Whoahh! Who would have thought about that, eh? Here is this English Language and English Literature BA just going through one of those milestones difficult to achieve in today’s current time and age. Who would have thought that on January 20th 1997 I would start working for IBM and that 15 years later I would still be there having a blast loving what I love doing: working smarter, not necessarily harder, with plenty of people as passionate as I am for everything related to knowledge sharing, collaboration, communities, learning and social networking, and aiming at doing, or, at least, trying my hardest, something meaningful and purposeful. Yay!! Happy IBM Anniversary to me! If someone would have told me, back then, in January 1997, that I would be making 15 years in the IT company that hired me back then, as a contractor, to then full time regular employee in November 1999, enjoying the work I do without focusing too much on the technology piece, that I never liked anyway, I would have told them that they would be just plain crazy. If someone would have told me that after IBM making its 100th anniversary last year, and with over 50% of its population less than 5 years in the company, while I just hit 15 years, I would have told them there would be no way for me to last that long! Seriously. Can you imagine yourself in today’s world, 2012, where the average knowledge worker hangs around a job for 4 years approximately, lasting in any business for 15 years and still have a feeling that you are just getting started? Yes, I know, too difficult to imagine, but the reality is that’s the time I have been at IBM and it feels just like yesterday! Long gone are the days when I first started working as a Customer Support Representative for the mainframe, supporting the UK, to then move to the PC environment (OS/2 and Windows 3.11!), to then end up on the Training Department from the Help Centre where I spent 4 years in total getting folks up to speed on how to make effective use of computers to get work their work done, as customer support representatives. Long gone are the years where I spent one of the most unforgettable years on a physical assignment in Dublin helping out with the migration of the Help Center from Zoetermeer, NL, to Dublin itself. Long gone, too, are the years where I was in the Global Technology Services line of business, working as a Knowledge Manager for the whole of EMEA implementing and deploying KMS and other Learning & Knowledge initiatives. Long gone, as well, are the years where I worked at the Systems and Technology Group business unit on their Technical Communities Programme or the Global Business Services Community Building programme within their Learning & Knowledge section. Yes, indeed, time flies when you are having plenty of good fun and you have that strong feeling of contributing into something bigger, much bigger, than you. So much fun as the last 5 years that I have been part of the BlueIQ Team, as a social computing evangelist and community builder, helping accelerate the adoption rate of social software tools, both internally and externally, from fellow IBMers. So much fun as the last 11 years that I have been involved with social networking tools, having gotten started with that precious gem a bunch of us got busy with back then called Fringe and which, right from the start, initiated my journey towards living social till today. And still going strong! Late last year, with the craze from year end activities and the bunch of business travelling I did, I missed a couple of other important milestones: the 8th anniversary of my internal blog (December 2003) and the 6th anniversary of my external blog (October 2005); as well as my 12th anniversary as a full time employee at IBM (November 1999). I couldn’t possibly miss out on another important one, this 15th consecutive year I have been working for IBM, and which I made a couple of days ago. So what did I do to celebrate it? Well, after having completed a face to face team meeting to prepare and put together the last few details from the planning of our internal and external Adoption Programme for 2012 and beyond, and after a rather intense, exhausting, but equally rather exciting and exhilarating experience at one of the best conference events I have attended in a long while (Lotusphere and IBM Connect 2012), I decided to take the vast majority of the day off, hang out by the pool (After all, the weather in Orlando last Friday was just stunning!), relax, muse and ponder some more, about how lucky I am for working where I work, for living where I live, for doing what I love doing, and for having around me an incredible amount of really smart folks, both IBMers, and non IBMers, who, without them realising much about it, have managed to shape up, over the course of the years, yours truly, what I do, what I care for, in short, who I am today. I think it was Gary Hamel who once said that we, human beings, are pretty much shaped up by those people who we are surrounded with, you know, the folks who we usually hang out with (Gosh, wish I would remember the exact quote! Anyone wanting to come to the rescue, please?) and that’s probably the best way for me to define how I feel about work (at IBM) and perhaps share some further insights as to why, all along, I am a people person who cares about who I work with, what we do together and what we can learn new. Long gone are the days where I would worry about making more than enough money, or about having enough (executive) decision power, or influence, to change things, or about having wide spread recognition (even if I don’t deserve it) or just simply having enough work in order to be able to keep up paying my bills. While I can imagine some of that may tick for some people out there, it is no longer the case for me. Maybe even it never was in the first place. Yes, I guess you could call me a hippie, a Hippie 2.0, but I have always believed work should be a whole lot more than just that. Work. It should be about constantly finding new meaning, new focus, new purpose, new goals in one’s life, a strong sense of pride on what you do and who you know, who you connect