it’s this new kind of leadership the one we need to get us out of the financial crisis we have been living through the last few years. Yes, it’s that good! My favourite quote from the entire interview probably sets the stage of what would differentiate managers, executives and leaders of the 20th century with those of the 21st century: "If management is distant, up in the cloud, people just wait for orders. I want my people to think for themselves" Priceless, don’t you think? I am not sure what you folks would think, but I feel the world needs, and pretty badly, plenty more CEOs like Nishimatsu-san.

A few weeks back you may have read my recap of Jane Hart's webinar on choosing the right social learning platform. Jane outlined a variety of parameters that you should use to select your social... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Like I have mentioned yesterday, it’s been a few days already since I jumped the shark and joined the bunch of early adopters who have been hammering down, and taking for a spin, the latest iteration of Google to get social with Google Plus, right after Google Wave and Google Buzz. And I guess the experience has been somewhat rather positive so far, because a few days later, I’m still there, having a blast. So since a bunch of folks have asked me to share my thoughts about the overall user experience I thought I would put together this particular blog entry where I could describe a little bit what it is like: well, to me, it’s like being all over 2007, once again! But let’s get started with things properly. As most of you folks already know, my first exposure to social software was inside IBM, back in 2001, with a Profile Social Aggregator called Fringe; then I started experimenting with the instant messaging social capabilities of IBM Community Tools (a.k.a. ICT) around the same time; in 2003 I got things started with my first internal corporate blog, followed in 2005 with my first social bookmarking site called Dogear. From there onwards, and in 2006, Cattail (an internal Personal File Sharing space) came along, just as I was getting started playing with micro-blogging / sharing tools like BlueTwit, as well as Beehive (Now SocialBlue) and a whole bunch of other pilot social networking tools made available to us, fellow IBMers, through the absolutely wonderful Technology Adoption Program, a.k.a. TAP. Quite an exciting journey, if you would ask me, from the perspective of having that golden opportunity of living on the cutting edge of technology, although sometimes it’s been more along the lines of bleeding edge. Either way, the result was phenomenal since it gave a few thousands of us a unique opportunity where we could explore the potential of social networking for the enterprise, and still going strong!, and all along it’s been quite exciting being ahead of the curve from other waves of adopters or the mainstream itself. Even for us. However, you can imagine how, as time went by, most of us ended up with a whole bunch of various different profiles in a good number of internal social networking sites resulting in spreading thinner than ever and eventually jumping into what some other folks have been calling social fatigue. Pretty natural, most folks seem to claim, and I would probably have to agree with them to a certain extent, since I, too, noticed such fatigue over the course of the years. Till 2007. In that year, IBM decided to productise all of those wonderful social interactions and create, as a result of it, a single product: IBM Connections, formerly known as Lotus Connections. So in the end employee profiles, blogs, social bookmarks, files, activities, wikis and communities (And now Forums) became all integrated into a single point of entry: Connections itself. No longer would there be a need to keep up with multiple social networking environments, with multiple networks, with multiple levels of interactions. It was all coming along, rather nicely, into a single, unified experience. And we were all rather grateful! Yes, sir! All of a sudden, all of that social fatigue vanished thin air and a new re-energised effort to consolidate both connections / networks and content was born! All of a sudden there was a single space where fellow colleagues could all interact, be social, get the job done doing their work, but still have plenty of good fun along the way, without having that sense of walking the talk thinner than ever. Yes, sir, we *are* all grateful! Well, hello Google Plus! Welcome to my 2007 integrated user experience! Glad you could finally make it and very happy to see how you will help me fight that social fatigue I was starting to experiment with the Social Web and integrate all of my core networks into a single one, and all of that with a plus! Now, I am sure that plenty of folks out there would not feel very comfortable with me advocating for a ONE, single social networking tool that could eventually rule over all of the others. But the thing is that, if things continue like that, Google Plus will eventually rule them all! And here’s why. I am not going to bother folks sharing a good number of the rather interesting and insightful blog posts that other early adopters have been sharing so far in their own blogs. However, what I would like to do is to share with you folks why, if Google Plus continues to evolve nicely, like it is at the moment, even though we are only at iteration #1, I may well kiss good-bye to a good number of the social networking tools from the Social Web that I have been using over the course of the years. Starting with the no-brainers, both Facebook and LinkedIn. Why? Well, because G+ seems to have done their homework properly and understood how much more benefit they would be getting from a rather understanding and