Forget social learning, collaboration and what not - here's what Google Documents is great for. Ordering ice cream for the team!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

At the beginning of the series of blog posts on Google Plus that I started earlier on this week I mentioned how I would be putting together about four different articles about my first impressions on playing around quite a bit with G+, something that those folks who have been following this blog for a long while now would know it’s not something that I do rather often, so you can imagine how it is starting to grow on me more and more by the day. You could say I am having a blast with it, to the point where most of my other external social networking activities have gone a bit dormant in the last few days! I do realise though how I still need to post that fourth article and all, but I thought I would go ahead talk about something else today: the value I am getting from Google Plus already on my first week of usage. Because I guess that’s what we all care about  at this point in time, right? What (business) value do we want to get from G+? We all remember that social for the sake of social is not going to take us anywhere. So how am I benefiting from making use of it at the moment? Well, let me summarise it with a single sentence: facilitated serendipity on steroids! Yes, that’s right! Earlier on today I had the great pleasure of experimenting some more and play with some of the various different features from G+. If a couple of days ago I mentioned how important and critical the combination of both real-time and offline interactions would be like (See "Google Plus - Bridging Together Too Irreconcilable Worlds") today I had the mind-blowing experience of trying out Hangouts with my boss, another one with a fellow IBMer, and another one with Paul Jones, who is going through a truly fascinating experiment I am hoping to talk about very soon, as it relates, quite a bit, with my own mantra of living "A World Without Email". But more on that later on … Anyway, like I was saying, the experience of the Hangouts was just utterly surprising and very re-energising. Fantastic, to say the least!! Having an opportunity to do a simple video conference with the highest quality on both video and audio fronts is just priceless, even more when that videoconference can host up to 10 people concurrently without a glitch! Well, I know now that with that blog post I mentioned above I fell short, very short, on what I think is going to be the killer feature from Google Plus at this point. And I keep hearing lots of great things as well about Huddle, the one other feature I still need to play with! So this whole Hangouts experience surely has got a very clearly defined business value, at least, for me: connect, reach out, share your knowledge and collaborate with those folks who you share a common affinity with! Your social networks. But it gets better, because earlier on today, while most of us are still trying to get the hang out of Google Plus, so plenty of the conversations are still around how do we do what in G+ without going crazy, we are starting to see plenty of golden gems come afloat amongst those conversations that are starting to make it worth while hanging around for a little while longer. And I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks one of them I bumped into myself earlier on today, that I think you would also enjoy it yourselves. It’s a short video clip, very witty, sharp, straight to the point, hilariously funny, very engaging and fun to watch, put together by my good friend Kevin Jones, which makes for some perfect viewing before the weekend kicks off: The video clip lasts for a little bit less than three minutes and in a very refreshing and truly entertaining manner Kevin reminds us all why it’s worth while paying attention to Social Technologies, experiment with them, find out our sweet spot and use cases and figure out whether they would be providing us with an additional value add that we can incorporate into our overall productivity, effectiveness and business performance, or not, and his point on the importance to overcome fear and embrace change is just brilliant! In a way, the whole spirit permeating through the video clip is just proving the point of why a whole bunch of us are exploring Google Plus at the moment, to see whether it’d be another social networking tool we would be adding into the mix, or whether it would replace a few others, or, just simply, whether it would stick around. Keeping that open mentality towards it certainly is one of the strongest points from this video and one of the reasons why, for yours truly, Google Plus is here to stay. At least, for me. Even thoughit will redefine the whole strategy of how I make use of social tools out there on the Social Web. Next I will be sharing that final blog post on the concept of Circles and how I am using them, but first I would encourage you all to have a look into Kevin’s video clip and if you still want to have a play with Google Plus, leave a comment over here, including in the comment form your email address, and I will share along an invite. I have been sending a bunch of them already today… A few more wouldn’t hurt, I am sure! Come and join us! The waters are lovely! Let’s keep plussing and trying out these social technologies!

I started writing my previous blogpost under the impression that I was going to be able to finish in one go! As it turns out, I have said too many things on this blog, so providing a map to all those things in one little blogpost is close to impossible. So I'm carrying forward the work from the previous post. If you aren't familiar with the format I'm using - just read the previous post and in the mean time I'll cut to the chase.I'm glad you use the word 'context'.  A lot of the social learning patter these days seems to focus just around the cool tools we see all around us. While the tools are crucial to the success of social learning, it's important that we consider other factors too. OTOH when selecting a platform, we need take into account when the tools actually do matter. Speaking of tools - I recently wrote a blog post about 6 social learning platforms that you can enable on demand. The one thing I'll mention though - please don't fall into the trap of creating walled gardens. Consider the little things that make a huge difference; for example, metadata.Given my background as a training consultant, I know for a fact that a vast majority of people think of a training magic wand that'll make their performance problems disappear. As consultants however we need to be pragmatic and determine if training really is a solution. Our current performance problems need us to think beyond trainer mindsets, and we need to avoid being one-trick-ponies. There's a huge people angle to developing learning strategies. Firstly, all people are not the same - I like using the Dreyfus Model to plan how we can involve people at varying levels of expertise. You may also find my learning paths approach useful, so you can avoid the pain of big-upfront training. Most importantly, we need to devise our strategies to be pull-based, so we don't keep creating overloaded, one-size-fits-all-but-fits-none approaches to learning. I like approaches where we empower our learners and let them think for themselves like adults.I'm hardly an industry commentator to answer this question - but let me take a shot. If there's one word I want to focus on, it's versatility. L&D people in today's age need to wear multiple hats. If there's another word I want to focus on, it's creativity. We're beyond the point where one specialist can solve business problems with a known solutions. We're getting to a point where business is so fast that we're encountering problems we've never seen before. So I can't say much about the 'state of the art' except that we need learning generalists who can approach problems creatively, by applying diverse perspectives and heuristics.Those are quite a few things to comment on arent' they? I have a huge interest in how people work together. Working at ThoughtWorks has been a revelation for me. At ThoughtWorks, working with people like Patrick Kua has made me realise what an important place feedback has in helping people grow. A few months back I piggy-backed on some of Pat's posts and wrote a post of my own about about building a feedback culture. I completely understand that in the absence of the right culture it's tough to give and share feedback. To make it easy I recommend separating the 'what' and 'if' of feedback and treating all feedback you get as a gift. Yet again, if you're in a situation of conflict, you may want to try the technique of percepual positions to evaluate the situation from different perspectives.I also have a strong interest in being a student of leadership practice and HR. You'll notice that from my unending rants on the history of heirarchy, on how I approach leadership, and how I believe organisations should run their career development and leadership development programs. I could keep going on, but I'll stop by directing you to all of the little other things I keep posting about.Ha, ha! This is where I pop out an answer and people's estimation of my skills goes way down! Well, I use good old Powerpoint for most of my graphics. This however is the stuff I have least information about on my blog. You may find some tips in my blog posts about visual design, but I must confess you'll find far greater inspiration on Tom Kulhmann's posts on visual and graphic design.Oh I have tons of inspiration to share with you. Let me first direct you the 6 talks you should absolutely watch if you're a presenter or a trainer. I'm going to add Ken Robinson's latest TED talk to that list. Speaking of TED, it's a great place to learn not just about the various interesting developments across the world, it's also a great place to get inspiration for your own presentation style. Even Bill Gates seems a transformed speaker on TED. But if you're looking for the mother of all inspiring talks, you've got to watch the last lecture by Randy Pausch - and here's my commentary on Dr. Pausch's talk.In addition to this, there's all the inspiration I get from the web. Here are some news bundles I've created which you may find useful: Blogs from the Agile CommunityBlogs about Enterprise 2.0Blogs about Elearning and Learning TechnologyYou can also browse through my Delicious bookmarks and look at the bookmarks from my network. And of course, I have the knack of sharing inspiratin through my blog and through Twitter, so do check out the links below:The RSS feed for this blogMy twitter handle - @sumeet_moghe Well that's the map for this blog which I wanted to share with you. I hope it gives you and easy way to contextualise useful information from this website. So, how did you find the last two blogposts? I defnitely want to hear from you about this post, so please, please tweet this post if you can and also leave your comments here. Thanks!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over the last few days I pretty am sure folks may have noticed how things have been a little bit quiet over here in my blog, to the point where some of you may have wondered whether I am ready to go ahead and ditch it and instead point people to my Google Plus Profile, like some rather prominent and prolific bloggers have been doing as of late. The truth is that I am ready to make plenty of blunt moves on redefining my social networking presence out there on the Social Web, and I will be sharing some further insights on that regard very soon, but one thing for sure is that at this point in time my blog will remain where it is. I am not planning on muting for good my personal voice, my-self, my own thoughts out there on the Web just yet. However, in the last couple of days, I have been playing, experimenting and learning quite a bit more about Google Plus itself and how it will be redefining the way I interact on the Social Web. Yes, to me, so far, Plus is a keeper! And at this point I guess I am now ready to write another blog post, the fourth of the series, on the topic of one of its most disruptive and fundamentally paramount features: Circles. Circles, on its own, makes it totally worth it working with Google Plus. I would probably even venture to state that perhaps it will be one of the most critical key capabilities that this new social networking site would have to offer to the whole Social Web. Yes, it’s that good! It’s an opportunity to help you decide and define how you would want to work and interact with your various social networks in a single space, without going crazy, or without having to create multiple identities. Or without having the system dictate how you can do it with very little interaction from your part. David Armano has put together an excellent blog post that describes, pretty nicely, the kind of impact that Circles will have with how we manage and participate further within our social networks. Worth while a read, for sure. Ross Mayfield also put together a rather interesting and enlightening blog entry on this very same subject of Plus’ Circles along with a rather nifty, eye-opening and educational deck under the heading "Visual Guide to Circles in Google+", which I have embedded below, so you can flip through the Slideshare slides quickly to get an idea of what they are and how they work: Visual Guide to Circles in Google+ by @ross View more presentations from Ross Mayfield To add further up, my good friends Dave Pollard, Alan Lepofsky and Stuart Henshall, amongst several others, have put together a couple of rather interesting and equally revealing posts, respectively, that describe for themselves what the actual main benefits are from using Circles in G+. And along with some other interesting reads made available out there in the last few days I guess we are in pretty good shape to understand how they work. But if I would have to pick up another article that would be rather instrumental in helping describe what Circles are and how they operate, I would probably have to point you folks to one of my favourite KM bloggers out there, my good friend, John Tropea, who a few days back put together "Facebook and Twitter are broadcast design models; Google Plus is a sharing design model". One of those essential, must-read articles that you cannot miss to perhaps get exposed to some of the most comprehensive writing available out there on this particular topic. It’s a rather long blog post, but, believe me, it will be worth every single paragraph of it. It’s just brilliantly done! Ok, so now that we are through with that introduction to try to explain Google Plus’ Circles, and its many many benefits, I thought I would spend the next few minutes sharing with you folks how I have actually set up mine initially, so that you could have a glimpse of how they are actually working out for me. The interesting thing is that, to begin with, I didn’t start them from scratch. I actually copied the same model I have been cultivating and nurturing with my Twitter Lists for over the last few months. Thus the first thing I did was to delete the already existing default ones and start mimicking the model I have for Twitter, which is, finally, working out just fine, after several failed attempts to look for a model that would work the way I wanted. So what I am about to describe next is basically my own model for social networking out there for two of my favourite social networking tools which I have developed over the course of the years after experimenting and playing with multiple options. The good thing though is that in G+ it’s been much much easier to implement, because of the already existing work done with my Twitter timelines. So I just had to reproduce it and move along with it. And the way I got things going was with the initial creation of three magic circles (Or Twitter Lists). The ones where I spend most of my time at the moment out there on the Social Web and which, I am sure, as soon as you read about them you would be reminded of the Dunbar’s Number, although you will see how I have gone beyond that initial 150 limit, because for each of those three circles I haven’t established a maximum number of folks. I have let it develop and grow itself and see how further it would go. But let’s see it more in detail: One50: This is the first Circle I have created and in it I have grouped those folks who I have been following for years, way before social networks became mainstream, interacting and learning quite a bit from all of them over the course of time. They are my mentors, the ones who have got my highest level of social trust, although most of them don’t know it. They are the ones who have made and shaped what @elsua is today. They are the ones that I would want to follow and continue to learn from even when I am no longer participating actively on the Social Web. My essential core network that would transcend the world of the Web. The ones that I would want to keep in touch with on a regular basis no matter what. My closest friends and daily source of inspiration, if you would want to put it that way.  Interesting enough, from my One50 Twitter List, this is the group with the lowest number of folks who have moved over to Google Plus, and still, on its own, the main reason why I will keep making use of Twitter. At least, for now. Two50: This is the second Circle that I have created, and following a similar model to the one described above, it’s the one that I have used to group all of those folks who have similar roles, interests and affinities to the ones I have, folks who are interested in Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Learning, Communities, Social Computing, the Social Web, etc. etc. The group from which I learn plenty of new tricks and further insights every day on everything social, where a good number of conversations take place on the stuff we are all truly passionate about, i.e. helping accelerate the adoption of these social tools, both inside and outside of the firewall. These are like my pals, my partners in crime, the ones I trust to brainstorm, with whom I share across plenty of ideas, learn, collaborate and share my knowledge with without asking for anything in return. It’s based on a mutually rewarding and nurturing relationship of helping each other grow further in our collective sense of the network. The power of the network.  From this group, and like I was expecting it, almost all of them are in Google Plus already. It’s actually one of my largest Circles at the moment, so, since I treasure the conversations I have with them quite a bit, I have moved that Twitter List into a Circle knowing that unfollowing them in Twitter will not cause any damage, because we already know where we can find each other. Or, at least, I am hoping we know where we can find each other… hehe TheRest: This is the third Circle I have created and, probably the best way I can think of to describe the group of folks who are part of it is by mentioning that this is my group of acquaintances. Folks I am interested in keeping up with after an initial first contact, good conversation, knowledge sharing experience, etc. etc. knowing that at some point they will move up to Two50 or, even, One50. This is the most diverse group of them all, because it includes folks from a wide range of the interests I have in multiple topics, not just some of the ones I mentioned above. I probably don’t get to interact with them as often as with the other two Circles, but, at least, I make an effort to check, once a day, what they are up to, to keep up with those loose connections, hoping to strengthen them over time.  From my Twitter List, once again, the vast majority of them are already in Google Plus, so, just like I did with Two50, we have moved the conversations into Plus and I went ahead and unfollowed them on Twitter to help avoid cross posting of repetitive timelines and become a bit more focused on the conversations themselves, rather that the broadcasting nature of Twitter itself, which is eventually what Twitter will be turning into for me over time. And that’s it! Those are my core Circles in Google Plus. But also in my Twitter Lists. What I have done though is a natural split of considering Twitter a broadcasting, messaging, notification system, whereas Google Plus will be the place where I plan to curate top-notch, best of breed content along with the conversations that may surface over time. So, yes, not planning on abandoning Twitter just yet, but certainly starting to redefine my new relationship with it, including a reduction in the amount of time I spend there on a daily basis. It’s no longer going to be my main method of engagement and participation on the Social Web. At least, for me. Just another broadcast mechanism. The one that has gotten that #1 spot on my daily social interactions is now Google Plus and will stay like that, for a while, judging from the depth and engagement of the conversations I have been having so far within each of those circles. But, as a side note, I guess I should also probably mention on this blog post, to wrap it up, how these Circles are not the only ones I have. I have got a bunch of others that I have created as well from Twitter Lists, but that they have a very specific context that I am sure would become self-evident as soon as I share their names with a one liner annotation: Customers: Indeed, got a specific circle with the good number of customers I have already been interacting with on Twitter over the years, and which I have invited to come along and hang out with in Google Plus. Most of them are already in there and the experience has been rather pleasant; even more when we haven’t exchanged a single email but kept it all happening out there on the Social Web! IBMers: Of course, I put together this circle to group my fellow IBM colleagues AND alumni, who have been flocking like crazy to Google Plus, since the experience is pretty similar to what IBM Connections has been doing for us for years. And that way they have managed to make obsolete my split personality in Twitter with my @elsua_b account, so that account is just about to hit the floor and go into a dormant status very soon. BlueIQ Ambassadors: This is the group of IBMers I work with on a daily basis helping accelerate the adoption rate of social software, both inside and outside of the firewall. They are all social software evangelists and a very enthusiastic bunch of folks who truly live social and who so far have been rather instrumental in helping IBM become a social business. Still with plenty of work to do, for sure, but their help has been tremendous over time, and it’s always quite a treat to keep in touch with them and learn from their experiences, shared knowledge, stories, connections, how-how, etc. etc. Thus if you are a BlueIQ Ambassador and you are reading this and we haven’t connected yet in Google Plus, reach out to me, please! I would love to have you in this Circle And, finally, Weak Ties: Yes, indeed, this is the last circle I have put together (Coming along from my Twitter Lists) and, as you can imagine, this is the list of folks who have added me into their circles and whom I am trying to figure out whether they would be able to make it further along on my other Circles, whether One50, Two50 or TheRest (Or any of the others for that matter!). They are the ones I check out every so often to see what they are doing, see who they converse with, who we share potentially common connections with, and who provide me with an opportunity to figure out whether we will be working together in the near future or not. This is where facilitated serendipity happens at its best, because time and time again I have been having numerous occasions where what may have appeared as a weak tie, it’s essentially a strong one when you dive through their core networks. Small worlds, indeed! Well, I guess that this long blog post will close down, for now, the series of blog entries about my first impressions on my use of Google Plus, where the initial reaction is "It’s a keeper!", "It’s both the aspirin and the vitamin I have been waiting for all along" and I am hoping it would be for most folks as well! From here onwards I will probably keep blogging about related topics to G+, but, more interestingly, about the inspiring and engaging conversations that are starting taking place over there, right as we speak! So if you would want to reach out and connect with me on Google Plus, here’s my Profile. Let’s connect! The waters are lovely … Looking forward to seeing you all there!