with, collaborate or share your knowledge with; it should be about finding new ways to keep up with the learning curve so you can stay away from stagnation to no end; from being a passive consumer, or witness, of things (passing by); it should be about having that rather rewarding and fulfilling feeling that you are, hopefully, contributing into something bigger, much larger, something beautiful, that we could then pass on to our future generations knowing that we have done the right thing: leave them with an opportunity to remember and treasure a legacy that will make their lives, and those of their grandkids, much better altogether. Yes, I know. I am a hippie 2.0 at heart, probably on the verge of being flagged as well as a utopian, but very proud of it eventually! Always have. And while I may continue to work on helping achieve that purpose and those goals for as long as I possibly can, there is one thing that I could share with you all out there who may be reading this blog post as I reflect further on about how those 15 years have gone by lightning fast and with me hardly noticing it: carpe diem! Seize the day!! Make the most not only out of (your) work, but also out of your own life! If you come to think about it, we have been given one single life to try to enjoy to the fullest. To get the most out of it, while we can! Yet, we haven’t been given a single job to carry out in our lifetime, have we? But dozens, if not hundreds of them! So, why would we continue to work for something that we may not believe in, that we may not feel motivated, nor engaged enough, nor recognised for and whatever else? Just because it keeps paying the bills without involving too much thinking on the side from you? Really? I hope not. Otherwise we would be totally wasting another precious life. Our own. Just think of it. Already one third of it is spent getting plenty of much needed sleep, specially, those who have learned how important it can well be for your own well being to sleep good enough hours (So we don’t notice it…); the second third is spent at work (where I do realise a good bunch of folks do have a tendency to work plenty more hours than that second third!!) and that just leaves us with one third of our lifetimes to enjoy and celebrate what we enjoy doing the most: our true passion(s). Whatever those may well be… Why waste our meaningful and purposeful lives, just like that?!? Shouldn’t we all wake up, once and for all, and try to aim for better things? We know we can do it. We know we just need that gentle push to get us going. Perhaps 2012 is the year where we can break loose and start living much more fulfilling lives altogether. Otherwise, what’s the alternative? Do you like it? I surely wouldn’t. I guess at this point in time in these reflections I shouldn’t spend entire afternoons at the pool in Orlando, Florida, reflecting on these things, but as I went through my 15th year anniversary at IBM last Friday, while enjoying the sunshine, the good weather, a lovely drink and plenty of thinking along the side(s), I just couldn’t help but reminding myself of one of my favourite speeches, quite an inspiring and thought-provoking reminder for us all on what really matters, and which you can find out more about it on this YouTube video, which I will also embed over here. You know, the same thing over again, the small things: Wear Sunscreen! I am not too sure what I would be doing in the next 15 years, whether I would still be working at IBM, or elsewhere, but one thing for certain is that I definitely plan to continue having a blast with what I do, on a daily basis, living social and all. Life is just too short not to grab it by the face and smack it left and right, if it isn’t facilitating, nor helping, to provide you with you truly deserve. So go ahead and grab it, before it vanishes and moves on, leaving you behind! Happy IBM Anniversary, my dear hippie 2.0! Here’s to another 15 coming along …   The question should not be ‘What keeps you up at night?’, but ‘What gets you up in the morning?’ @practicallyrad at #ls12 — Stuart McIntyre (@StuartMcIntyre) January 17, 2012  

A few weeks back I was in a conversation with one of my smartest and most confident colleagues. What he told me might leave you a bit surprised. If your were to meet this gentleman in person, you'd have no idea that someone like him would ever be nervous. As it turns out, he was talking about his problem of getting nervous when he stands up and speaks in front of a large audience. Now, I must say I wasn't one bit surprised to hear what he had to say, because frankly I know very few people who aren't nervous of public speaking and presenting. In today's blogpost I want to share the advice I shared with my friend - five tips to deal with presentation fright.The Show Begins Before the PresentationIt's very tempting to spend the last few minutes before your presentation rehearsing your slides, thinking of your punchlines and deciding how you'll wow your audience. Frankly, it's a really bad idea to do so because it means you'll spend time away from the audience that's gathering at the venue. Why is it easier to speak to people you already know, than to present to an audience that you don't know at all? Familiarity brings a level of comfort and safety. Too often, the time you spend staying aloof from your audience, gold plating your presentation, is the time you can use to build familiarity and comfort. So how about the next time you present, you try to mingle with your audience, get to know a few people by name and see how you can use the friendly faces in the audience to give you confidence?Don't Blow Your own TrumpetThe other day I saw this really funny Dilbert strip and it reminded me of a session at the recent DevLearn conference. The speaker (his name isn't important) started off his session with a few minutes about who he was and pointed out that the most important thing for us to know was that he had about 30 years of experience in L&D. I found that amusing at the time, because he was speaking of social media in the workplace - a youth driven phenomenon that has come up just in the last few years. How did the 30 