compromising Terms of Service, something that both FB and LI still have got to come to terms with it. Then followed by Flickr. If you have been using the Photos option within G+ you will surely agree with me that the user experience is far superior to Flickr’s upload of pictures, which is eventually what we would all want to do, right? The fact that you can import bulk uploads really easy makes it a breeze to move away from other photo-sharing social networking tools, like I recently did for Instagram with Instaport, and probably Flickr soon, too! Oh, I am now waiting for the iOS Apps to become available and that’s where my mobile photo-sharing will be going, eventually… The next one coming down nicely would be Delicious… Why would I want to go and share my bookmarks and whatever other links in an external social bookmarking site when my core social networks, i.e. my social graph, the one I care about the most, are all hanging out in Plus. Why force them to go and do a couple of extra clicks to get access to interesting and relevant content when you can do that right there! Mind you, I haven’t been doing any external social bookmarking for the last few months, after the recent debacles and hiccups with services like Magnolia / Gnolia or Delicious itself, respectively. But I can see myself using Plus to share my favourite links with my social networks, in context, i.e. in Circles, which means we all get to hang out at the same space! Moving along, the next one on the line of threat would be our beloved Skype. I am not sure whether folks have been experimenting with Hangouts (See this rather quick YouTube video clip on it) in G+ already or not, but if you have, you know exactly what I mean. They totally rock and I could surely see myself using them more and more as my core networks continue to make the migration over. And, finally, the single one I feel would be the most threatened of them all: Twitter. And I know that this is probably going to hurt quite a few folks, when I say such thing, but I am already seeing it myself judging from how drastically my time in Twitter has gone down and how that time has been re-invested in Google Plus. I am a big fan of Twitter, as most folks know already. It’s been my single, most important social networking tool of them all! I live there. Or, at least, I used to. But the thing is that Twitter has been enjoying a good number of annoyances over the course of time that have provoked that love / hate relationship to evolve into one where I can’t care less anymore: Search: Looking back not even a week’s worth of tweets, both your own or others’, is not good enough, I am afraid! Specially, when you are doing live tweeting at conference events and a week later it’s all GONE! As if it never happened! Timeline: It used to drive me crazy I can only go back up to 6 hours of tweets; I know and understand the Social Flow and everything, but let me decide what I want and don’t want to read, please; I am already old enough to make such decisions. Replies & Mentions: They have never worked the way they should, have they? And that’s been like that for years, creating and generating unnecessary hassle for what I do believe is one of Twitter’s core capabilities… reaching out to people! Spambots: They may be doing something about it, but not good enough, in my opinion, when too much of it is out of our own control! Just like with email! Silly Twitter API limits: One of the reasons why I keep following very very few people, as opposed to the ones I know I should / could follow. Again, let me decide, without limits, the number of folks I would want to follow or not. Don’t make that decision for me, please. Twitter API new rules: That have crashed most of my favourite Twitter clients user experiences and no questions asked! Latest example, the recent changes where I cannot longer see DMs in my favourite Twitter client for Mac: Nambu. I do know it would happen eventually, but let’s face it, Twitter is what it is today because of its entire ecosystem, not because of the tool itself; if you ignore it, or kill it, be ready to suffer the consequences… Lack of support, All of the issues I mentioned above have been reported to Twitter by yours truly a few times, and I am still waiting for their first response on any of them :-// Hold a simple (Not even complex!) conversation: In Twitter? Yeah, right, good luck with that one! You will need it! Its lack of integration with other services: That I know will be addressed to a certain extent with the upcoming iOS 5 release, but then again probably a bit too late already, if we would have to wait for over 4 years to such integration into an entire social ecosystem.  If you would look into each and everyone of those issues you could say that Twitter would be in trouble. But the thing is that Twitter *IS* already in trouble, because Google Plus addresses, AND fixes!, each and everyone of those annoyances and it does it beautifully, if I may add, even something so relatively simple like sharing clean URLs that you could then curate and re-share across. Now, I am not sure what you folks would think about, but I am, for once, getting really excited about the huge potential that Google Plus has got to be a smash hit in the Social Web. Its unique opportunity to be pervasive enough to be part of Google’s entire ecosystem makes it tremendously powerful; its mobile capabilities (The Android App is brilliant!) will be par to none, as soon as the iOS App hits the Apple Store (Hopefully, this week!) and the other half of the mobile world gets down to business with it. Its simple, yet wonderfully insightful approach towards Circles (Think of Twitter Lists with a purpose) will help folks tame the info overload beast that most other social networking tools tend to have as