Today was a great day at ThoughtWorks University. Our graduates have reached the business end of the course and are building a real-world application as part of their work here. To help people build their presentation skills and also for them to share knowledge and insights, we've organised Pecha-Kucha nights in the office. The idea is pretty simple: Every week, six students and a few trainers present.People can present on any topic of their choice as long as it's valuable to the group.Their talks should have no more than 20 slides which automatically transition within 20 seconds each.Everyone in the group has to present at least once.We do this once a week, on Wednesdays and we bring pizzas into the office (or an alternate snack).So that's the general format, and we did our first Pecha-Kucha night today. And was it awesome or what! For one, I consider myself to be a good enough presenter - but was I humbled by my students! I can speak to the quality of the presentations out there and some of them were so good that I feel honoured to be in the company of such people. More than the content of the presentations, I really felt that the talks gave us a different level of acquaintance with each other which will shape our ties over the weeks, months and years to come. We had topics ranging from how to play Euchre to the coolness of mathematics; from why dogs are man's best friend to someone's first experience with programming (a complex social system). We had advice on sports, careers and blogging and there were some great questions as well.  To blow my own trumpet, I'll say our first Pecha-Kucha night was a great success, given how much we achieved in less than 90 minutes (pizza eating and socialising included). If you'd like to see the presentations, you can find them under the twupk tag on slideshare. For your benefit, I've also added the presentations to this blogpost, so you can see some of them from here. Of course, nothing can beat the experience of watching people speak live; so you've got to pardon us if the slides don't make sense by themselves. Before I leave you to view all the nice presentation-ware, I'd like to encourage you to try an activity such as this on your training program and see what people do. As trainers if we can relinquish some control and give that back to our students; more importantly treat them as peers, they're likely to amaze and astound us. That's what our students did to us today. So try it out - give up some control and be prepared to be amazed. Molly Bartlett Chris Reade My First Program - by Chris Reade Rose Fan blogging and you - a love story Andrew Clarke Mathematics and You - Andrew Clarke Ragavan Govindraj Why we do what we do Sanjiv Suman Sports - Sanjiv Suman Sumeet Moghe Career Advice Pecha Kucha for TWU Grads © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

And while I am still digging the Google Plus experience, confirming that, for now, it’s going to stick around with me for a while, time and time again it keeps proving its great value, beyond the initial learning curve and that set of discussions and interactions about getting around the tool itself. On a rather regular basis one keeps bumping into not only some rather interesting and engaging dialogue amongst your social network(s), but also precious little gems that are worth while sharing across beyond G+. Like, for instance, a recent Plus entry that my good friend, Dan Pontefract, Director of Learning and Collaboration at TELUS, shared across where he included a link to a recent video clip, where he was interviewed to talk about their experiences with social software tools within the enterprise. In case you haven’t seen it just yet, let me encourage you all and have a look into Social Learning at TELUS. It’s a rather short interview, that lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes, but at the same time rather telling and quite revealing. In it, Dan shares how they keep making use of social tools like blogs, wikis, microblogging, etc. etc. in order to help people not only collaborate more efficiently and effectively, but also as a key, core learning activity, that helps sparks new ideas, new methods of solving business problems, while still keeping it all rather engaging and informal. In fact, while going through the video clip myself, I noticed three different things that I thought were worth while mentioning as well, which were coming out of the interview itself in a rather succinct manner, but that I think is equally important. To name: Social Software as a powerful Collaboration AND Learning environment: Yes, indeed, quite refreshing to see how the folks at TELUS have combined both social computing with learning and made them both take a big share of how work gets done within the corporate environment. It’s interesting to notice how heavy they rely on these social tools to help promote self-/group learning activities, to the point where they may well be self-sufficient, both producing and consuming that content they create and share across. Power to the people, if you ask me, and perhaps nothing more empowering than letting your employees take good care of their own learning activities, while on the job. They probably know better about their needs than you do. You don’t have to have everyone on board to get value: Indeed, something that we have seen ourselves, over at IBM as well with some of our social software tools, like IBM Connections Bookmarks where about 35k fellow IBMers make use of it, yet the entire IBM population of 400k benefit from it, because the search results from our corporate Intranet search engine are injected with those social bookmarks that folks keep adding along. And it looks like the folks at TELUS share a similar experience; while they may not have achieved just yet 100% penetration with their social tools, the ones who are making active use of them are helping everyone else get enough value, perhaps not just producing valuable content, but digesting it as well. This is, in my opinion, a critical point regarding the adoption of social tools within the enterprise, mainly from the perspective of setting up the right expectations and encouraging those who would want to make use of the tools to use them, while allowing the remaining ones adjust accordingly and figure out by themselves whether they would need to jump in as well or not. Let them figure out the value they would want to get from it is probably as good as it gets in order to allow for knowledge workers to understand how, when, why and what to contribute, whenever they may be ready. Don’t mandate, but empower: Which brings me to the third point Dan shared across that perhaps folks may not have noticed, because of how subtlety he shared it across, but that I think it’s quite important and paramount to understand what a successful adoption by most employees of these social tools would be like: don’t mandate their use, but empower your knowledge workforce to make the right decision(s) on whether they need to or don’t need to. He basically shared how at TELUS they don’t mandate folks to make use of social tools from top down, instead they allow their knowledge workers themselves to figure out whether they have a need to use them, or whether the pain points they may have could be solved by those social tools, but it’s all part of that play and experiment nature, where employees are allowed to explore by themselves and figure out the potential of social software to help them improve both their individual and group productivity. It’s all a matter of understanding that rather than managing it as a project and making it mandatory, it will always be much more productive leading the change, facilitating it, embracing it fully starting with yourself, regardless of where you may well be within the organisation, helping others how they could benefit themselves from making use of social networking. Management, all of a sudden, needs to turn into Leadership, an active leadership, by the way, that leads by example and not just by talking away about it. There are plenty of other golden nuggets that I could mention on this blog post about Dan’s short interview, but I think, instead, I am going to encourage you all to have a look into the video clip yourselves, and watch through it. It will be worth while your time, I can surely guarantee you that. And from here, perhaps just share a special Thanks! to Dan for the inspiration and for sharing along the interview itself with all of us, on what it is like a successful adoption of social software within the enterprise. In this case, at TELUS. Well done!

It all started with Scott Robinson telling ThoughtWorkers that he wants to work with us. How did he do it? Through a really creative reverse Facebook-ad. Over the last couple of days, all ThoughtWorker denizens of Twitterville have unloaded on on the #DearScott hashtag - some amused at Scott's cleverness, some trying to socially network, others just being funny! I think #DearScott should be a way for just about anyone around the world who wants to work at ThoughtWorks to get in touch with us. It's just a great story of how social media is completely transforming the way we work, communicate and do business these days. All the best Scott, hope you do well at the interviews!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

While a rather fascinating and inspiring conversation is developing nicely further on over in Google Plus, around a recent blog entry that my good friend Euan Semple published over at his blog under the title "Ten ways to create a knowledge ecology" (A superb piece of writing that, by the way, I can strongly recommend you all have a look and read it through as well, in case you haven’t done it just yet, as I do believe it’s probably one of the best articles published this year around the social transformation that businesses need to go through in order to become and live social, and help prepare for that knowledge ecology that Euan hints so nicely), the topic of communities and gardening communities through community managers (Or community facilitators) came up again and I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks this quick blog post where I can reference a rather interesting and very thought-provoking short video clip that tries to answer the question we have all been trying to answer all along: What is (a) community? You would remember how in the recent past I put together another blog entry around this very same topic trying to explain and define what a community is, and, most importantly, what it is not!, under the heading "Community Management Fundamentals - Where Do I Start?" Well, earlier on today, I bumped into this short blog post by my good friend Nancy White where she is referencing a brief video clip, rather inspiring, I may have to add, that pretty much explains it all very nicely on what distinguishes a community, and its many traits, and what not. Worth while watching it through, for sure! Thus I have taken the liberty of embedding the video over here, produced and released by non-profit organisation Essential Arts, as part of Bilocal, so that you folks could also have a look and watch it along: What is a Community? from Essential Arts on Vimeo. Pretty inspiring, don’t you think? Well, on that very same Google Plus conversation I linked above, my good friend, John Tropea shared another link to a recent blog article he put together under "Knowledge ecology related to facilitating CoPs", where he shares extensively what his experience in helping facilitate communities of practice has been all along, by referencing and annotating further a good number of the various different entry points that Euan himself referenced on the original blog post on knowledge ecologies. Another must-read! The rather interesting part from John’s article is his very succinct distinction between a community manager and a community facilitator in helping get the most out of the overall community experience without mandating how communities should really operate. Quite the opposite eventually, i.e. empowering them to manage their own flows of knowledge, their own connections amongst community members, how they collaborate with one another, and how they can help address business problems effectively, but without having too much intervention happening altogether. Acting more like leaders and facilitators leading and showing the way, rather than (community) managers trying to manage just another project; in this case a community. Lots of great tips in this regard shared across by John himself, that makes his blog entry a really good and worth while read for those folks who would want to unleash the full power of their own communities by perhaps just letting them go farther enough to discover their own value and build upon it over the course of time, as CheeChin Liew nicely added into the conversation with this priceless quote, picking up on another one from the one and only Dave Snowden: "You can’t manage community but you can create a community ecology" And that folks is one of the many many reasons why I am having a total blast at the moment, over at Google Plus engaging in such conversations as the one I tried to portrait briefly with this blog post that would surely help us all mature further on about our own ideas on the art of not just managing but facilitating successfully (online) communities. Yes, indeed, it’s a tough job! No-one said it would be an easy one, but with priceless conversations, resources and further links shared across by those in the know, as mentioned above, somehow the job does seem a little bit easier now, don’t you think?