years of experience matter? In my mind he had set his billing quite high at that point and the only direction he could go was south. cIn fact, he didn't do his 30 years of experience any good when he said that there's there's a version of Facebook and MySpace that you can install behind your firewall. As it turned out, the talk was a huge disappointment for me personally and was the only session I didn't report. Martin Fowler once told me that if you have to tell your audience how good you are before you start your presentation, it's an indirect indication that your talk is not good enough to establish your credibility. Why would you want to brag and then set yourself up for failure? Presentation guru Olivia Mitchell shares some very practical tips on how you can establish your credibility without bragging at the start of your talk. Frankly she's got some great tips to relieve the pressure that a chest thumping self introduction can create for you.Fight the Murphy Monkey"As you get to speak, it's as if a (Murphy) monkey has suddenly jumped onto your shoulders. He claws your neck and weighs you down - making your knees feel weak and shaky." - John Townsend, The Trainer's PocketbookRegardless of how experienced a speaker is, the feeling of nerves is always there. Everyone feels a little nervous when addressing an audience, especially an unfamiliar one. Experienced speakers however, will deal with this quite well. As Townsend says, they know about the Murphy monkey. You'll notice that a lot of great speakers will start their talks with a question, or a show of hands, or a quick activity or icebreaker. They might initiate a discussion, tell a story or ask for a volunteer. This is a way to not just engage your audience from the start but also a way to share the spotlight with them somewhat. For sometime, during the tense initial minutes, you've thrown the monkey off your back and thrown it to your audience. I've found this to be a good way to take the pressure off myself and get the rest of the presentation into a relaxed, conversational mode.Practice Exclusion while you work on Inclusion"Creativity means creative choices of inclusion and exclusion." - Robert McKee As experts on the topics we speak on, it's natural to have heaps to say. Of course, everything is important and we want people to get a 'complete picture'. Unfortunately people can retain only so much at the end of a standard 60 minute talk. To top it, the more points we need to cover and the more complicated the talk, the more we need to remember. As a consequence there's more pressure on us as speakers. On the other hand, if we were to keep the main presentation simple without being simplistic, the details are likely to emerge from conversation. Conversation helps ease the pressure in presentation situations. It's important to know how your audience is likely to pull the details, and drive out depth that way instead of putting all the pressure on yourself to push out all the information. Olivia Mitchell's excellent guide helps you stop information overload in your presentations.Manage your EnvironmentLast but not the least, I want to mention a problem I face often. At ThoughtWorks University, often the hotel room gets really cold when we switch on the air conditioning. Conversely when we switch of the air conditioning, it gets warm and comfortable, but at the same time it becomes hot and sweaty if you're a really active speaker. The feeling of being hot in a large room doesn't help any presenter's mental state. To add to this, a warm, comfortable room after a heavy lunch in the afternoon is an invitation for a snoozefest, regardless of how engaging the speaker is. I've also walked into rooms with several chairs arranged neatly in rows when I've got just about 15-20 people in the room. People have a tendency to sit in a scattered fashion if the room allows them to. I like to get people into one distinct cluster, as close to myself as possible. That way, it's easier to interact with the audience and keep things conversational. If I have group exercises, they're easier to run this way as well. More importantly, the feeling of having one group close up as against several splinters all across the room feels significantly less intimidating. The less intimidated I am, the more likely I am to be myself. If you present often, I'm sure you feel nervous every now and then. How do you deal with the stage fright? I'd love to hear your tips and I'm sure others who read this article will find those useful too. Please drop your ideas in the comments section. Thanks for reading - see you here next week!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Over the last couple of months, my wife and I have been caring for and feeding a few stray pups in our neighbourhood. For those of you for whom this is an alien concept, in India, every neighbourhood has packs of strays. Often they're made out to be a menace, and they can be with their pack behaviour, especially when protecting their territories and often when they're rabid or just plain hungry. Most times though, they're just good dogs, and just like other dogs, they are lovable, friendly and loyal.Coming back to the original topic, my wife and I had been caring for this new litter and every now and then we thought of putting the pups in a shelter so they could have a good life and maybe find a permanent family. And then every weekend, something would come up and we'd think that we were doing our bit by feeding the pups, so we kept putting off the idea.When I came back from my latest vacation, I noticed that some of the pups were missing, particularly a male pup I called Tawny. Tawny was always weak and lower in the pack order - so he always got scraps for his meal. Perhaps he died of starvation. Wimpy and Brownie, two of my other favourites had grown. I had another thought about taking them to the shelter, but I then thought that they seemed to be doing well, so I put the idea off again.A few nights back an intruding pack of dogs attacked Brownie and Wimpy. Brownie was walking around with a twisted neck two nights back and I had to rush her to the veterinary hospital and shelter. Wimpy on the other hand, breathed her last this morning. I could have stopped this from happening.I think there's a moral in this for me and for others. If you have a thought about doing good for someone - just do it. Don't postpone it for another day - sometimes life has a way of making you regret it.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