they grow bigger. And the list goes on and on and on… Indeed, you can colour me excited. I haven’t felt this excitement about the Social Web for a long while, probably as far back as when Twitter went mainstream, but I must confess that after having played with Google Plus for a good few days, I am still enjoying the experience, just as much as the first day, despite the learning curve, despite having to re-build my networks, despite the fact that there are mostly geeky early adopters in there, while we wait for the rest of the masses, etc. etc. It hasn’t faded away and probably it won’t. At least, for me, because right now I am just waiting for Google Plus to open up the doors and give us an opportunity to invite others, so that we can get that second and third wave of early adopters and from there onwards go mainstream. Now, the final key question I am sure you folks would be wondering about as I get to wrap up this blog post. Will I ever leave all of those other social networking tools and move just to Google Plus? My personal gut feeling is that, just like I did with IBM Connections back in 2007, if my core networks (Specially the ones from Twitter) decide to move I’ll be making the move myself. So far, I am just two thirds of that move to be complete and then you could say that Google Plus would be, for me, at least, the one that would rule them all. Just like Connections does for my Intranet social interactions. And somehow that feels rather liberating… For a change.

Sir Ken Robinson's most recent TED talk is a great validation of our approach at ThoughtWorks University. While Sir Ken speaks about education and I'm more a corporate educator and for long I've felt strongly against one-size-fits-all, factory style, conformant education. I've always been one for a pull-based approach as you may have noticed from my past blogposts some of which are below:Put your learners on a diet - consider a pull-based approachEmpowering learners in an Induction Program5 Simple Ideas to give an Edge to your Induction ExperienceLearning to Learn in the modern EnterpriseSir Robinson's talk has some great quotes that I want to share with you:"Education, in a way, dislocates very many people from their natural talents. And human resources are like natural resources; they're often buried deep.""The great problem for reform or transformation is the tyranny of common sense, things that people think, 'Well, it can't be done any other way because that's the way it's done.'""You know, to me, human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.""The other big issue is conformity. We have built our education systems on the model of fast food. This is something Jamie Oliver talked about the other day. You know there are two models of quality assurance in catering. One is fast food, where everything is standardized. The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants, where everything is not standardized, they're customized to local circumstances. And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education. And it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.""We have to go from what is essentially an industrial model of education, a manufacturing model, which is based on linearity and conformity and batching people. We have to move to a model that is based more on principles of agriculture. We have to recognize that human flourishing is not a mechanical process, it's an organic process. And you cannot predict the outcome of human development; all you can do, like a farmer, is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish.""It's about customizing to your circumstances, and personalizing education to the people you're actually teaching.""It's not about scaling a new solution; it's about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions, but with external support based on a personalized curriculum.""Now, in this room, there are people who represent extraordinary resources in business, in multimedia, in the internet. These technologies, combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers, provide an opportunity to revolutionize education."Great speaking and great inspiration for those like me who believe in individualisation and diversity. We need to give our learners credit for who they are and move away from one-size-fits-all training. Instead, let's find an agricultural model that works for the enterprise. More about this when I post about ThoughtWorks University next month. Thanks Sir Ken - this is great ammunition to support my thoughts!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

It looks like yesterday’s blog post on my first reactions about Google Plus have sparked (Pun intended) a bunch of interesting feedback, all over the place, from plenty of folks out there, ranging from perhaps a bit too much excitement, or just plenty of hype or simply going far too far stating that G+ could eventually become *the* social networking tool that would rule them all. Fascinating insights, for sure! Thanks much, everyone, for sharing them along! While I am trying to keep up with all of them sharing across some additional feedback I thought I would go ahead though and put together this blog post sharing one additional thought that’s been in my mind ever since I started using Plus a few days back. Is Google Plus a Vitamin or an Aspirin? My good friend, and fellow colleague, Louis Richardson, is a tremendously engaging public speaker with an amazing talent in delivering key, powerful messages in various different topics; one of them being Social Business. So a couple of months back he put together this brilliant presentation on the topic of Ideas @ Work that he has blogged about over at The Collaboration Soapbox and that I can strongly recommend you watch through, if you