Today at ThoughtWorks University, I tried a different format for the team's retrospective. This is a team that's one week into their first project and have finished their first iteration time-box. In order to introduce them to the idea that there are different patterns to retrospectives, I wanted to try a different way of conducting the ritual. Often retros are a very left-brained activity, with people doing a structured brainstorm, then analytically bubbling up the most important themes and then discussing action items to resolve or address the issues. I wanted to try a right brained format that takes a more creative approach to reflection and problem-solving. Let me tell you how I did what I did.Preparation for the eventOften we spend a lot of time in retrospectives just brainstorming issues, so I wanted to get that out of the way and determine the highest priority discussion items before the meeting. To achieve this, I tried Google Moderator. People could make suggestions of topics they wanted to discuss, vote items up or vote them down. We decided that we were going to discuss only the top five items that came up. By the end of it we had 130 votes on 10 suggestions from 26 people, so I'll say the preparation went quite well.To prepare the room for the meeting, I put up the above poster at different places in the room. I also laid out the 'table cloth' on five cafe style tables, by covering them with flip chart paper. To top it all off, I ensured that each table had pencils, crayons, markers, stickies and index cards. Everything that could stimulate their creativity.How I ran the eventSo once we were done with the voting, it was time to get to the meat of the activity. I did my best to keep to the essence of The World Cafe format. Here are the steps I followed:Since this is a new team, I started off with a safety check to determine if everyone felt safe to contribute their ideas and share their thoughts.Once I'd confirmed the safety levels in the group, I assigned a problem on each table.Each table had a minimum of four to five people on it.For the first round of 15 minutes, everyone at the table discussed the problem I'd assigned to them and also potential solutions. The groups had the opportunity to discuss problems in many different ways. They could doodle on the table cloth, or even do elaborate illustrations to graphically record their conversations. They could use the stickies or index cards as facilitation tools. They could note action items, or just have a rambling discussion!After 15 minutes, I had one person stay back at each table to retain context and play host while others moved to different tables.As a cafe-host, I floated across tables to ensure everyone was comfortable with the topic on hand and had enough, safe discussion going on. Wherever I saw things getting stuck for too long, I interjected and let the group see a different perspective.I encouraged participants to link and connect ideas coming from their previous table conversations.In the last round of conversation, I asked people to synthesise their discoveries and to consolidate action items for the problem they were solving.Once everyone was done, I consolidated action items on a whiteboard, ensuring that most of them had an owner for them.How I think the event wentI actually felt we got a lot of discussion going in the retro and gave each item it's due importance. We got a lot of diverse perspectives and connections on each problem, which gave us a lot of interesting action items to work on. The cross-pollination across tables ensured that people were engaged through the discussions and that we were sharing ideas across small groups. In contrast to traditional retro formats, we spent an equal and a large amount of time on all issues, by trying to solve them in rotating, small groups. This means we now have a huge list of tangible action items that the team can execute to make real improvements. If you wish to run a World Cafe style retro and want to learn more about my experience, please do reach out to me. There's a lot of good information in the World Cafe hosting guides, so do use them. Of course, there's also the great book by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs.And BTW, if you have success with this format, please do drop a note on the comments section of this blogpost.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Last week, upon my return from my last business trip, I was hoping to be able to resume my regular blogging activities and share with you folks some of the interesting conversations I have been engaging with and other interesting resources worth while sharing across. Alas, my local Internet Service Provider, movistar, had other plans for me: no other than disrupt an entire week with a rather poor performance of my ADSL line to the point where I spent more time being offline, disconnected, than connected. Rather frustrating, to say the l east, but since a long while ago I learned to apply one of the key principles to blogging, i.e. never ever blog whenever you are upset about something, or someone!, I decided to take a couple of days break from posting something over here, waiting for the connectivity issues to be fixed, because I know if I were to complain I wouldn’t be getting any kind of response, like I never did back in October 2009. And it looks like today things are back to normal somewhat, which means, I am back to normal, too! Off we go with my usual blogging activities and what a better way of getting things going, once again, than with the inspiring video of the week? This time around Social Media @ Work. Indeed, this is a rather short video clip that lasts for a little bit over 13 minutes where you will see a whole bunch of thought leaders sharing their insights, experiences and know-how around the impact of social networking, not only behind the firewall, but also outside. Good friends like Neville Hobson and Livio Hughes, amongst several others, get to spend a few minutes sharing some insights further on why internal communicators should be paying attention, just as much as they have done for other traditional means of communication, to other new forms of engaging their audiences, like social media or social tools, in order to foster, cultivate and nurture a much more engaging dialogue amongst employees AND with employees right at the center of the interactions: Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo. There are a bunch of people out there who have been claiming all along how most knowledge workers out there are all marketers, in their own terms, and for those products they are really passionate about. Well, after watching the video clip a couple of times I think the same thing could be said about communicators, whether internal or external. With the existence, and abundance, of social networking tools, we are no longer having to depend on one or two individuals, or a small team of communicators, to help spread the message around. Instead, everyone is now empowered to become a communicator, engage their own audiences, and keep the conversations going on those important messages they would want to share across. Essentially, every single employee has now become the corporate brand, whether brands like it or not. All of a sudden, brands have now got, finally, a face, a voice. A passionate human being driving their message across to multiple audiences and the only thing that the Communications & Marketing teams can do is to embrace and facilitate that shift, that unstoppable change. They no longer control the message. Mind you, they never had… It is as if that opportunity to let it go, to abandon that command and control attitude from Communications & Marketing, is finally coming about as one of those corporate realities that no-one can neglect, nor should ignore. Yes, the video clip may well be oriented towards communicators and all, but if you take a closer look, beyond that initial focus group, you would be able to see how plenty of its key learnings would also be relevant for everyone who is involved with social tools. And that’s the whole beauty of the video itself, that it will provide everyone out there with plenty of advice on why it’s becoming an imperative to be very well versed in this social media space, if we wouldn’t want to be left behind, and why it’s no longer a nice thing to have but an essential key trait to be able to make the most out of your social networking tools suite, which, once again, is raising a rather important and critical question: Can the corporate world run their business successfully and effectively, without jumping into the social computing bandwagon, whether internal or external? Something tells me that it wouldn’t. It’s already passed that point of no return for most businesses out there, just like it’s done the same for our society in general, so the only remaining question would probably be "How are you going to empower and engage your employees to help them drive the message of what really matters to your customers, business partners and competitors?" Well, perhaps you would need to show them "Social Media @ Work" to get the ball rolling, if you haven’t done so just yet after all. And if you already have, show / share it with them anyway, as a good refresher of why living social matters. Now more than ever!

I find it amusing when people speak of social learning and technology enabled learning almost in the same breath. It's as if social learning is impossible without the help of technology. It's odd - didn't people have coffee table conversations before the age of social media? Did people not learn from each other? While I understand how the the recent explosion of the social web accelerates this process, social learning is hardly a phenomenon solely dependent on technology.In today's blogpost, i want to introduce 7 different patterns you might want to try out before you even take the plunge into technology enabled methods to facilitate social learning. At ThoughtWorks we see these patterns everyday and that's perhaps one big reason why collaborative learning seems to thrive at this company. Don't get me wrong - you're likely to still need technology. I hope though, that by applying some of these patterns you'll have taken several high impact steps to influence your organisation's learning culture. With that said, let's take a look at the patterns.Reface your Team SpacesImage taken from karthikc's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.If charity begins at home, learning's got to begin at the workplace. While we pay so much attention to the curriculum, it can't hurt to reconfigure the workplace to facilitate learning and collaboration. A few weeks back I read an excellent article by James Clay where he wrote about the importance of how institutions need to create spaces that encourage informal learning while creating a context for people to socialise and learn at the same time. The article made absolute sense to me, though it still intrigues me to see so many workplaces all across the world that adopt a closed cubicle and corner office approach.At ThoughtWorks we've taken a people centric approach to designing team rooms - the above picture is indicative of our open workplace approach. We keep experimenting with seating methods to maximise collaboration on our project teams - the uPod configuration is just one of those different layouts that we keep trying out every now and then. There are several benefits to such open layouts: people talk to each other and throw out ideas without any restrictions or walls. Information radiators and open wall spaces give people enough and more opportunity to collaboratively problem solve and find creative solutions. Most importantly, the open workplace allows for cross pollination of ideas across teams and 'departments', since we've torn down the unnecessary walls. Whether we we like it or not, we see things happen and we learn from each other's successes and failures.All the chest thumping aside, I completely understand that moving to a completely open workspace isn't trivial for those in cubicle and corner office land. Which is where I think you'll find these tips to build a collaborative workplace really useful. It's a huge, but really valuable change and all the little steps you can take to get there, are worth their weight in gold.Bring in the LunchImage taken from wetwebwork's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.Another pattern you'll see very often at ThoughtWorks is the idea of learning lunches or brown bag seminars. The idea is very simple. If you have an idea you want to share, or something you want to discuss or a concept you'd like others to learn about, organise a meeting over lunch so people can socialise and learn in a comfortable setting. These short, 30 minute, one hour or 90 minute sessions often end up being really valuable. The very fact that people have the opportunity to leave when they think they've had enough, makes it a relaxed setting, where participants aren't just sitting through the discussion because they were asked to. As a community initiated event, it provides an learning opportunity for the people, by the people.Pecha-Kucha Nights or Just Ignite ItImage taken from pecha kucha cologne's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.Something we've been tried recently is the idea of Pecha-Kucha nights or Ignite gatherings. You may have read my recent posts about how we're using Pecha Kucha at ThoughtWorks University. The idea of Pecha Kucha is fairly simple:Meet on a designated evening.People can present on any topic of their choice.Their talks should have no more than 20 slides which automatically transition within 20 seconds each.If you wish, you can allot a couple of minutes at the end of each talk so participants can do some QnA.I've seen some great Pecha-Kucha events -- the recent Agile Suitcase event at XP2010, is a prime example. The breadth of ideas that get thrown out, the accidental and serendipitous learning that we go through and just the remarkable insight it gives us about our colleagues and others attending the event, are just the kind of things you need to learn informally and socially. Do remember, Pecha-Kucha and Ignite aren't the only short - presentation formats. There's also Lightning Talks and Talk20.Open Space Conferences - For the People, by the People Image taken from edmittance's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.If there was ever a group learning pattern that was truly for the people by the people - it's got to be the Open Space approach. I've seen a few of these at ThoughtWorks and more recently at the XP2010 conference. In fact we use Open Space to define the agenda for several of our time-slots at ThoughtWorks University. As a company, we're also quite privileged to have a distinguished Open Space facilitator in our midst - Steven 'Doc' List. Doc writes extensively about the Open Space approach and you should definitely read his posts on the topic. Again the idea of an Open Space is very simple.At the beginning of an Open Space the participants sit in a circle. The facilitator will introduce the theme of their gathering, and invite all participants to identify any issue or opportunity related to the theme. Participants willing to raise a topic will come to the centre of the circle, write it on a sheet of paper and announce it to the group before choosing a time and a place for discussion and posting it on a wall. That wall becomes the agenda for the meeting.From that point, it's upto the group to attend sessions they care about. There are just four principles for Open Space conferences:Whoever comes is the right people: and so, you shouldn't be offended if some people don't come and the people that arrive are the people who genuinely care.Whenever it starts is the right time: spirit and creativity don't run by the clock.Whatever happens is the only thing that could have: once something's happened, we can't break our heads over it. We need to move on and let the group dictate the agenda.When it's over, it's over: we can't tell how long a discussion can take, but when we feel we're done talking we shouldn't need to stretch the discussion just to make for the time in our slot. As a corollory, 'if it's not over, it's not over' - participants are welcome to take their conversation beyond the planned slot, if they feel they'll gain sufficient value from it.There's also one law - "Law of Two Feet". The idea is that if you're caught in a discussion that you're not contributing to or not learning from, then you should just use your two feet and go someplace else! And most importantly, no one should take offence to this.I've seen some really great conversations and learnings come out of Open Space conferences and if the idea interests you, I encourage you to pick up Harrison Owen's excellent book - Open Space Technology (A User's Guide).Take it Offsite - Away DaysImage taken from Sam Newman's Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.A huge part of the culture at ThoughtWorks is how every year, each country organises an offsite for all the ThoughtWorkers of that country. In our culture we call these Away Days and I'm sure they have their parallels in the retreats that various other companies keep doing. Our Away Days are a great place for ThoughtWorkers to get together and not just know each other, but to informally learn from each others experiences. The geeky company that we are, I've seen beautiful things happen at Away Days -- geeks get together and write some code for an organisation like Unicef; we share good practices across our consulting engagements, we discuss a range of esoteric topics and we often listen to cool people like Andrew McAfee speak about their area of expertise. For a company like ThoughtWorks, this social interaction is just gold-dust! Of course, on the way we have a lot of fun as this post about our 2007 Away Day will tell you.Unconference It - Barcamps/ Geek NightsImage taken from kk+'s Flickr stream under the Creative Commons license.Just like Open Space, unconferences, particularly BarCamps and Geek Nights are a huge part of our culture at ThoughtWorks. While geek nights are a bit different and often have at least one defined, main event, barcamps are open-to-all, participatory workshop-events, where participants provide the content. Like Open Space conferences, barcamps are largely self-organised events where participants decide the agenda. The only difference is that barcamps are typically technology oriented gatherings, though in the recent past people have used the format for other topics as well. The idea behind barcamps is pretty simple:When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world. Barcamps operate on the 'no spectators, only participants' principle. Attendees should either do a session or contribute in some other way to make the event a success. If you wish to present a session, then all you need to do is prepare in advance and be at the event early enough to propose it. People at the event decide which sessions they'd like to see. Once you do present at a barcamp, you're obliged to share your knowledge with the rest of the world. Cool, isn't it? If you wish to host a barcamp, check the wiki page to organise such events.Conference It!Image credit: ThoughtWorks Bangalore.Last, but certainly not the least, I want to talk about a recent phenomenon, particularly at ThoughtWorks India. We've been organising an internal conference called XConf, which we're using as a platform to share innovative ideas, good practices and to socialise, meet and learn. Our first event at Chennai was a grand success and our upcoming event at Bangalore is likely to be even bigger. We keep the organisation of this event as simple as we can - we encourage all ThoughtWorkers from across India to submit ideas for talks; we then arrive at a shortlist for the event and then voila, it's time for us to travel to the host location and spend a weekend sharing knowledge, like there's no tomorrow. From all the experiences that you're likely to hear about this approach, you'll realise that there's a huge benefit in harnessing your company's collective intelligence in internal conferences. See if you can try something like this and talk to a ThoughtWorker if you're keen to know more about what we do at XConf.At the end of this rather long blogpost, all I'll say is that these are just a subset of the many social learning patterns I see at ThoughtWorks, which the world can learn from. Do remember that your lobby, your pantry, your cafeteria, your all hands meetings, your project onboarding practices, are all opportunities for you to create the context for social learning. So while technology is important, don't forget the human elements that build the foundation for any collaborative learning you'd like to facilitate at the workplace.What do you think of the ideas on today's blogpost? As always, I'm keen to hear your thoughts so do let me know by adding liberally to the comments section of this article.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