About two years ago, I wrote a short blog post on the topic "On Humanising Titans", where I tried to put in perspective what it was like being humane by showing and demonstrating a new kind of leadership, that one of leaders as servants, as I was trying to capture what must have been, till then, one of those sport battles of epic proportions difficult to forget. Even today. Well, three years later, almost at that very same time, and at the very same venue (The Australian Open) I guess we have just witnessed another example where we can surely take the word epic into a new level! But even more so I think we have just witnessed, in its purest form, two very distinctive traits from that new kind of leadership that a bunch of us have been advocating all along over the course of the last couple of years: Perseverance and Resilience. No doubt, last Sunday’s Australian Open’s tennis final between Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal was one that’s going to be rather tough to forget, and perhaps we shouldn’t. In fact, I hope we don’t. If anything, I think, and I am hoping you would all agree with me, that it was magical to witness, over the course of 6 wonderfully long hours!,  how just a single tennis game can transcend the court, and send a clear message, across the globe, when these two titans get together, to help us understand what we all are made of. Perseverance and Resilience at their best. Now, at this point in time, most folks out there who know me know that I’m a true nadalist at heart, but at the same time I do recognise and acknowledge when someone is playing some absolutely stunning tennis, just like Roger Federer has done for years already!, and in this case the tide is shifting towards Nole. So big congrats to him and his team for making quite an entrance into 2012! Just fantastic! However, I would want to share a couple of thoughts with regards to Nadal himself, since I cannot imagine what he must have felt like after losing such a tremendously powerful game down to a couple of details that I am sure we can all think about. And remember. Still. Here is this Spaniard, who has already lost a good bunch of finals with Nole during 2011 wanting to come back for more. Never giving up. Nor wanting to do so any time soon. Not only does he want to improve his game, knowing 2011 wasn’t enough to beat him, but also trying to search from within himself for new ways of re-finding excellence. He knows he just needs to keep coming back for more. He knows that the next time he will be one step closer. Perhaps that one that time around. He may be going down again though, as it has happened last Sunday, but there he is, standing up again, thinking about the next time. Because there will always be a next time. Whenever, wherever. Talking about being stubbornly perseverant and resilient, right? Take a look at this absolutely beautiful piece put together by Brian Philips under the title "Nadal vs. Djokovic: Here We Are Again, My Friend" (The epic warfare of tennis’ big three)", where not only does he get to define, and pretty accurately, what epic means nowadays, like I said, taking a new meaning altogether in today’s sports’ world, but where he also gets to talk about how tennis matches like that one, where titans clash together like those two, brings up a whole new beauty of lessons learned about life in general not just for tennis lovers, but for all of us in general: "Nadal, though? He plays like he’s fighting giants. It’s not just the sneer, or the muscles, or the hair, or that forehand — you know, the one where he swoops the racket all the way around his head like he’s whipping the team pulling his chariot. It’s also that frantic tenacity that used to drive me so nuts. Federer seems devastated when he loses but he also seems to sense losses coming and accept them before they arrive. When Nadal falls behind, he turns the match into life and death. He gets mad. He hesitates less. He hits the ball harder. He doesn’t look sad or scared. He looks defiant, and he plays like he’s possessed" Imperial, indeed! Not sure what you folks would think about that quote, but, to me, it clearly defines a very simple concept that’s slowly, but steadily, re-entering the corporate world at long last: passion. Yes, indeed, it’s all about how passionate you are with your mission, whatever it may well be; how willing you are to go the extra mile to accomplish that sense of achievement for having done something you feel really passionate about; to demonstrate that no matter what the conditions you may be working under, you can still have plenty of good fun. You can still enjoy the game. Whatever the game. It’s basically about showing how that leaders as servants mantra takes a new meaning when you bump into a fearless leader like Nadal wanting to serve not just himself, nor the game, but everyone else along with it! That’s what passion does to you, for you. That’s why every time he hits the court I’m right there, watching him stand, waiting to be wowed and inspired alike, once again, and be ready for another unbelievable tennis match. Because, just like he, Nadal himself, stated after the match, after that 6 hour long final with some incredible tennis on both sides of the court, he’ll "keep fighting". Well, if he will keep on fighting, so will we, don’t you think? It’s the least we could do for him and for us. It’s the least we could do for our leaders of tomorrow. Today. Once again, that’s what passion, and true, unconditional inspiration to want to excel even more at what you already do can do for you. Now, imagine that happening in the corporate world, with our own business leaders? Can you imagine where they would be capable of taking us all? No exceptions? Serving to lead will take us there. No doubt. I can hardly wait for it! And you?