can spare 24 minutes of pure gold. It’ll be worth both the time and the effort spent in it, for sure! One of those ideas that Louis mentions on that presentation that I actually find quite thought-provoking is how most organisations would need to look at social software within a business context. Living social for the sake of social alone is not going to take you very far. Quite the opposite. You probably wouldn’t even go beyond the One Year Challenge. However, looking into how social can help you become better at what you already do, at how you can improve your overall business performance, your employees’ productivity, engagement and morale, as well as your talent management strategy, your business revenues, your customers’ satisfaction and whatever other indicators would certainly put you on the right track towards embracing social business fully. But he then comes to ask the key question about social business and social software tools: Are you looking for a vitamin or an aspirin? Basically, are you trying to find a quick fix for that long lasting headache you have been suffering from for a while, or are you looking for that vitamin that would make your business even stronger? Now, this may well seem a rather trivial question, but in reality, it isn’t. It’s the one that defines what your own social business strategy would be about: trying to address a business problem with a temporary patch, hoping it will go away or rather prepare yourself to overcome those business problems before they become a real issue in the first place. It’s rather interesting, to say the least, but I am seeing that very same analogy with my use of Google Plus and the overall Social Web. Initially, after the first few days of use I thought G+ was the perfect aspirin for me to get rid of the good number of headaches I have been having with various other social networking tools. Now, don’t take me wrong. I am not saying that social software is problematic. Not at all. What I am just saying is that most of our social networking tools available out there are lacking in one way or another to provide that unique social experience we all know it’s possible to achieve at some point. In yesterday’s blog entry I hinted what some of those problems were and I stated some of the main reasons as to why I was excited to see G+ being the aspirin that addressed and fixed all of those different issues. However, while I keep making extensive use of it, I do realise, more and more, that Google Plus is no longer the aspirin of The Social Web (Yes, it’s addressed quite nicely most of my pet peeves with a good bunch of social networking tools!), but rather that strong vitamin you take to improve that overall user experience with social tools. Yes, yesterday I mentioned how we are just talking about iteration #1 of G+, but most of us are already seeing the huge potential. Let’s face it, if you think of it as an vitamin that you take day in day out, imagine what it would do to your connections and your networks in say, 4 or 5 or 6 years, like some of the others have done so far. Somehow G+ is starting to feel more like that vitamin the doctor recommends you take to remain strong at working through your daily routines and improve your overall health status. And I must confess that after a few days playing with it, I see plenty of healthy interactions taking place. As a starting point, I’m seeing much more profound, engaging and lasting conversations with my core networks that I never thought I would be able to develop in other social tools, unless meeting face to face. Secondly, I’m finally seeing the huge benefit of tapping into the weak ties in a meaningful manner through various Circles, without having to struggle to make sense into it, like with some of the others. And, finally, something that is starting to make me feel even more excited about it all. And that’s the lack of sense of guilt for being unable to get the most out of my social interactions when I know I could, but that due to technical implementations, hiccups, bugs, issues, and whatever else I was always falling short behind. Google Plus has become, to me, at least, both that aspirin that fixed the temporary headaches I have been suffering from using other social networking tools and that vitamin that will surely help me continue to cultivate and nurture better relationships with those folks I care about by having more meaningful and engaging conversations without having that feeling of being on the losing end all the time. In this case, I think things have shifted around nicely and we are about to embark on the winning end of The Social Web. Now, I do realise as well that we are at the beginning stages and we would all have to wait and see how things would pave out eventually. It’s Google after all, the one behind it, so we may need to wait for a few months to see how things would turn out, but the start, you would have to agree with me, is rather promising. Something we couldn’t say from several of G+’s counterparts when they first started up themselves. I’ll be keeping my fingers crossed that things won’t mess up and that it will continue to grow healthily for us all, proving there is a way to live social out there on the Web without us, social networkers, feeling the pain, but rather the opposite: enjoying the experience! (Oh, by the way, in a follow-up blog entry to this one, the third and perhaps final one of the series, I will be sharing one other additional thought on what, to me, is the killer feature from Google Plus that many folks haven’t talked about just yet… something unique that no-other social networking tool out there is providing at the moment and that I think would highlight the future of social networking, both within the enterprise and further beyond… Stay tuned!)