It’s been over a month since I first started making use of Google Plus. Yes, me, too!, I still can’t believe I have been there for that long already! But I am back to Twitter. I am back to making active use of one of my favourite social networking tools out there, where I have been spending a large chunk of time over the course of the last four years and counting. No, I haven’t given up on Google Plus either. Quite the opposite! It’s now my top favourite social software tool out there on the Social Web, as I tried to reflect on a good number of different blog posts over the course of the last few weeks; something that didn’t happen for plenty of other social tools out there when they first launched. So what’s happening then? Does this all mean that I will be using both Twitter and Google Plus, in conjunction, when a couple of weeks back I ventured to state that my days in Twitter were numbered? Yes, indeed! It looks like that’s what’s going to happen: for the next few weeks, perhaps months!, both Google Plus and Twitter will be walking along, hand in hand, for yours truly. Why? Well, for a good simple reason, to be honest, I want to get the best of both worlds! Of course, who wouldn’t, right? Like I said, back then, when I was first getting started with making use of Google Plus, I ventured to state how my participation in Twitter would be diminishing to alarming levels in favour of G+, as I felt the latter was starting to become both my aspirin and vitamin for my social interactions, out there, outside of the corporate firewall. I still feel the very same way about Google Plus and how it’s taken over most of my external social presence from various social tools, over the last few weeks, but then again I still see great value in making use of Twitter itself, so I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks today how I plan to make them both work for me, specially, in the case of Twitter, since there have been a bunch of you who have asked me in the recent past how I plan to make use of it, now that G+ has got most of my attention. There are three different use cases for which I still think that Twitter is unbeatable and would probably be hard to beat over the next couple of years. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that Twitter should sleep it over thinking they have won already. They haven’t. It’s just the rest of the social networking sites haven’t caught up with it just yet, but they will. Specially, Google Plus. So what are those three use cases that would still drag me into Twitter on a daily basis? Well, here they are: Immediacy: Indeed, this is, perhaps, one of the most powerful use cases for Twitter at the moment, as I have mentioned in a series of blog entries in the past, specially, when facing emergencies of whatever the kind, whether natural catastrophes or whatever else. There is nothing out there that would help you get up to speed with world events and be in the know just as Twitter does. It just works! And it does a wonderful job at it. So when things break loose and information gathering becomes of paramount importance, more specifically, in a rather short period of time, Twitter is probably as good as it gets. The killer combination of hashtags, Twitter Lists, Local & Global Trending Topics and the right social network(s) surely make it an essential tool to have, which is why ever since I switched over to Google Plus I have come to rely much more heavily on both Twitter Lists and hash tags to keep me in the know within a matter of seconds. Priceless! Information Density: This is also perhaps one of my favourite use cases for Twitter as well. Never thought that 140 characters, or less, would prove to be so useful. Indeed, compared to Google Plus, the amount of information, links, golden nuggets, inspiring insights, etc. etc. you get exposed to in a single Twitter screen / page would probably make it worth while all the way to stick around with it for a while. It’s something difficult to see work just right and scalable in other social networking sites. And, to me, the perfect ground to mine top-notch, best of breed content that I would want to give it, at a later time, a bit more of a permanent home rather through this blog or perhaps G+ itself, which is where the conversations are happening at the moment. Yes, indeed, Twitter has just transformed itself into an invaluable information provider that I can easily scan, filter, mine, utilise further to the best of my abilities to be in the know of what’s happening out there in the good number of topics I am interested in or passionate about. Once again, in order to make it work for me I have decided to make a heavier use of specific hashtags (Like #socbiz #e20 #km #kmers #e2conf #cmgr #cmtybc and so forth) and Twitter Lists to make the most out of it trying to keep the noise at a bare minimum, so that signals keep popping up from all over the place. Mobile: In a recent panel I participated in, on the topic of Twitter, of course, I mentioned how perhaps the killer feature from Twitter itself, and, almost definitely, its bright new future may be aligned with the whole world of Mobile. No, I am not referring to the wonderful number of really good mobile Twitter Apps available out there for smartphones and tablets, but more along the lines of Twitter becoming an integral part of the Mobile OS, with the upcoming release, specially, of iOS 5, where the mobile user experience fully integrated with Twitter is probably going to take it into the next level. Just like we could send an SMS pretty easily, so will we, very soon, be capable of tweeting with the same ease of use, regardless of where we would be inside our smartphones. And since I have got an iPhone4 I can imagine how it would still keep dragging along my mobile use over time, specially, when I am on the road and would need / want to share updates quickly of what’s happening around me. Yes, the iOS App from G+ is a rather good v1, but I think it’s missing still a little bit on the Immediacy front I just mentioned above. And that’s it! Those are the main three use cases for which I am still planning to make use of Twitter from here onwards. The rest of the conversation(s), never better said, have moved already to Google Plus, where I am having a great time connecting back with both my Twitter networks, where about 2/3 of them are already actively using G+, and with long time gone folks Twitter made me forget about, because of the silly Twitter API limits I talked about briefly a while ago. It’s never been so refreshing to have them back into my social streams and learning what’s been happening to them and what they are working on without having that feeling I am missing something, which was always lingering around in Twitter for a long while, as a technical limitation of the system itself not being capable of handling well the river of news. That’s all gone now! I can, finally, decide for myself, whether to dive right into the streams or whether let them flow freely and move on. Now, it’s my choice. Not Twitter’s any longer. Which brings me to another key point I would want to share across to finish off this blog post, and which it is meant, specially, for those folks I used to follow in Twitter, but that I am not doing so any longer. At least, in the traditional way I have been doing over the last few years. Yes, that’s right. Ever since my conversations have now moved to Google Plus (See previous blog entries on the topic for more info…) and most of my Twitter networks are there already, I have decided to do some Twitter Hygiene, as my good friend, Marcia Conner would say, and unfollow all of those folks and move them to Twitter Lists, where I can still keep up with them all, but without having a cluttered timeline anymore. The smart folks at The Next Web explained it rather beautifully just the other day under a rather insightful and engaging blog post under the title "Why unfollowing is a good thing and why you should make lists on Twitter". It isn’t anything personal at all, since, like I said, I would still be in touch with them all rather through those Twitter Lists or through Google Plus itself, where they are already rather active engaging in a good number of fascinating conversations. It’s more about refocusing and reinvesting your time with both social networking sites without having to go and suffer from social fatigue or seeing multiple across the board repeated updates. Call it fine-tuning your social presence out there on the Social Web. I call it redefining a whole new experience where the conversation has moved into a better place to happen altogether and instead it’s left behind an amazing place to collect relevant and interesting content that will keep feeding those conversations for a long while. So if you are one of the folks I have unfollowed just recently in Twitter, don’t take it personal; it was never meant to be that; it’s just that I needed to redefine my own social presence with the huge disruption of Google Plus taking place a few weeks back!, it’s now time for me to readjust and get the best of both worlds; so, if you would want to stay in touch whether on Twitter or Google Plus itself, do reach out to ensure we are still connected. It wouldn’t be the first, second, nor third time that Twitter may have played its silly game of unfollowing inadvertently without me or you noticing it. See? That’s one of the reasons why I have moved elsewhere, but, after all, fear not, I am still just one tweet away from you, my dear social network(s)! Please, don’t be a stranger!

Continuing our newly established tradition of Pecha-Kucha nights at ThoughtWorks University each Wednesday night, we did our second Pecha Kucha night today. Again a whole lot of fun, great serendipitous learning for all of us and an excellent insight into various presentation styles. It's a bit unfortunate that I'm away on holiday for the next two weeks of TWU and I'll miss the events on the next two Wednesdays. Anyways, here are some of the presentations people put up and again they're no substitute for being there live at the event, but they're definitely indicative of what you could expect at such evenings. Do remember that you can see most presentations on slideshare using the tag twupk. This is my last post on the Pecha Kucha nights for this term of ThoughtWorks University, but you'll hear more from me when I'm back and we start the third term for this year. Sam Tardif - 17 Reasons why AFL is Better than your Favourite Sport 17 Reasons why AFL's better than your favourite sport Abubacker Siddiqui - Health Health Stuart Greenhall - What Consultants can learn from Optimus Prime What consultants can learn from Optimus Prime Priyanka Shah - Indian Classical Dances Garima Singh - Introduction to GIT Rohit Bansal - Running a Green Business The Green Business Akash Bhalla - The Consequences of Actions © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

A few weeks back I was all set to start working with a friend of mine. I rate her very, very highly and she was going to be a real asset to ThoughtWorks when she'd join. A couple of weeks before her joining date though, I spoke to her and learned that her client can't release her from her current project. When we caught up, it appeared that her employers hadn't communicated her planned exit to the clients and at the eleventh hour they threw a fit. My friend and I spoke at length about possible solutions, but it looked like she was irreplaceable on her project -- given that she was leading it. While I admire my friend's decision to stay back on her current job to serve her existing customer, it seemed to me that her project was at a really high risk if it was so dependent on her.On Agile teams we often talk about the truck factor: "The number of people on your team who have to be hit with a truck before the project is in serious trouble".While being hit by a truck isn't a very pleasant metaphor, you could easily substitute that occurrence by people leaving their jobs, going on vacation or falling sick. The smaller your truck factor, the more risk your project is at. The larger your truck factor, the better you're managing your risk. So if all that needs to happen for your project to fail is for you to leave the company and go, then I argue your project is already at a really high risk and there's something you need to do about it. I've often heard my colleague and ThoughtWorks consultant, Angela Ferguson talk about the importance for consultants to plan their obsolescence. It's an interesting thought - because if you're the 'hero' on your project, you perhaps want to retain that status. Unfortunately, being a hero isn't the best thing for your clients! So in today's post, I want to talk about three simple strategies that can help you plan your obsolescence in your team.On typical, leader driven, command and control projects, there's only one person who has a vision for how the final product takes shape. They understand the strategy, the release plan and even plan the little bits of work that each member of the team performs. As it turns out, when these people leave, the project is in absolute shambles. Agile teams mitigate this risk by applying the practice of Collective Ownership. The idea is for all members of the team to contribute ideas to every segment of the project. This defies traditional wisdom where a single architect is responsible for unifying the vision for your project. Agile however, is based around real-life experiences with human behaviour, and the one thing we know about people is that they make mistakes! Architects/ Chief Designers/ Project Managers all make mistakes - and they're not wrong to do so. Unless you're dealing with a trivial piece of transactional work, it's impossible for one person to know everything about everything. By ensuring that everyone explicitly understands and contributes to the project's design and planning, you encourage diverse perspectives, and reduce the risk of letting one person's mistakes fail the project.So the next time you're planning out some fancy solution-ing workshop, include the rest of your team members in it. Try an Agile Card Wall to track and manage your project's progress as against a plan on Microsoft Project, which only you can see. Yes, you'll need an electronic version of your plan and you may have distributed teams as well -- in that case use a collaborative project management tool like Mingle. Remember, you need to move from a point where it's your project plan, to a point where it's the team's shared vision.The other thing you'll see on Agile teams is the act of Pairing. The idea is to have two heads solve a problem instead of just one, thereby achieving some interesting benefits. Firstly the quality of the work goes up, because while one person is creating the output, another person is checking it. The increased quality always leads to big savings on the project as time goes on."Laurie Williams of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City has shown that paired programmers are only 15% slower than two independent individual programmers, but produce 15% fewer bugs. (N.B.: The original study showed that 'error-free' code went from 70% to 85%; it may be more intuitive to call this a 50% decrease of errors, from 30% to 15%.) Since testing and debugging are often many times more costly than initial programming, this is an impressive result." - The EconomistThe other, more intangible benefit of pairing is that of knowledge sharing. Constant rotation of pairs ensures that every understands every part of the project almost equally well. This again helps ensure a higher truck factor on the team. So think about this from the perspective of L&D and elearning projects - how about having instructional designers pair with builders and project managers. How about having builders pair with testers and how about having SME's pair with all the different roles? You can build a truly cross-functional team that can deal with the risk of losing a random person.Last year I read a really interesting article on the Harvard Business Review blog about why the wrong people get laid off at their jobs. From the blog, "Legend has it that Gordius, king of Gordium, tied a knot so intricate that no one could untangle it. There were no visible ends. It lasted for centuries." The article discovered that the people that often got laid off were the people whose work the company understood quite well. It often didn't matter that they were superb workers - the fact was that people understood the risk of doing without them. On the other hand, people who were Gordian Knots - who performed well, but whose work no one understood were the ones that seemed to keep their jobs. While this strategy may seem to help you as an individual, it's more likely to backfire. Firstly, if no one understands your work and you're not as good as you think, you're likely to get fired anyway. More importantly, the mystery around what you do may protect your status but hurts your client, as a consequence hurts your employers and then hurts you. The examples of the AIG and Lehmann collapse, finally triggering the downturn there for us to see.So if you really care about your clients and your employers, spend some time each day, demystifying what you do. Refine your job description, create standard work that'll help you teach others what you do, coach others to perform your tasks, write a wiki page for each of your individual capabilities. Create a toolkit for a potential replacement. Think as if you were going to roll off the project tomorrow! While I've put my friend on the spot when writing this article, I realise that despite all the great wisdom out there, I haven't been great at planning my own obsolescence. Which is why you'll see this post when I'm on vacation - I want to see how my pet project performs in my absence. I've done what I can to narrate my work and hopefully the team is fully empowered to make my decisions when I'm not around. Over the next few months, I want to ensure that I detail each piece of work that I do for my employers. If anything, that'll give me the opportunity to try different roles in the organisation - if the opportunity comes by.What do you think about the idea of planning obsolescence? I can understand the choice of words can be a tad depressing - though I'm keen to know from you if my argument made sense to you. Do let me know what you think - I'll look forward to your comments on this post.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