For the last few months I've been a self confessed fan and avid user of iPhone OS. Yesterday, as an impulse buy, I picked up a Droid. Months of conditioning to Apple's interface left me confused when I first saw the HTC Sense skinned Android interface. That was at noon yesterday. A little over a day and I'm happily doing all of my mobile computing tasks using my Android. It doesn't surprise you that I didn't need any training, does it? But here are some questions for you.Did the inventor of the wheel have training? Did Alexander Selkirk who was castaway on an island and survived for four years before rescue have any training? If you embark on a project out of your comfort zone, will you really need up-front training on the domain? The answer to all of these questions is perhaps a "No". For the last few years, I've been thinking that not just the elearning that we create, but also the way we choose to educate in classrooms and corporate boardrooms is ineffective and outdated, given the information explosion we have today. What's the purpose of any education? To prepare us for real life, don't you think? If that's something we agree with, then education should no longer be about disseminating information. Education should be about simulating real life challenges - the information should be incidental to solving the problem. Work, on the other hand needs to build in the safety for failure. In today's blogpost, I want to share a few thoughts about the place for challenges in today's education and work environments.Information is already out thereAs I struggled with my new phone, I decided some information could be handy. Not surprisingly, all the information I needed was available when I needed it. A quick tour of the HTC Sense interface came with the setup application on the phone. Information about really useful Android apps came to me through a Google search. Even when I was planning to buy the phone, I got all the information I needed by searching through reviews on the internet. Now this may all seem simple because I'm just talking of a phone switch. I do think however, that you'll agree with me when I say that information of most kinds is already available to us - regardless of the subject. We no longer face an information famine - it's all there at the click of a mouse. Why then, do our models of education and training retain the legacy of the 80's when information was scarce and available with only a few experts? Now that most of the information is already out there, I believe we need our experts and 'trainers' to be more than just information bearers. Failure is a great teacher "The main point is that, if we continue to look at education as if it's about coming to school to get the information and not about experiential learning, empowering student voice and embracing failure, we're missing the mark... Because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process." - Diana LaufenbergYou should definitely watch this talk by Diana Laufenberg where she talks about her experience of teaching children in different schools and how she has found mistakes to be an integral part of learning. At ThoughtWorks we believe in a culture of 'failing fast and learning from our mistakes'. That's because learning is an iterative process and not an dimension free event. I remember that I've learned most of the skills I practice today through years of applying them and having failed several times. Failure has taught me the ways that don't work and as a consequence I've learned the ways that work for me. Learning is effective when it's painful, but most learning experiences tend to try and lay a red carpet for the learner. We do our best to tell them 'the right way to do things' and coach them through the 'one right answer'. What happened to good, old fashioned exploration? Now I know that an 'instructionally sound' approach of leading the learner down 'the right path' seems very elegant, but this is what I call 'false elegance'. It seems like very intelligent design in comparision to the trial and error approach of learning, but we all know at the bottom of our hearts that the messy, failure ridden road is the one that builds true skill. Why then, do educational programs not encourage failure? Why don't companies build in the safety to fail, so people can keep learning from their mistakes? After all if people keep learning, the organisation tends to keep growing.Information creates Knowledge, but Challenges create experienceThe downside to pushing your content to the learners is that it assumes that all of the information is equally relevant to the learners and meets their learning needs. - Tom KuhlmannI'm a big believer in the power of pull to create learning. As human beings, we're an extremely adaptive race. Given a challenge, we'll usually gather the know-how to solve the problem. Challenges need to be at the center of modern learning experiences. Be it training, or elearning, when there are challenges that are as close to the real world as possible, we help learners build the confidence and experience to respond to similar challenges at the workplace. For example at ThoughtWorks University, graduates have the challenge of building a real world application for a real world client. The challenge has everything you'll see in real life, delivery pressures, technical complexity, teamwork, consulting, etc. By the end of the experience, we're not just helping the grads to learn the skills they'll need at their job - we're helping them to learn how to learn.Setting challenges is just a better use of people as well. We don't need to hire expert trainers in hordes if only we can build in safety to fail at the workplace. Intelligent workscape design can help in a big way. In instructional situations, designers can work with SMEs to create authentic challenges. SMEs on the other hand can serve as coaches (or virtual coaches) to guide people through the struggle. In face to face situations, this is a way to foster leadership - after all a lot of leadership skills are the same as the ones we need to become good coaches.As we head into the next generation of learning technology, I wonder if our focus needs to be around designing experiences over designing information dumps. I'm a big believer in the fact that learning is a process, and not an event - how can we put our learners on a diet of information and let real world challenges determine if they even need all that information in the first place? What do you think? Is pull overrated, or can we do significantly better as instructional designers? I welcome your comments!© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Once again, I am on the road on to my next business trip, this time around with two distinctive parts; one of them to Helsinki, Finland, where I will be participating in a number of IBM sponsored events around the Social Enterprise, a really cool, inspiring and rather innovative initiative on "Redefining Work 925" and, believe it or not, Living "A World Without Email" (One of my favourite topics du jour, as you can imagine …) and the other one to Paris, France, where I will be participating, and moderating a couple of panels, at the always engaging, entertaining and rather thought-provoking Enterprise 2.0 Summit, which starts next week on February 7th, and that this year promises to be quite an amazing event! But more on that one later on … Yet, once again, since connectivity while on the road has got a lot to be desired for, I have picked up the good habit of pruning my RSS feeds (Remember RSS?), spice them up a bit and enjoy offline reading while I’m disconnected. And while I am doing that up in the air, I bumped into this brilliantly provocative blog entry by Tim Elmore on "Confessions of a Ghost Writer … for Students". Goodness! How low can we, human beings, get? Or, even worse, how can we still allow that to happen? Indeed, in a rather sharp article Tim comes to question not just the ability of ghost writing for students per se, but the ethics, or, better said, the lack of ethics and morale, in doing so when students are employing those ghost writers to pass on their exams on subjects that may be of interest to them, or not. Showing, at best, how laziness, and perhaps that lack of morale or motivation combined altogether, can certainly damage the true spirit of hard labour (Even on the literal sense of the word!) in delivering something for which one would feel very proud of. At least. The story of the ghost writer that Tim exemplifies in that article will surely give you chills going through your spine big time, as it highlights all of those traits that a bunch of us have been wanting to wipe out from the corporate world as well for a while now: hypocrisy, lack of ethics and morale, unwillingness to do meaningful work (that’s truly yours, not someone else’s), lack of responsibility and co-ownership, laziness, instant gratification for the sake of it, not the value you may be providing, etc. etc. You know the gist… What’s really troubling though from the article itself is not what Tim portraits quite clearly of what’s happening out there right at this very minute with students and the work they produce (Or don’t produce, better said), but a rather poignant question that I thought I would include as well over here to see the whole context of where we may be heading: "What will our world look like if these students become our leaders?" Whoahh! Sorry, but before we try to venture an answer for that rather provocative question allow me to comment on it for a minute: No, we do NOT want to have those leaders governing in our world. Sorry, that may have worked in the recent past, but as we moved into a (business) world that’s more interconnected, networked, engaged, transparent, public, nimble, collaborative, trustworthy, engaged, committed, authentic, and whatever else you can think of, along those lines, that is, the last thing we need is to have a range of generations who become our leaders by doing something that doesn’t match, really, any of those traits: cheating (due to lack of ethics and morale). Tim’s article clearly reminds me of a recent internal conversation I had with a bunch of fellow IBMers where we were discussing the concept of ghost writing on blog posts and social networking sites, specially, with senior leaders in mind, as a way to allow them to enter the world of Social slowly, but steadily, helping them adjust to new ways of interacting with the help of others, who may be a bit more versed. Well, now more than ever, and after reading Tim’s piece, I’m not convinced at all that ghost writing, even for executives!, is a good thing! The Social Enterprise has always demanded authenticity, co-ownership, responsibility, trust, transparency, commitment, engagement, motivation, being the real you, your self, the don’t pretend to be who you are not, etc. etc. Around the world of blogging, I have always found it very difficult to try to justify ghost writing when authenticity and trust kick in, even for senior leaders and that article surely confirms that belief. If you can’t be you, please don’t get someone to be you. No matter how important you are, how busy you may well be, how much of a thought leader you are (and perceived by others), engaging in social networks requires your personal you to do it. Sorry, no ghost writing. Yes, I can imagine such activity may have worked in the traditional world of communications and marketing, and, to a certain degree, I can agree with doing such activity when you need to deliver a certain corporate message, whatever that may well be, but when it’s just you (your thoughts, your beliefs, your ideas, etc.) what you are delivering we want to hear, read, learn from you, AND interact and engage with you!, no intermediaries, please. We had enough of those in the recent decades and I am starting to think we need to move on from that discourse. To the point where I am more and more convinced by the day that if you can’t engage with your real self in social networking sites, your blog and whatever other means of living social, I think it would be much preferred that you don’t engage at all. We want the authentic you, the trustworthy you; we want to have the certainty that we are talking with the real thing: your own person. I guess you folks may be thinking that I am a purist and all, and perhaps I am (Don’t think I will have any issues with that notion in this context, to be honest), but read Tim’s article once again, move that context into the corporate world, and try to answer that question again: "What will our world look like if these students become our leaders?" … with that mentality, but, even worse, with that notion of ethics and morale about meaningful work, inspired by their so-called role models that have already starting shaping up that wrong set of core values. Not sure what you would think, but I feel we need to stop it. And very soon, before it is just too late! How can we possibly justify ghost writing / engaging in social networks today when that lack of authenticity, trust, openness and transparency, amongst others, will clearly not just damage your reputation as a business (Remember businesses are made of people!), but also your engagement with your peers, subordinates, thought leaders, customers and business partners alike? Is this the new workplace of the future, we have been envisioning over the course of the last few years, that we would want to inspire within our younger generations, as well as our more senior knowledge workers? I surely hope not! There is something very wrong about this out there, in my opinion, and the sooner we all put a stop to it, the better. So next time that you may be thinking about doing ghost writing, or ghost blogging, please do think about it, think of the repercussions, of the implications, of the consequences, of the potential damage you will be creating. And, above all, be transparent and open enough about it and let us know you will be still carrying on with it… so that we can move on in search for those other leaders who want to be their selves inspiring lots of trust, authenticity, transparency, openness, engagement and whatever else, because, somehow, I feel we would ALL be much, much, better off altogether! Business. Made Social. Earn it!