"It's easy to sound smart, when you parrot the wise" - Someone I can't remember.I have absolutely no remorse in saying that most of my ideas are not original. In fact I don't even believe in originality. To me originality is the fine art of hiding the source, which unfortunately I'm crap at - so I like to give credit to the sources I steal from. After all, isn't synthesis one way of way of expressing your creativity? I'm stealing another idea today, but before I tell you what that idea is let me tell you what I'm trying to do. Until sometime in 2008, my blog was just a catch all for everything that made it's way into my stream of consciousness. Since then, I've made a concerted effort to focus this blog on issues related to modern learning and development. We're halfway through 2010 now and before I write anymore, I wanted to provide my readers a map to this blog. This is also my way to reiterate the how I think about L&D and where I as a practitioner see things going.So what's the idea I'm stealing? I loved Tom Kuhlmann's format where he provided answers to frequently asked questions about rapid elearning. I have no pretensions to being an expert like Tom, but I do get into a lot of conversations in the community and I often get asked questions too. So I'd love to use a similar format to explain how I think and to give you a map for the content on this blog. Given how much of a common man I am in the learning industry, this is as close I'll get to an interview! Incidentally, I have over a 100 links that I'm sharing through this and the next blogpost - so keep track of them! In fact for your browsing ease, I've also catalogued them on my delicious bookmarks. Allright, these are going to be fairly long blogposts so I won't waste any of your time - let's get going.I confess to being an L&D industry common man. I work at ThoughtWorks, a company that defies traditional theories of management, as director of workplace learning. Of the many things I do, I run one of the best graduate induction programs in the IT industry - ThoughtWorks University. As part of my technology education background, I have a strong bias for free and open-source software, though I'm also a hard-core Apple fanboy. You'll often see me as a participant on various webinars. I tweet using the handle sumeet_moghe and here's my Linkedin profile.The most important thing you need to know about me is that I hate being a one trick pony. In fact, I prefer being a learning generalist, more appropriately a versatilist. Having said that, you can't take me too seriously because I'm neither a researcher nor an academic. I can't vouch for the statistical accuracy of what I write or profess. All I can say is that what I write is true for me and my experience.To be very frank, there's only so much I can do as an individual. I think there's heaps of interesting stuff happening all across the industry and I'm particularly interested to see how people are using their skills to solve real business problems. So that's the reason I like attending webinars. Now the reporting's a completely different story. You must remember that I'm not the only live blogger out there. In fact, I've taken inspiration for this from Cammy Bean, who's just fantastic when live-blogging events. She's just so good that it's impossible to match up the number of events she reports and the quality she brings to her reporting. I'm just following her lead trying to share what I learn in each of these events with the rest of the world.There's a lot of interesting stuff you'll see on my webinar reports and conference reports. There's over 30 different events where I've learnt interesting stuff ranging from Ruth Clark's approach to scenario based learning, to Jane Hart's approach to selecting a social learning platform. And then there are brilliant experience reports by folks like Steve Ash and Lars Hyland, so I think that there's a lot going on with the webinar circuit that deserves reporting.I don't think I do a very good job of keeping up. I have a 12 hour day at work on the best days and there's very little time I have otherwise to stay abreast with everything in the industry. That said, I think over time I've learned how to learn and all the informal networks I'm part of, are helping me grow as a professional. In addition, some thought around how to structure my personal knowledge management framework has helped, so when I do dip my toe into the river of information, I end up making the dip fruitful!First things first, I like to believe that there's a shift happening in the way we collaborate on teams. This is not to say that things have turned on their head, but I definitely think that there's a change in the control structure and the dogma around the best ways to collaborate. I still love face to face communication (who doesn't), but I like to believe that if you can't collaborate without being colocated, you're perhaps not agile enough. There are so many great tools that can help your team collaboration soar, that you need to keep your eyes open for things that are changing in the technology space.Well my views on presentation skills have evolved over time. To me, the McKinsey Mind quote, "Presentation is the ‘Killer Skill’ we take into the real world. It’s almost an unfair advantage."; is an indication of how important this craft is. To contrast that with the amount of slideumentation we see in the corporate world, is depressing to say the least! This said, I don't think it's rocket science to do good presentations. If you plan effectively, choose the right tool for your presentation, use simple techniques to create meaningful visuals, and avoid some of the common mistakes, you should be well and truly on your way to matching Steve Jobs!Yes and no! I started