In the last few weeks a lot has been written about whether Google Plus is the ultimate killer social networking site of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or several others, you name it. Perhaps we have seen far too many articles and blog posts on the topic and while I do think it’s just a bit too early to make such kind of statements, even if Google Plus has just reached over 25 million users already. I still think it’s a bit too early to be announcing the painful death of each of those social networking environments. Let’s not forget how long it took both Facebook and Twitter to become mainstream and reach that tipping point of no return, of rampant progress, of gaining enough relevance and importance to stick around for a while, in short, of having enough global impact that almost everyone has heard, or knows about them. G+ still needs to reach that level. I do know though it will reach it eventually, perhaps even sooner than anyone else!, but what I am rather surprised about is the fact that hardly anyone has talked or blogged about the fact that Plus does present a real threat to the king of communications, collaboration and knowledge sharing: email! And here is why. I know, and I do realise, I am very much due a couple of posts on this blog around the progress reports from my long standing initiative about living "A World Without Email"; it’s been a good few months since the last time I published such reports and I am sure folks would be curious to know how things have been going all along since the last one, so I have already started to draft those posts, which are going to be a bit massive, by the way, since they will contain lots of interesting reading materials on the whole topic of ditching corporate email. Thus stay tuned for them coming up shortly! However, I thought I would perhaps give you a tease with this blog post here today to share some further insights on why I *do* believe that Google Plus poses a potential real threat to email. But before I go ahead and do that, I would strongly encourage you all to have a look into a rather interesting, and great read by Matt Hames in a recent blog entry titled "Google+ is not taking on Facebook, it is taking on e-mail" where he exposes some of the issues, or problems, email has been having for decades, and how Google Plus, once again, would apply that aspirin and vitamin effect to address those pain points and fix them all. Here is a noteworthy quote from his article: "Yes, e-mail is a simple way to share some interesting learning. Think about how many e-mails you get with NY Times articles, or mashable articles, sent to a dozen or so people, with no context just "hey, read this". The "hey, read this" is often written as - FYI. Worse still, e-mail is a black hole for knowledge. Once in yesterday’s e-mail, its destined to be ignored and eventually deleted. Even if it is thoughtfully placed in a folder, e-mail search isn’t great. And e-mail conversations are the worst. People end up blaming the original e-mail for all the subsequent ones. And someone coming in late won’t be able to follow the conversation." [Emphasis mine] I would strongly recommend you to read the rest of it; it will be worth while your time in setting up the stage on why G+ may well be marking the end of email as we know it over the course of time, which is something that I am sure most of us would find rather ironic seeing what a strong player GMail is, for instance, at the moment. But it could surely happen! In fact, it’s already happening! Yes, that’s right. As most of you folks know already, I have been using Google Plus for a little bit over a month already, and during the course of that time I have noticed a drastic decrease on the number of inbound corporate emails, as well as external, personal ones over the course of time. So in the last 4 weeks, and what I have got this week so far, I have received an average of 9 emails per day, compared to 15 received last year over the same period of time, or compared to the 33 I received in 2008, when I was first getting things started. So right there, you can see a decrease of nearly 60% of emails for that 4 to 5 week period of time, in the 4th year of tracking progress from the previous year, which is a rather substantial reduction on my inbound email count, compared to previous years. Not sure what you would think about it, but I am finding it rather remarkable and mind-blowing to finally have an external social networking site that can help me tame the email beast, even further, onto becoming unnoticeable altogether, pretty much like IBM Connections does for me today behind the firewall with corporate email. So, at this point in time, I am sure you may be wondering what kinds of interactions that I used to have through those few inbound emails are now coming through Google Plus. Well, here is a short list of the most frequent ones: Questions & Answers (Whether public or private): the fact you can post a question to a circle, or to one or more individuals from the same single interface, along with your various Stream(s) is priceless! Specially, when you can aggregate all of those responses in a single thread altogether as well without going insane trying to make some sense into it! Information Sharing: Along the lines of sharing links to interesting Web sites, blog posts, etc. etc. publicly or through your circles. What Matt mentions as one of the strongest selling points from G+ … sharing! And no longer just a social networking activity per se, necessarily, on its own. In Google Plus we don’t facebook, nor tweet, we just basically share. Something that everyone can relate to without using foreign language terms to most folks, just like "I will email it to you".  Customer Interactions: This has been one of the most refreshing interactions I have been welcoming to G+ right from the start. Most of the customers I interact with are already heavy, active users of Plus; we started interacting through Twitter, LinkedIn and through blogs, and, lately, I am finding out how those interactions are happening on G+ alone and no-one seems to be complaining about it. In fact, long standing issues from other SNS are a thing of the past. There is now a flow, a tracking record, an opportunity to share publicly or privately without having that worry whether the system will mess up or not, or whether unwanted parties would have access to those private exchanges or not. Sharing just happens naturally and in meaningful way: a conversation. The way it was always meant to be. Remember blogging back in the day?  Discussion / Conversation: What before used to take place as a back and forth "Reply" or "Reply to All" it’s now finally finding a place where that clutter to carry on a longer, deeper conversation is no longer there and instead Plus has taken over by allowing interactions to take place for as long as they would need to, that is, for the entire life of the dialogue itself, without the frustration of having to struggle resurfacing the conversation, i.e. re-finding that email, or the entire string of emails exchanged. Priceless, if you just want to focus on the conversation without having to worry about the technology. Plus makes that worry rather redundant, which is a nice refreshing change. Social Capital: Every so often, I used to receive emails from fellow colleagues, customers, business partners, friends and other external parties just "to keep in touch", to find out how things were going, whether things were all right, about how work is progressing, personal related stuff, etc. etc. Basically, social capital related interactions of people genuinely interested in keeping in touch for the sake of cultivating and nurturing long lasting relationships. Never before has sharing of pictures, video clips, music, general interest topics become so relevant and part of those daily interactions. It’s my daily dose of caring to improve those social capital skills with others, but with plenty of ease of use altogether. And, finally, Business: Yes, indeed! Interestingly enough Google Plus has already started to morph a good bunch of the conversations talking about Plus itself and how it works to conduct business, in the most general sense, whether personal or work related and since a few folks have asked me about this one already, I think I’ll develop it further on a separate blog entry where I will reflect on whether G+ is ready for the Enterprise. Or not. A quick hint… it’s getting there! And pretty fast, too! So will Google Plus manage to kill email altogether, or reduce it by large numbers, or, at least, help us all reduce our current dependency on it? Well, if I judge things based on my first month of interactions with it, I can probably vouch that Yes!, it will do and sooner than we expect, as more and more people start making their way into it and find out how much more different it is interacting through it than through other social networking sites, where headaches and increasing frustration are no longer there. The challenge will remain whether Google itself would want G+ to be more successful than what GMail is today and how is that going to put things together in the near future. Remember Google Wave? They all said that it was going to redefine the way we do email today. Yet it didn’t deliver, although it was a great solution. No doubt! Well, this time around I think Google Plus is still a great solution and will probably manage to help us all free ourselves from the email yoke! And I may be able to add… about time, too! Mind you, like I have been saying all along since February 2008, I still see plenty of really good use cases for which email is probably the best tool out there, specially, for 1:1 private, confidential, rather sensitive exchanges or for calendaring and scheduling. I also realise that some professions would consider email an essential tool to live by, specially, for auditing and tracking purposes, but for the rest of us there is a window of opportunity to reduce our addiction to it and we should not let it go this time around, like we have done with a bunch of others … Have you started to notice a decrease on the amount of emails you have been receiving since starting to use Google Plus yourself? Drop a comment and let us know…

I pride myself on being an excellent vacation planner, but somehow none of my vacations seem to start on a very auspicious note. The last time my wife and I took a similarly long vacation, we were stalled by protesters at the Bangkok airport, and at the last minute we had to take detour via Singapore to begin our vacations. It bled us the extra dollars and well, wasn't much fun! Till last night, it seemed that our vacation was blessed by the gods. Speaking of gods, there's a saying,"Man proposes, god disposes!". I'm not sure god had much of a hand to play in this, but here's what happened. We had tickets to travel by the 1715 train to Trivandrum so we could then catch the Sunday flight to KL. For some reason, I'd entered the 2145 train on my Tripit itinerary and my wife and I planned our day at office with that assumption. So well, you can imagine the fiasco thereafter - we reached the train station in the hope of catching the train, only to know that I'm actually a crap planner and we'd missed our train hours back.Well, I wasn't going to allow our vacation to be derailed (pun intended) by such a minor setback. So, autoride back home, some time on the internet and we had air tickets to Trivandrum. And so, this morning we got on the 1020 Air India flight to Trivandrum - our destination, Kovalam beach. Does that sound awesome? Not quite! Well, Kovalam beach isn't the best place to visit during the monsoons. It's off season, most places are shut tight, the area has almost a deserted, sleepy look and every picture of the beach looks like you took it with a badly scratched lens. We took some time out to tuck in a very heavy meal of chicken, beef, fish and porrotas though the oil didn't seem to do much good to my tummy. Anyways - I spent a good part of the evening in the hotel swimming pool. And now, I'm tired, cranky, bored and I'm waiting to take my flight out - 0800 this morning, I'm outta here! Gotta set that alarm.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over the course of the weekend, the always insightful Isabelle Ayel shared across, over in Google Plus, an amazingly inspiring thread by Ron Jeffries about one of those TED Talks that can surely change the way we all see things in life. TED Talks are usually just like that. A good bunch of them can surely aim at transforming the way we see and experience things in our lives and manage to make it through. The one that both Isabelle and Ron shared across a couple of days back surely is one of those and on one of my favourite topics, too!: The Hidden Power of Smiling by Ron Gutman. Indeed! If you can spare a little bit over 7 minutes, you are off to an amazing trip by Ron Gutman where he talks about some of the recent research that’s been done around the topic of smiling and the kinds of benefits it can have in all of us, going from increasing our life timespan the more we keep smiling, to improving our overall well-being and that one of those around us. Never before were we probably going to consider how such a simple gesture as smiling, both at people and things, something we can all *do* at any given point in time, would have such a comforting set of rewards. "The Hidden Power of Smiling" surely deserves this week’s spot for "Inspiring Video of the Week", not only for the many insights shared across about how beneficial smiling can well be for all of us, but, mostly, because this is certainly one of those TED Talks to save for later, specially for those moments where we may need it the most! Ron does a beautiful job at reminding us all how, way before we are all born, we were already smiling big time, so why put a stop to it, as we grow older? Where have we gone wrong? Most importantly, what can we do to bring it back into our daily lives? I am not sure what you would all think, but after watching it, there is only one single thing that I just can’t get out of my head at the moment: to keep smiling! That’s just how powerful this TED Talk is, and, like I said, if you have got 7 minutes to spare and would want to cheer yourself up or just simply be reminded about why you need to keep on smiling, no matter what, and the more, the better, then this would be the Talk to check out: I can strongly recommend it to everyone out there who would want to find out plenty more about some of the traits and amazing qualities that have certainly differentiated us from all other species. It’s just one of those rather touching and inspiring Talks difficult to forget. Oh, and if you would want to find out plenty more what passion and creativity are all about and how technology can impact something so relatively traditional like dancing, allow me to suggest as well you watch this other TED Talk (A bit over 17 minutes long) on "The LXD: In the Internet Age, Dance Evolves…", which I am sure is going to put a couple of lovely smiles on your face, as well experiencing plenty of WOW moments! Not too bad for inspiring videos of the week, don’t you think? Well, keep on smiling, you know, you will live longer!, and in the meanwhile get on with some of those moves, too! They look like some pretty good fun, too! Although for me, I think I’ll just stick around with the smiling part …