One of the most popular posts on this blog is about my ideas of what constitutes a social learning culture. In that article, I wrote about the need to bring together the most passionate people you can find for your business. If that is true, then intelligent hiring has to be at the center of an organisation's social learning strategy. While technology is crucial to the success of a social learning initiative, at the center of it all are people. In today's blogpost I want to articulate my points about why hiring is crucial to success of a social business and ask if L&D has a place in developing a hiring approach for the organisation.The 90-9-1 RuleWikipedia's most active 1,000 people — 0.003% of its users — contribute about two-thirds of the site's edits. - Nielsen, 2006 I've linked to this resource several times and to me it represents the constraint for most communities. Researcher Jacob Nielsen in his 2006 alertbox said that in most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action. This is what we often term as the Participation Inequality principle of online communities. Now if we were to extend this principle to a mid-sized company of let's say 2000 users, that gives you about 20 people contributing to all the action on your social platform. Traditional hiring eventually norms to an equilibrium similar to that of the outside world. 1% on the big, broad internet still amounts to thousands of users. 1% participaton the intranet, is something that an organisation serious about social learning can ill afford to live with.I Think of Workplace Learners on a SpectrumWhen interviewing people, I like to investigate their inclination and approach to learning. Now what I use, has no scientific basis though I want to introduce it to you all the same. I tend to think of people on a spectrum as you'll see above. On the left hand are the people who I call the laggards (for want of a better term). These are the people who cannot articulate their approach to learning clearly and don't present evidence of being self driven in how they learn, share and connect. The dormants on the other hand show evidence that they can learn when presented with a challenge, but don't quite demonstrate that they can drive their own learning. They do show promise and are perhaps only awaiting inspiration. The learners are the third kind of people on my spectrum. These individuals can show evidence of having proactively picked up several new skills over the past few years. They however aren't in a position to influence change in their peers, because of their current lack of sharing and connection. The resistors are a special kind of people on the spectrum and I'm not even sure if they're a different breed. These are learners who already share and connect in their own way. Despite their obvious ability to be social learners, they're resistant of newer approaches to learning and can often be wary of new tools, platforms and strategies. The really special people are the sharers, who can not just drive their own learning, but have no trouble adjusting to any kind of collaborative environment. The tools are only a means to an end -- they focus on making the most of the environment they get.Now I'm not trying to pitch my approach to you - it obviously is very 'me'. What I'm trying to say here is that learning is also a skill and different people show different levels of proficiency with this skill. To build a true learning organisation, you need to avoid hiring the laggards and dormants until they demonstrate evidence of at least being able to drive their own learning proactively. While job interviews focus a lot on core competence, I wonder if it's crucial that we try to gauge learning ability when you're hiring?Emergent and Novel Practice need SharingA lot of knowledge management thinking draws from Dave Snowden's work on the Cynefin model. Snowden describes situations, models and systems by way of four main domains - Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. For simple problems, the cause and effect relationship is absolutely clear. You could write a five step process to solve the problem and you'll get the same results each time. It is akin to turning the handle on a sausage machine - you know exactly what to expect. For problems in the complicated domain, there's again a clear cause and effect relationship, but you need to analyse the situation to establish this. Once you've understand cause and effect, you can easily apply an established practice.It's here that things become interesting. When problems head into the complex domain, cause and effect are so mixed up that you can determine the relationship only in hindsight. Depending on how a few parameters change, things can look quite different. This is where story telling and experience sharing is crucial. Knowledge sharing helps establish patterns that can help identify cause and effect relationships. This leads to solutions in this space (emergent practice). What's even more interesting is the chaotic domain, where there's no visible relationship between the cause and effect. This is where problem solving becomes iterative and we do what seems like a good choice. Depending on the result, we retrospect and take the next step. In the chaotic domain, collaboration helps drive the right decisions eventually leading to a novel solution for a novel problem.Most organisations are looking to outsource problems in the simple domain. Organisations are likely to retain the problems in the complicated domain, but the problems that we have little idea about are in the complex and chaotic domains. We need sharers to solve these problems. Hiring helps us seed our organisations with smart people that are willing to share, collaborate and connect to solve tomorrow's problems.After that rather long setup, the question I want to ask is if L&D needs to play a larger role in the way organisations hire. If we really care as much about collaboration and knowledge sharing in the enterprise, then is there a case for us to invest ourselves strongly in our employers' people strategy? How can we help HR identify the meta-cognitive candidates that can be the sharers our businesses need? If we say we don't need to bother with this , then are we saying we can afford participation inequality? What do you think? © Sumeet Moghe, 2009