off my career as a training facilitator and that's perhaps my strongest skill even today. I look at training as a distinct discipline from presentations, so while media skills are crucial to training, they aren't all training's about. As a trainer, the biggest virtue you can have is patience - you need to believe that your learners can do it! You need to know how the brain remembers, the effective use of language patterns in the class, ways to encourage participation and to handle QnA. There are various subtelties in being a trainer. For example, competition lends momentum to training, but how do you ensure that people learn to collaborate amongst all the fun? Another example I love to talk about is around the issue of entertainment in the classroom - how much is enough? As a trainer I'm always looking to improve my skills in leading socratic discussion, eliciting well formed outcomes, reviewing concepts effectively -- and student feedback always helps. After all, it's a performance of sorts and we need to ensure that it's of the highest quality.Again, most of this is experiential and I can't vouch for the academic authenticity of my opinions. I'm big on rapid design of any kind. Back in the day, I was thinking about rapid instructional design with Powerpoint and I've come down that road thinking how we can apply Agile principles to elearning design as well. There's however an aspect of this which I'm extremely passionate about - the role of an instructional designer. I strongly believe that it's not about the tools - creativity is key. The typical elearning projects are late, poorly designed and just don't solve performance problems. We need a breed of passionate instructional designers, who have more skills than just writing. When we start leveraging our SMEs effectively instead of looking at them as barriers to our instructional process, we're likely to produce high quality outputs.Why just elearning? If we're creative enough we can not just apply them to transactions such as simulation design, but also solve complex problems like induction. But coming to the topic of elearning - I like to apply the rapid paradigm. On this blog I've demonstrated that it is possible to produce elearning on a shoestring. It's important to remember that you don't need to do everything within elearning - you need to find a way to integrate all of the rich media from the web. If you're big on rapid elearning just in the same way that I am, you should take a look at my 6 tips for rapid elearning success. In addition, pay attention to meaningful interactivity, your navigation scheme and your information architecture and you'll find that it isn't rocket science to create high quality, yet low cost elearning. This brings me to the end of this blogpost - in my next post, I'll cover off other stuff that I usually write about. Do let me know if you like this map to my blog. I'll look forward to your commentary.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Continuing further with that series of blog posts on the topic of Google Plus, I thought I would ahead today and share a third one, which I thought was going to be, originally, the last one for now, but then again things have come up and there will be another one that I will be sharing next, where I will talk a little bit about the topic of Circles and share a couple of thoughts on how I am managing them and their flows.  But for now I will spend the next few minutes talking about what I would think is the killer feature from Google Plus, at least, one of them, that you hardly ever see on any other social networking tool out there on the Social Web and which I think is probably going to be one of the main key success factors from G+: bridging together too irreconcilable worlds. Ray Wang already hinted it earlier on today on a recent tweet that I thought captured it, half way through, very nicely: "MyPOV: The thing that #googleplus #google+ has right is the Unified Communications. The communities will come as a result. #socbiz #e20" and then developed further on this really insightful Google Plus discussion with a bunch of other folks. The overall sentiment is that G+ may not be ready just yet for a full implementation of unified communications and I would probably agree with that statement. But what I think G+ provides us with is a new breaking ground that no other social networking tool, at least, till now, has dared to bridge just yet: combining both online (As in real-time!) and offline interactions. Yes, that’s right. If you take a look into some of the most popular social networking tools within the Social Web, hardly any of them provide full support for real-time, online interactions; with today’s Facebook announcement we may have the first exception. However, for the rest everything happens offline or in semi-real time, which in most cases, for a certain number of interactions and use cases, is not enough any longer. In a fast pacing world where most of the action happens in real time it’s a pity to see how we keep missing this bridge of combining the best of both worlds. But here comes Google Plus, packing together, quite nicely, a whole bunch of features that help us combine both of those worlds and get the most out of them. On the one hand, we have got Google Talk, nicely integrated into Google Plus, which means that you can go ahead and fire up an Instant Messaging chat with your networks with just a single click. Then for those folks who heart Gmail, we are starting to see how G+ is getting nicely integrated in there as well with the Notifications pop-up box and all. But perhaps the killer feature from those online, real-time interactions is going to be, of course, you have all guessed right, G+’ Hangouts. Indeed, plenty of folks keep