Life's great when there are natural tensions. As a tourist, I always want good weather and clear skies. OTOH, every local dying of heat in a tropical country wants rain. If there's agriculture, people need rain. It's a healthy tension. Life's also great when you discover the truth behind modern day myths. When you have concrete evidence to bust an old-wives-tale you've heard for years, you feel good. I've felt all of this ever since I got into Malaysia on a cloudy rainy day. Sunday afternoon was depressing - I felt like a fool to have arrived into a tropical country during the onset of the monsoons, and for sure I wanted to go beat some of my friends who said I could come here any time of the year. So all I could do was whisper a silent prayer, hoping things would clear up. As it turned out, things did indeed clear up and we've had 3 days of almost clear, unblemished weather.My greater discovery has been Malaysia. Malaysia is primarily an Islamic country and a model Islamic country at that. For ages since the emergence of modern day terrorism, the faith of Islam has gotten a bad name. Malaysia is an example of how an Islamic nation can be prosperous, peaceful and compassionate. For someone like me whose best friends have been Muslims, this is evidence to bust a modern  myth. Not that the jihadis do justice to their faith, but well every religion has it's villains and there's no reason to tarnish Islam for the work of some lunatics.Anyways, l've had a great first couple of days in Malaysia, so let me tell you more about that. Flying in - Our Hotel and Local OrientationWe booked ourselves into the Chinatown Inn hotel on Petaling street, a bustling street shopping extravaganza that doesn't let up till midnight. Getting here from the airport was no big deal. We were flying Air Asia, so we flew into the humble LCCT (Low Cost Carrier Terminal). Getting transport from there was easy - we took a bus from the airport to KL Sentral (yes, that's how they spell it) and then we took the train to Pesar Seni (The Central Market) and then we just walked to the hotel.I usually judge a city by the cost of what it takes to be a local. Transportation from the airport was cheap; just 8 RM ($2.50) as compared to Bangalore where a similar trip costs about $3.75. As soon as we got on the streets we were looking for food - our meal on the flight was measly, so we had to eat! So, we walked into a local joint serving Indian Malay food and we were done with a full meal for about 10 RM ($3.13). Cool, huh! Yeah, Malaysia seems to be easy on the pocket.Location wise, we were in tourist haven. Chinatown boasts of great food options, cheap shopping at both Petaling street, the local wholesale emporium and the neighbouring Central Market and is a stone's throw from a lot of the tourist destinations. I strongly recommend that if you come to KL, you pick an accomodation in Chinatown to enjoy the real city. Our accomodation set us back by 300 RM (about $30/night) for three nights, which isn't bad at all. We spent the first evening walking down Chinatown, trying to soak in the shopping atmosphere. I succeeded in making my wife avoid the temptation to splurge on the huge variety of garments, shoes, bags and jewellery on show. Chinatown's a truly Asian shopping experience, rivalled perhaps only by Bangkok's Lumpini Market/ Chatuchak Market and Delhi's Sarojini Bazaar. So if you're coming over, keep a few kilos of baggage allowance aside to take back some shopping. I'd been craving to have some frog on my trip here, so we settled for an expensive-ish meal at one of the streetside eateries at Petaling street. When I say expensive, I mean expensive by Malaysian standards. Our meal at the restaurant, with two servings of steamed rice, two curried frogs and some stir fried shrimp, cost us about 40 RM ($12). Not to be deterred, I happily tucked into my meal and threw in some local mango ice cream as dessert. That was the evening for us; our next day was going to be long and exciting - Melaka!Day 1 - MelakaMelaka is one of Malaysia's most important, historic cities. A bustling medieval port, the center of European colonization for a few hundred years and subsequently the place of Malaysia's declaration of independence, Melaka has a prominent spot on most tourist journals as it does on mine. The little town is less than about 150 km from KL and buses leave every hour. If you travel to Melaka in the near future, you're likely to have to take the bus from Bukit Jalil, a make shift bus stand in the absence of the main Puduraya station which is currently under renovation. Anyways, it wasn't a stretch to get to Bukit Jalil. We got a bus from Puduraya, which incidentally is just a stone's throw from Chinatown. A 30 minute ride got us to the bus stand and we were on our way to Melaka. At about 9 AM the bus (24 RM two-way ticket) trudged into Melaka Sentral, the city's main interstate bus station which isn't really close to the tourist hotspots. So, we took a connecting town bus, to get us to the Portugese Square hosting the historic Dutch Christ Church. From that point on, it was us hopping from one sight to another in Melaka including the Porta De Santiago, the Sultanate Palace, ruins of St. Paul's Church, the Maritime Museum, the Independence Memorial, St Francis' Church and of course the Menara Taming Sari (a.k.a the Melaka Tower). The tower surely was the icing on the cake as you'll see from this 360 degree panoramic photo I took from the top of the ride. The Menara ride is quite expensive by Malaysian standards though 40 RM ($12), is still cheaper than similar experiences in the west. The food in Melaka was something to write about as well and not just when it came to the price. At 11 RM ($3.4) we ate all that you see on that tray above. Quite a lot for that price, huh? But as I said, the price wasn't all - the food was so tasty that it blew our minds. I strongly recommend the Jonkers 888 restaurant on Jalan Hang Jebat as the place to have lunch at Melaka. They are quick, and yet very crowded by locals which is always a sign of good, affordable food in a foreign land.So, that pretty much ends the story of our first day in Malaysia, a visit to a heritage town, dotted by some amazing local food and lot of great photo ops.Day 2 - Kuala LumpurAnyone who says there's nothing to see in KL is either out of their mind or has never bothered to step outside the tourist hot-spots. Kuala Lumpur is truly Asia's meeting ground in terms of culture. There's so much to see and do that a day just doesn't suffice. Let's just say we skimmed on the surface of this magnificent city. Now don't get me wrong - KL isn't huge. It's about a third of Bangalore's area and twice the size of San Francisco, so that should give you a notion of size. It packs a lot into that little area though -- food, entertainment, shopping and sightseeing put together. The fact that we were based out of Chinatown made a lot of the sights quite easily accessible on foot, so again that's a reason for you to stay there if you're in KL.We had a packed day planned and I can't tell you what all we crammed in to get the most out of the day. The photos have got to tell the tale (when I manage to get them on Flickr). I will say though that I was disappointed by the Menara KL. 38 RM ($11) seemed to be a bit much for the very limited views from the observation deck atop the tower. Again, it isn't much when you compare it to the John Hancock Tower or a similar sight across the world, but by Asian standards it was too little to do for too much of a cost. Some of the places we saw/ visited in the day:KL Railway StationCentral MarketMeredeka SquareAbdul Samad BuildingMasjid JamekMasjid NegaraKTM BuildingMuseum of Islamic ArtsKL Bird ParkMenara KLKL Convention CenterPetronas TowersThat's quite a bit to see in a day and by the end of it, we were craving some serious nutrition. So we made our way to Restoran Yousuf's opposite Central Market. Yousuf's is a popular nasi kandar establishment in the parts. The phrase nasi kandar, came about from a time when nasi (rice) hawkers would kandar (balance) a pole on the shoulder with two huge containers of rice meals. The natural evolution of that practice is the nasi kandar cuisine in Malaysia which gives root to delicacies such as Nasi Goreng, Nasi Ayam, Nasi Lemak, 'fish-head' curries, the breads and the various spicy sauces in Malaysian Indian cooking. A regular favourite happens to be the Nasi Roti - a light pancake tossed around and folded by hand before being shallow fried in a pan. Nasi rotis come in different varieties and I strongly recommend the Roti Pisang - a banana pancake. If you feel like something savoury, try the Roti Canai with some of the nasi curries. At Yousuf's a big meal for two can't set you back by more than 12 RM. Remember the name and if you need recommendations of what to eat, talk to me!I've thoroughly enjoyed my first two days in Malaysia, despite the rain. If the start is anything to go by, I can tell that Malaysia's a fairly complete Asian experience with all the influences it brings from Indian, Chinese, Indonesian and Thai cultures. I wish I'd planned more time in this country, though I do think I'm going to return here for my rejunevation leave next year. I still have a few days to go before I leave this country. Next stop - Penang and Georgetown!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of rather interesting and insightful blog posts that have been covering IBM’s journey to become a social business. A journey that started back in 2001, but that it had its main roots well substantiated within the company for much longer. Interestingly enough, when everyone was starting to think about going social within the enterprise, IBM had already well established, and recognised, since May 2005, the well known Social Computing Guidelines that soon became an industry standard in setting up a reliable and trustworthy governance model and guidelines for knowledge workers to engage with both internal and external social networking tools. However, fast forward to 2011 and I still get asked, every so often, how is IBM doing in the social business space, not just from a vendor perspective, but also from its own internal social transformation. Are we there yet? Have we already made that transition successfully? What has been the experience like so far? Well, I could probably summarise it all with a single sentence at this point in time: It’s been a long journey, indeed! We have learned a lot, we have become much more efficient and effective at what we do, but we still have got lots more to be done! Like for almost everyone out there, becoming a social business is a tough job, for sure, we are not discovering anything new in there, there needs to be a significant cultural shift, a change of mindset, a change on how we do and conduct business, but the good thing is that the trip to provoke such social transformation has been worth while all the way coming from a Globally Integrated Enterprise into a Socially Integrated Enterprise (a.k.a. SIE) Take a look, for instance, into this rather insightful blog post over at Social Media Today by Rick Liebling under the heading "An SMT Interview with Ethan McCarty, Senior Manager, Digital and Social Strategy, IBM" where he reproduces a recent interview he did with fellow IBM colleague, and good friend, Ethan McCarty where Ethan tried to describe what that transformation has been like so far. Here are a couple of my favourite quotes from the interview: "At IBM we are trying to create a new way of working that connects our people with our customers, prospective employees, communities in which we want to do business and other constituencies in a more direct manner and meaningful way. This sort of engagement leads to increased surface area between the brand and these various constituents. These touch points produce digital evidence of behaviors, and that can lead to improvements in business" Or this other one: "The real power to transform is on the business side. This is where a social framework can create new ways to enable sales forces, new ways to discover expertise, new ways to understand your organization’s culture, new ways to establish brand trust with your customers, and much more" Those two nice quotes make eventually for a nice segway into another rather enlightening article published, just recently, by Mark Fidelman under the title "Why IBM Represents The Future Of Social Business" where he does another extensive interview with Jeff Schick, VP Social Software at IBM. Perhaps one of the most thorough and comprehensive interviews on describing IBM’s experiences on becoming a social business, the interview itself covers a whole bunch of stories, use cases, experiences, solutions and plenty of know-how describing what’s been like living social at IBM, with a couple of golden nuggets I thought would be worth while sharing across over here: "Social analytics is playing a huge role in not just making recommendations of content, people and communities, but in recommending what an organization need do to better its financial results" Or this other one on the key importance of improving business performance: "From my perspective, we’re back to making better informed decisions to derive greater value, better results and better customer satisfaction. That’s an important aspect of the role predictive analytics will play as social analytics evolve" I strongly encourage you all to have a look and read the rest of both interview articles, as they would provide you with some additional information on some of the initiatives IBM is running as part of becoming that successful social business, like the Social Business @ IBM effort (Part of Smarter Planet and IBM’s Centennial Celebrations) or the Expertise Locator (By the way, go ahead and read as well Ethan’s brilliant blog post around the topic of "experts"; worth while the read!). I can imagine how there may be some folks out there though who may be questioning IBM’s own social transformation efforts themselves, specially when much of the focus hasn’t been really on figuring out the ROI of Social Media, which most folks who know me already know where I stand with anyway (Pretty much along the same lines of "How do you measure successfully KM after 17 years being out there in the corporate world?"), but the way we see things over at BlueIQ, IBM’s own internal social software adoption program I have been working at for nearly 4 years now, has always been prone towards thinking what would have happened if we didn’t embark on living social back in the day? Could we afford ignoring it for much longer? Probably not! Definitely not! Let’s just look, for a minute, into some of the social analytics that have been shared in both articles referenced above… If you take a look into them closely you will notice how a good number of them are rather staggering, to say the least. The amount of knowledge, expertise, know-how, skills, experiences, project / team / community related work that has come out as a result of using these social tools can be quite overwhelming, given the sheer numbers. Now, imagine for a moment that all of those social tools would not have been there! A large chunk of that precious knowledge would have been retained in locked up systems like Instant Messaging, private Teamrooms, or shared drives, in obsolete Intellectual Capital / traditional KM systems, inside people’s computers, or, my good old time favourite: email! Or, even worse, in people’s heads (Not even shared, nor documented just yet!). Instead, we have now got that richness of information, knowledge and top-notch, best of breed relevant content, available to people’s fingertips to then be able to make better sense, and better decisions, that would impact not only their individual / team productivity, but also their own personal business relationships with both customers and business partners, which is, probably, what really matters the most at the end of the day. That, to me, is the real ROI of Social Computing. That sensemaking activity around the knowledge shared in making the right decisions to help improve your overall business performance. That’s when the journey to become a successful social business will go into the next level, moving away from that technology focus into one where it is fully integrated into how we do and conduct business, how we all become a lot more engaged, transparent and nimble at what we already do. Yes, we are still getting there! Like I said, it continues to take time and lots of good effort and energy to provoke that cultural shift and that mindset change. But the trip, so far, has truly been fascinating and quite an amazing learning experience for everyone, of finding out not only great content you didn’t know it was there available to all of us from all along, but, most importantly, the experts behind it as well and within reach of a single post, tweet, or whatever else. Because, as we all know, content is no longer king, people are! Always have been… (Oh, by the way, if you would be interested in finding out some more about IBM’s internal use of social software tools, with a special focus on IBM Connections, and rather recent - from July 2011-, check out the one slide shared across by fellow IBM colleague Steve Cogan who keeps updating it every so often as well… Then imagine what things would look like if all of that knowledge, if all of those business connections, would not have been made in the first place … Get Social. Do Business!)