saying that video, and videoconferencing, is going to be huge, if not already, as perhaps the next frontier for effective online collaboration amongst small groups, where instead of just typing away, you would just do a single click here and there and off you go with your webcam talking away with other folks. Well, Google Plus would allow you to do just that, with a single click, and with up to 10 people of your social networks and that is something that no other social networking tool has even attempted to do. But it gets better… It gets better, because, even though I haven’t tried it out just yet myself, I have been hearing and reading from a whole bunch of other folks from my own networks, who have tried it out already and they have loved the experience, for how smooth it is and what high quality the rendering of the video is so far, which I think is rather interesting, because, in my opinion, it is going to help improve the way we collaborate online. How? By enabling audio (voice) and video right into your social streams. And here is the kick of it all. I am myself a rather fast typist, learned over the years and all, like probably most of you folks out there as well, but still I talk much faster than I can write and that along the combination of body language would make for a perfect collaborative environment where I need to get the job done with a small group of people in a short timeframe and somehow I still think that seeing is believing. After all, we are all visual animals. However, what I really like about this bridging of these two irreconcilable worlds from Google Plus is that for those hangouts you can set them up yourself on purpose, inviting others to join, which is really good on its own already, but you can also join random hangouts of people who are in your network(s), who you may know really well, or not that well, but still having them at your reach for a video conversation with just one single click would enable something that I have always found very empowering and engaging from any social networking tool: facilitated serendipitous knowledge discoveries resulting in a constant and rampant social learning experience! Can you imagine? You are just going through your G+ Streams and all of a sudden you see a hangout from a couple of folks from your networks who just got it started and since you have got a few spare minutes you decide to join in and BANG! the conversation kicks off and it blows you away! Remember that golden combination of both strong and weak ties? Well, imagine combining both of them in a single hangout, using video, to converse, connect, share your knowledge, collaborate both with a purpose or perhaps just for the sake of it. Who knows. The key thing is that feature *is* already available, right as we speak! Which means that if you are lucky enough to have a G+ account you would be able to test it out right away. If not, you may need to wait till July 31st, when Google will go mainstream with it for everyone and open Google Plus. Now, while you muse about it for a little while longer, imagine what that would mean when you think about going mobile and what this would represent… Yes, I know, truly mind-blowing! The richness of interactions, wherever you are, no matter what, taken into a whole new level! The fine line between offline and online, real-time interactions will be a thing of the past! If not already! You may have embarked yourself in a rather fascinating and perhaps a bit too complex conversation in one of the threads and in order to finish off, before you all go crazy, you click on Start a hangout, invite those folks and finish off the conversation, right there! Priceless, specially if you are stuck on a particular issue that you need to develop further more than just a few words. I am not sure what you would think, but the potential is just huge and it IS already here! Now, finally, if you combine that set of features to incorporate video and audio into your streams, but also available elsewhere from where Google may be planning to integrate G+ with I think we have got a winner and if I were Skype, amongst several others, I would probably start worrying about it a little bit, because somehow I, too, can see myself, with a whole bunch of other people, shifting gears and moving to Hangouts, vs. Skype, more than anything else because the entry point is just low enough for me to not have to worry, that is, click on a button, start the conversation! And all of that without having to even know your Skype ID. Like I have said in the last couple of blog posts, the more I continue to play, experiment, learn, and enjoy Google Plus, the more I am convinced it’s going to be huge. It just probably needs some time from us all to let it mature and grow healthily, to perhaps give it some time off adding further pressure on it and let it keep innovating adding new features and enhancements on what I think is one of the main premises for social networking tools: reach out to those who you care about, stay connected, converse with both audio / video AND text, share, learn, cultivate and nurture your social networks as a result of it in an efficient and effective manner. The one that matters to you and your network(s). A win-win situation, in my opinion, if you would ask me, and, like I said, if you look into the potential growth from an integration point of view, along with the world of mobile that Google seems to be so good at, I do think we have got a new kid in town that very soon is going to grow into a rather smart adult in the social networking space integrating for us all a bunch of various different interactions that so far were just too scattered around. And that would make things just so easy for us all, don’t you think? Click, click, done!