I've been on tour in South East Asia for the last few days and it's been great fun, I must confess. For those who may have waited for an article and didn't see it on time, I apologise - and I'll try to put in a little extra when writing this article. When I go tripping, I usually try to study as much as I can about the place where I'm heading. Unfortunately my memory never serves me well, so when I reach my destination, it's all about planning for each day and relying on little, contextualised information sources such as the Lonely Planet website, Trip Advisor, a local map, street signs and my own senses. The fascinating thing is that regardless of how little I know about the place on day one, I feel like I know enough to get around by the time I leave the place. I've been thinking about this lately and it makes me think that the way we tour perhaps has some inspiration on how we can effectively train new hires at our workplace. To think of it, a new workplace is similar to a new city. Knowing how to survive in a new city, getting familiar with the roads, lanes, alleys, eating spots, food, sights, shops is very similar to learning about a new job. Yet, learning a new job seems to be significantly tougher than touring a new city. I accept that we approach tourism and new hire training with different mindsets, but the fact is that both activities are eventually about learning. There have to some parallels - what do you think? In today's blogpost I want to share my thoughts of what we as instructional designers/ learning consultants can about new hire training from the age old act of tourism. A lot of my thoughts find resonance in our design of ThoughtWorks University and I'll try to relate my thoughts back to real world examples as much as I can.Approach learning 'Breadth First'When I was planning my trip, I did as much reading as I could about the the places I wanted to visit. After a while though, every new name of a place confused me. Was Ubud, in Penang or Bali? Is there a Little India in Singapore or in Penang? Or both? Which is the larger free-flight aviary? KL or Singapore? And do I shop for Batik in Singapore, Penang, KL or Bali? As the places, sights, shopping and food options kept piling up, my memory started to fail me. The illustrated Lonely Planets and Outlook Travellers weren't helping; nor was Wiktravel. So I decided to do just enough to get a high level plan in place. I used the travel guides to put together a rough itinerary, but that was it - I couldn't handle anymore. When I think of traditional new hire training, I see a similar phenomenon of information overload. The idea seems to be to tell people everything they need to know in the shortest time possible. I look at this as being the equivalent of reading and remembering the Lonely Planet guides for all the three countries I'm visiting. That just doesn't work. What we need is a breadth first approach where learners can know what they don't know. I think of it as the equivalent of building boxes in our heads which we need to fill out with in-depth knowledge and skills as we go on. At ThoughtWorks University, we adopt a breadth first approach as well - our aim is to give people the bare minimum skills and knowledge to start ineffectively, yet safely at their jobs. The key is to know that they'll be ineffective - and that's where the importance of failing fast in safety comes in. I'll tell you about that in a bit.People need a map to get around (even better, a GPS)When I get to a new city, I first like to pick up a map. In Asian cities it's very common to find a detailed map at the airport or jetty. The map is then my guide to the destination and I carry it around everywhere I go. When I see a sight, I cross it off my map. When I want to reach a local attraction, I look at my map to guide me from my origin to the destination. If I'm unsure about what the fuss about a certain place is, I look at the back of the map for a description of the place. The information I get in context is badly authored, often grammatically incorrect, but useful - often invaluable. In terms of quality, it pales in comparision to the Lonely planet book, but the fact that it's lightweight and always with me, makes it far more valuable. If I had a smartphone with GPS, I would have perhaps found that even more useful! I learn about the new place by being in the thick of the action and the context for learning is no different from the context of real work. The map is a tool for me to deal with the new context and be successful.New hire training requires learning designers and trainers to create the right context for learning. We need to be able to put people in a safe work context as soon as possible, while giving people the ability to make mistakes in safety. We need to be able to create a map of lightweight, useful information that can help people when they're stuck. Communities of practice, organisational knowledge sharing, search enabled learning and the ability to learn when you need to, is crucial to a new hire's success. At ThoughtWorks University, we put new hires on a real world project for five weeks of their course. They already have the breadth to know what they don't know. This is the time for them to perfect their skills. The project itself is structured with rules that create the context for learning. In addition our online learning packages, our organisational wiki, communities and the students own social learning activities provide the map for students to learn step by step on the project. Learning here is contextualised to real-world tasks as against traditional learning which doesn't culminate in a tangible goal.Quick feedback aids effective learningWhen I get lost in a new city - I ask myself a couple of questions: Where am I? Which direction am I heading in?I've found that the best way to stop going around in circles when I'm a new place. Street signs and unfamiliar places are a great way to get feedback when you're in a new town. If you see a street sign you aren't expecting, all you need to do is find your current location on the map and then correlate it to where you're actually heading. The course correction takes just a few minutes. Often, if you're traveling with someone, they'll tell you if they feel you're heading in the wrong direction. That is feedback too - it allows you to course correct.Think of the parallels in new hire training. Does your course provide the right kind of feedback to learners so they can learn from their mistakes? How much of the feedback is intrinsic - driven by situations and real work? How much is extrinsic - a.k.a a teaching moment? The ThoughtWorks University project is structured into four iterations with plenty of feedback opportunities thrown in. Here are a few examples:A broken build on the project is feedback that someone on the team needs to fix it.Iteration retrospectives at the end of each week help the group figure out what they're doing well and what needs improvement.Big visible charts monitoring the progress of the team, their technical debt and their learnings, provide feedback on how they're delivering.Automated code analysis tools such as those for test coverage, help the team determine the quality of their solution.Regular customer interactions create the real world business feedback for our learners.Pair programming and group work ensure that people benefit from peer feedback and can learn from each other.I could keep going on with how we've workscaped ThoughtWorks University to include real-world feedback, but I guess you get the idea of how you can effectively use feedback to create learning.Expert advice at the right time is invaluableHave you ever employed a tour guide for specific trips? Or found smeone to ask directions when you're woefully lost? This is where experience comes in handy. Sometimes, it's just not meaningful to keep making the same mistakes. You don't learn anything and you just end up getting very frustrated! And expert who can help in such situations is just wat the doctor will order.Think of how you can provide expert advice on your new hire training programs. In reality, your new hires will rarely work all by themselves. OTOH, they'll rarely have experts guiding them at each step. What you need is a balance between letting learners be self-driven and offering them advice when they need it. At ThoughtWorks University we manage this by bringing on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) as trainers - they are the best at their jobs, so why not leverage them to create the best learning experience for our new hires? We use our SMEs to create leveraged teams that mix youth and experience. From time to time, our SMEs pair with the new hires so they can coach each of them individually on their specific strengths and weaknesses. The key here is individualisation, as against a one-size-fits-all experience that fits no one. The SMEs being part of the team can help the group course correct when they reach a dead end. This helps students learn what to do when work is not the happy path you learn about in training. As you can see learning about a new job is not so different from learning about a new city. So put on your design hat and see what you can do with your new hire program to include some of the elements I've mentioned in this blogpost. I'd like to encourage you to think of the tools as a means to an end. The goal is to have new hires feel confident in their job, just as you'd want to feel comfortable in a new city. On ThoughtWorks University, we're managing this by giving new hires just enough instruction to get started on a project, with enough resources (elearning included) for them to pull learning from when at work. We're supporting them with experienced consultants on their training project and we're creating lots of feedback opportunities for them to learn from their mistakes. I will speak more about our experiences at DevLearn 2010 and sometime soon on the Learning and Skills Group. In the meantime, let me know what you think about this article - your comments are always welcome!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Indeed, while everyone tries to go and aim for that Work / Life Balance or, as of late, Work / Life Integration, I am starting to be more and move convinced by the day that there isn’t such a balance nor such integration after all. It’s all about a state of mind, whatever that may well be, whether you are at work, enjoying some great quality time with your loved ones or just simply away on vacation. Eventually, it’s your state of mind, something that no-one can take away from you; not your family and loved ones, not your work, not even your boss. And it’s just too funny that I have finally come to realise about that while I have been on vacation myself for the last few days, which is why you haven’t seen any updates on this blog for nearly two weeks. But I am now back and my state of mind is "back to work, back the social grid!" Fully re-energised, batteries charged all the way up!, really excited to face, and embrace, the remaining of what’s left for 2011, for sure! In short, ready for plenty more! I must confess that I truly enjoyed though the time that I have been disconnected, unwinding from everything, going back home to visit my family and spending plenty of quality time with them catching up with real life, you know, the one I guess most of us keep neglecting time and time again, because it’s always going to be there. You know, they are always going to be there! Well, really? Who knows… Do you? Do you have that certainty? I surely don’t! The thing is that this time around I thought about bringing with me my MacBook Air, so that, in between here and there, you know, those idle moments where nothing seems to be happening, I would have an opportunity to play catch up with work as well as do lots of the blogging I have meant to write over here for a long while. Oh dear, life has done it again. Life is wise. Life knows what’s best for you and for those around you. No doubt. Never question it, because by the time you do it, it would be too late! In the whole time that I spent on vacation, this time around going back home to León, mainland Spain, I hardly managed to be connected to the Social Web. Yes, we all know it already, we are all interconnected, we have always been interconnected. Yet, our physical world, at least, in some parts of the globe that being connected to the Web reliably has got a lot to be desired for! And that’s just what I experienced while being away. After a couple of tries of playing catch up with the Social Web and gaining further frustration for not managing to stay connected, like I am used to, I eventually gave up and stopped trying to get connected. Instead, decided to switch off and enjoy plenty of physical, face to face, social networking with the kind of folks who are already interconnected amongst themselves, and for whom social technologies don’t seem to be playing a key role. At least, the one I thought it would. And I had a total blast throughout all of that time! Goodness! Did that experience change a whole bunch of things for the better?!? It surely did and I am very happy it did! It was also about time it managed to break through and go through that awakening phase that I guess most of us would need to go through every now and then to show us all what really matters. Yes, as usual, the little things! To describe it all in a single blog post would probably take me ages to do, and perhaps you folks may be able to see it coming along in upcoming blog posts anyway, while I try to cover various different subjects and other interesting readings, as I will try to make a connection between this offline time, what I learned during such time, as well as how it relates to the Social Web, and my overall experiences, because, as usual, it does and big time! However, in order to share with you some of the beauty and privilege of what I have enjoyed in the last few days, I thought I would go ahead and resume my regular blogging activities with the Inspiring Video of the Week, which, once again, is a rather short, but amazingly inspirational, thought-provoking and mind-boggling TED Talk by Ric Elias. I will embed the YouTube video clip over here that I bumped into before I started my holidays, while I will point you to the original Talk itself, but you will have to watch through the little bit over three minutes to get a glimpse of what this holiday has meant for yours truly. And, most importantly, how I am beginning to understand how that state of mind is playing with us all to really help us focus on the things that really matter: our personal / business relationships with others, whether at work… Or not. (You would have to agree with me that just the Ted Talk / Video clip on its own would make us all reflect about a thing or two on how we currently view things, and where we should be placing, and focusing on, our *real* priorities, don’t you think? … Yes, it’s good to be back into the usual things of life and work, but with a redefined purpose altogether. Living Social FTW! Ohhh, and talking about re-difining purposes altogether, take a look into this essential, must-read article put together by my good friend Dave Pollard on "Living Disconnected". Perhaps one of the best, most fascinating, blog entries you will read this year. Without a single doubt. It will be worth while your time, for sure, with plenty of food for thought for all of us on what’s coming… if we don’t change our inadequate state of mind!)

A short flight from KL landed us in Penang - the pearl of the orient. There are good reasons for Penang to be called that. It's definitely Malaysia and Asia's food capital and perhaps also the cultural capital, given Georgetown's status as a UNESCO world heritage site. As in KL, we wish we had more time here - good reasons to ask for a bigger holiday allowance. Fat chance of that happening anytime soon, though! Anyways, let me give you a quick run down of a few things that may serve you well if you come to Penang.AccomodationWe booked our accomodation at Penang through Hostelbookers. Hostelbookers often has links with several homestay providers and we ran into Annie's homestay close to the famous Batu Ferringhi beach at Penang. The accomodation was expensive by Penang standards, but we didn't want to run around looking for places to stay given our tight itinerary. The room we got at Annie's home in Batu Ferringhi's posh residential area by the hills was nice and cosy, but I've got to warn you about a few things. Firstly, it's a homestay - so don't expect someone to clean your room everyday and take out your garbage. You've got to do that yourself. Second, she has just one bedroom with an attached bath and that didnt' do us much good since our water heater wasn't working too well. My wife's really particular about a hot shower, and she had to go to the shared bathroom to get one. So we paid for an ensuite, but really did with a shared bathroom. All that said, it's a stone's throw from the beach and in a really picturesque locale and if you can deal with Annie's talkative nature then you should be fine. Getting aroundAs we do at most Asian island and beach destinations, we rented a scooter to get around Penang. A scooter in these parts is absolutely invaluable because of the flexibility it gives you. At 35 RM ($11) a day, it's a cheap alternative to rental cars and taxis. Traffic in Penang is relatively easy to negotiate, since most people follow traffic rules and are generaly disciplined drivers. Given my Indian upbringing and experience handling peak traffic in Bangalore, I had it quite easy. If you're squeamish with the idea of riding a two wheeler, then consider renting a car or better still use public transport. Unlike many other island towns, Penang has a really good bus service called RapidPenang that is fast, cheap and reliable. For example a 90 minute ride from the airport to the beach cost us just 12 RM ($3.77) apiece.SightseeingPenang's definitely a sight for sore eyes with it's rich mix of natural beauty, beaches and culture. Amrita was really tired and sore on day one, while I was being my usual energetic self. So I decided to head off to Taman Negara - the Penang National Park. The park itself is a well maintained trekking site perched atop a hillock, surrounded by the sea. Some of the beaches are absolutely breathtaking. You can take yourself along the 3km hike to Monkey beach. My shoes gave way half way through, so I couldn't make it to the end of the hike and returned from the Maritime University itself. Along the same route, you'll find the Tropical Spice Gardens and the Butterfly Park. I gave those a miss too, since I've seen quite a lot of similar sights in my lifetime.Day two, was perhaps the most enjoyable and the saddest day of our entire trip. We were at Georgetown. Georgetown is an important site of the British colonial era in Malaysia. Home to several temples, mosques, Chinese temples and colonial buildings, every corner of Georgetown is seeped in history. Amrita and I did quite well to see all of Georgetown's 36 interesting sights, but not before my trusty Olympus camera gave way and stopped functioning altogether. Task for me when I get back home - get the camera fixed! I'm not going to list all the sights down, but here are some you shouldn't miss at all:The Clock TowerFort CornwallisPenang MuseumThe Kapitan Keling MosqueThis is by no means an exhaustive list, especially if you're a photography buff. Georgetown has several great photography opportunities and if you don't want to miss any of them then charge your batteries, get yourself one of the detailed area maps and go absolutely bonkers!Day three was a light day -- there was heaps to see, but we decided we didn't want to stress ourselves too much. The Penang hill railway was on our list of things to do, but unfortunately it was undergoing renovation. If you're there in November, you're likely to see the famous train back in action. Anyways, we headed off to the 'infamous' Kek Lok Si temple, which the temple managment keeps expanding every year. While the temple's quite nice, it paled in comparision to some of the other sights we've been witness to especially with the number of shops that dotted every corner of the establishment. It seemed more like a shopping destination than a real temple. So if you had to give this a miss, don't worry - you aren't missing much.FoodLast and certainly not the least - food! Penang is truly the best food destination you can get to. Penang eats its food at hawker centers - a place for street food vendors to get together and sell their stuff. Consider this as the street equivalent of western food courts, only cheaper, tastier and less posh. Hawker centers serve a huge variety of food, ranging from the very popular Nasi Kandar cuisine, to Chinese, Malay, Baba-Nyonya, Indonesian and Western delicacies. While these places generally serve good food, I strongly recommend you eat at Georgetown for a wider range of food and rock bottom prices. Some of my favourite foods at Penang have been the delicious grilled fish that they serve on banana leaves, the satays, the Char Kwoay Teow (fried flat noodles), the Laksa and seafood soups, the Nasi Biryanis and Rotis, the seafood steamboat barbecues, and the different varieties of Mee (noodles). If you feel upto it though, you should try the Bak-Kut-Teh - a very tasty and spicy, soupy concoction made with (take a deep breath) the insides of a pig. No matter how repulsive that sounds, it tastes sinfully good and is well worth the experience. In fact, if you're really particular you can choose which parts of the pig make their way into your soup!Anyways, food is Penang's crowning jewel and you just can't go wrong with it. Regardless of where you go and what you order, you're likely to get good food. All you need is a spirit of adventure to keep trying new things and you're likely to experience strokes of serendipity! Penang was my last stop at Malaysia. I wish I had more time to enjoy this country and travel to some of its other beautiful destinations. Perhaps I'll do that during my rejunevation leave coming up next year. Let's see -- for now, my next stop is Singapore. Keep following this space for more stories from Asia's most organised city.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

(I was hoping to be able to share this blog post while I was on vacation with my family in León, mainland Spain, but apparently lack of reliable (NOT!!) Internet connectivity, provided by Movistar, le sigh, prevented me not posting it sooner… More on that in an upcoming blog entry though, but for now regular blogging will resume, once again from today onwards… Welcome back!) As most of you folks know already, over the next few days, I will be on holidays visiting my family in mainland Spain and while it’s supposed to be a time where I will be doing plenty of disconnecting and unwinding from the Social Web, as I get to do some serious catch up with real life, and with the little things that matter, I just can’t help dropping by on this blog every now and then, and over the next few days, and share with folks some further thoughts and insights that have been in my mind for a little while now. And lately, my mind has been buzzing with how my overall experience with the external Social Web has changed rather dramatically thanks to Google Plus. Over two months on it and I am still having a blast. This time around though for business, too! Yes, that’s right! A few days back a couple of folks asked me to comment on where I would see Google Plus in the near future with regards to other Enterprise Social Networking tools and my initial thoughts have been, almost from the beginning, that the potential to become rather significant is already there. It will be a matter of whether Google manages to let it grow in the right direction with some further innovations taking place, but at the same time while respecting the overall user experience we are treasuring quite a bit, and which distinguishes itself from other social networking tools right from the start. My good friend Andy McAfee put together a rather insightful blog post a couple of weeks back under the heading "Google Plus and The Social Media Moonshot", where he reflected somewhat on that potential Plus has got already embedded into it as a "great boon for enterprises and small groups of collaborators". And I couldn’t have agreed more with him on that statement. In a way, it reminded me, quite a bit, on the huge potential of Google Wave for that same audience, although it’s probably just too bad it didn’t deliver that time around. He also comes to share his experiences with it and how he finds out he spends more time sharing Public posts rather than through Circles, which is quite an interesting observation, even more when everyone is talking about how transformative the whole concept of Circles has been so far. I am not going to spoil it much more for you folks on Andy’s additional thoughts on how it is working out for him, but I would encourage you all to go and have a look through it. It would be worth while the read, for sure! What I found interesting though is how we are both sharing a very similar behaviour on how we are working around Circles themselves. I, too, publish most of my posts to Public and just restrict some of them to specific Circles in a very defined context. That one of business related updates. Indeed, one of my favourite circles that I put together a little while ago is one for Customers, as more and more of them are starting to come along and join G+ and so far I have been enjoying the interactions quite a bit. In the past you would remember the series of blog posts I have been putting together so far, where I have been hinting how Google Plus is surely shaping up the way I interact with the Social Web out there. Some of those insights were highlighting how G+ could be used in a business environment with both public, private updates, hangouts, huddles, instant messaging, etc. etc. and one of the things I am finding out in the last few days is how those interactions are starting to be rather focused on business interactions. It’s been a bit over two months since it was launched and I am already seeing on my Stream how a large chunk of the updates do no longer have anything to do with how this new kid in the block works here and there. The conversation has moved on and once we have past the initial learning curve the really good stuff is starting to happen. For me, that’s interacting with customers, business partners, and fellow IBM colleagues, but at the same time keeping up with industry thought leaders in an open, trustworthy environment where more in-depth dialogue is not only encouraged, but facilitated nicely altogether. A good number of those conversations are happening out there in the open, indeed, but at the same time a whole bunch of other interactions are happening privately, in circles, or through direct messaging, which is when it really gets interesting. With other social networking tools it was rather cumbersome to be able to successfully engage with people in meaningful dialogue for whatever the restriction. Some times it was the 140 characters limitations, or the private nature of the SNS (For family and friends, like Facebook), or the aggressive terms of service from a variety of social tools where you no longer retain the copyright of what you share. Well, Google Plus fixes all of that and so much more! I have been having business related conversations with a few customers, where we have been capable of exchanging long-ish conversations in a natural way, without being forced to be concise, just letting it develop and see how far it could take us or worry about who owns the content shared. And those exchanges have been absolutely wonderful! What social tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Posterous, and a few others, haven’t figured out for years Google Plus delivers from day one! And all of that without taking into account Hangouts, Huddles, Instant Messaging and the like that add further up another key aspect missing from the Social Web: real-time interactions! Not sure what you would think about it, but I am enjoying it so far big time! It’s that specific scenario as well that’s helping me shape up how I interact with Circles. Like I have mentioned above, most of my posts are Public, i.e. published to the world, but the way I consume content in G+ is rather specific on its own. I spend most of the time in Circles. To me, they are all starting to become channels of insightful information and relevant content that I can reuse / reshare again, or that I can learn some more from, or that I can help others with. But with a different twist. While most folks are interested in the content itself, my Circles are all based on a people centric approach, where what matters to me are the people themselves and not so much the updates. That’s why I am enjoying both business and personal updates, even those of a rather trivial nature. Plenty of people keep saying that social networking is all about personalising your experience, to make it your own, to find a purpose for it (Whether business or personally related), to connect with those social tools in a meaningful way and keep the dialogue going and somehow I feel how Google Plus is helping me achieve that. It’s helping me, and those I interact with, become a whole lot more personal with some of our updates. And that’s what I am enjoying the most at the moment, that I am interacting with people, people who bring forward their personalities, their affinities, their passions, their selves, without pretending to be someone else they aren’t. It’s that going personal that’s helping me become more personal myself in trying to keep cultivating and nurturing those personal business relationships, because, at the end of the day, I guess that’s what really matters, right? That’s why, to me, Google Plus, has got that huge potential from an enterprise perspective. That’s why, as soon as Plus starts integrating the massive Google ecosystem behind it, we will be having quite an interesting effect on how we conduct business, specially, externally. Can you imagine when G+ is tightly integrated with Google Search? Mind-blowing is one of the many words that comes to mind! Now, I am sure at this point in time you may be wondering whether that means I will be leaving behind business related social networking environments like our external instances IBM Connections, which are still my preferred method for doing business, right? Well, not really. I still see both of them walking together, hand in hand, getting the job done. What I am seeing though is how most of my business interactions have now moved on from social tools like Twitter or LinkedIn into Google Plus and somehow that’s something that I’m starting to like quite a bit, since, once again, I no longer have to worry about having to figure out technology. I just have got to focus on the conversations and get the job done, which is, in my opinion, what the Social Web should be about. Forget the social technologies at play and focus on living social. Do Business.

If there's one place I just didn't couldn't do any justice to during my trip, it was Bali. The island of the gods may seem like a speck of dust on the huge ocean, but frankly its arduous terrain makes it difficult for you to get a full coverage in the space of three days. In fact, you could be in Bali for a month and still have plenty of things to do. Home to some amazing coral reefs, dive spots, snorkeling waters and surf beaches, Bali provides an equal measure of entertainment on the cultural front. In a largely Islamic country, Bali is a Hindu majority island and it's amazing to see the parallels between my own culture and that of the Balinese. In the end, we could hardly sample the island in our three days, also because of the fact that we didn't want to stress ourselves too much during the last few days of our vacation.OrientationBali is a glorious, large island and the way you need to enjoy it is in layers. There's something for everyone to do. So if you're planning a trip, here's some information that may come in handy.Kuta, the first layer: Bali has an enviable coastline and the Kuta, Legian and Seminyak beach trio provide 40 km of almost uninterrupted coastline for you to enjoy the waters around this island. While Kuta, the premier surf destination is home to maddening crowds and is a typical Asian beach location; Sanur, the country cousin beach is your opportunity to enjoy the waters in quiet. Kuta is also a stone's throw from Denpasar, the city-ish area of Bali, where you can do a bit of museum hopping.Ubud, the second layer: If Kuta is home to Bali's best beach, then Ubud's got to be the cultural capital of the island. Home to quite a few museums, Ubud is also a great shopping destination for Bali's traditional handicrafts - batik, wood carving, stone sculptures, paintings and ornaments. Most of Bali's people are employed in these cottage industries, so you won't really find a particular market for specific things. You just need to pick a village and then go from home to home trying to buy what you fancy. Also, Ubud is home to several other attractions such as the Goa Gajah (Elephant Caves), the Wanara Wan (Monkey Forest) and places to see the famous Barong and Legong dances.Lovina, the third layer: We didn't even touch this part of Bali, though we did border on the fringes of the beautiful Lake Batur and the equally awe inspiring volcano, Gunung Batur. Kintamani, the village around the rim of the volcano, is famous for it's morning market that opens every three days. This apart, Lovina houses Bali's highest and most sacred place - Mount Agung. At the peak of this mountain is Pura Besakih, Bali's most revered temple - from where the gods descend when they come to Bali. Add to this the beautiful black sand beach of Lovina (which I've seen only in pictures), the Candidasa and Padangbai beaches, the Goa Lawah temple and the proximity to Lake Bratan and the temple there, you've got some really interesting things to see and do.All this is just a cursory introduction to Bali. Fringed by other beautiful islets and dive spots, Bali is a great destination for watersports and marine exploration. If there's one place I'm coming back to for my rejunevation leave, it's got to be Bali. Bali also has nine beautiful, highly important directional temples set either at the shores of the sea or in the hills. If you can visit all nine, then you've got to give yourself a pat on your back.What we managed to doI have to admit, we didn't plan our stay in Bali too well. Too much to do, too little time. We had to charter cars because we wanted to just rely on a driver to do the navigation for us - in hindsight, a scooter would have been a better idea. In the end, we just ended up doing a drive through Ubud, with a bit of shopping thrown in. A customary visit to the legendary Tanah Lot temple, dinner on the beautiful Jimbaran beach were just about the things we could make time for. We also witnessed the amazing Barong, Legong and Kecak dances - and if you have just a few hours in Bali, you should definitely watch these. Don't even think of missing them. And we went around the Bukit Peninsula a bit - to the Uluwatu temple and GWK cultural park. My wife got herself a Balinese massage and we spent a few hours at the Kuta beach - but that was it. I feel like I've left so much unseen and untouched back in Bali that I've got to go back. Heck, I haven't even tasted some good Balinese cuisine yet - except my amazing seafood dinner at Jimbaran beach which I highly recommend to anyone who visits Bali. We're now on our way back to Bangalore. Despite the fact that I missed heaps in Bali, I've been missing my dog Sparky a lot. I'm looking forward to seeing him, getting back to work and planning my next holiday with renewed energy. For those who follow this blog for the L&D stuff I usually post - sorry if these posts annoyed you. I just can't start a new blog for personal stuff and keep it alive as well. Hopefully you got some handy hints about the places I visited and if you're heading to any of these destinations, feel free to talk to me and I'll share some tips with you.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009