As I have just mentioned in my last blog entry, the last few days I have been embarked on my latest business trip, coinciding with a wonderful visit all around to Helsinki, Finland, where my good friends from IBM Finland invited me over to participate on the IBM CIO Forum event, with the rather innovative initiative of "Redefining Work 925", and a couple of other events, and where, after being there for about three days, I think I may have just experienced the future… The future of a fully networked and interconnected world… Our world. And what it would look like altogether. And, yes, it’s much more exciting and brighter than whatever I could have ever imagined! As a road / air warrior, I get to travel a fair bit and visit not just mainland Spain, but a bunch of other countries in Europe, and North America. I have yet to visit South America, continental Africa and Asia, although I know it will all come together eventually at some point, but if there is anything that Helsinki, Finland, has shown me in the last couple of days is that you can have more than a decent Internet connection, and for free!!, while you are carrying on with your work and personal life helping it become ever so much more engaged, participative and interconnected with the Social Web available out there! In another blog post I will detail some of the highlights from my visit to Helsinki, what I learned and what plenty of other folks are doing out there in the area of Social Computing, but for now I just couldn’t help thinking about putting together this short blog entry to explain why my expectations on connecting to the Internet, for work, or personal stuff, will never be the same again after this business trip. And here is why… That’s a snapshot of the free wi-fi connection at the hotel where I stayed those days in Helsinki. And this is the one from the free wi-fi connection at the Helsinki airport, which is even much more remarkable: For a good number of years I have always been complaining (Yes, I guess it’s complaining, because that’s probably what I have been doing all along…) about how poor the quality of wi-fi and Ethernet connections are in a good number of countries I have visited (US, Canada, Spain, France, UK, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, Mexico, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, etc. etc.) and on top of that how expensive it is for the quality of service that we get, even worse here in Spain, where the prices for ADSL, for instance, are some of the most expensive in Europe with the lowest bandwidth! And not just at hotels, conference venues, Internet kiosks, regular 3G connectivity, etc. etc., but also at our own homes! I was reaching the point of believing that we would have to get used to living through such poor quality standards of service with no remedy, waiting for our ISP providers to keep making big bucks while never delivering, and eventually give up on it all. Here is another example. This week I am in Paris, to attend and moderate a couple of panels at the always enlightening and rather exciting Enterprise 2.0 Summit event and here is the current free wi-fi connection at the hotel I’m staying at, so that you folks can have a look into what it is like coming back to the harsh reality I have been exposed in the last few years: Ouch!! Well, see the difference? Maybe not! Maybe we should not get used to such poor quality standards on providing wi-fi connectivity, regardless of the venue. While In Helsinki, I certainly experienced the future. And it is just gorgeous and bright! It’s something that I never expected it would be quite shocking as it was, yet so rewarding and fulfilling. Have you ever heard about being empowered, as a human being, thanks to technology and the Internet, regardless of whatever you may be doing? Well, I experienced that! And so much more! I met a bunch of wonderful friends over there, some of whom I have been wanting to meet up in real life for the last few years, like Esko Kilpi or Riitta Raesma; met other new friends like Saku Tuominen, Petra Sievenin, Harri Ohra-Aho, Marko Laukkanen or my fellow IBM colleague Ville Peltola, amongst several others (Too many to mention!!), who are working on some pretty amazing stuff related to the Social Enterprise field, yet for them that amazing pervasiveness of a fast and speedy Internet connection is a given. Well, perhaps it should be for us, too! It was quite a liberating experience, to be honest, to be socialising in the true sense of the word, i.e. going to bars, restaurants, and whatever other hang-out places and find out that each and everyone of them had really good, decent, and FREE, Internet connections for their customers to enjoy while having conversations with your friends. Social, for me, while on the road, has taken a new meaning. One that I’m finding it hard to come to terms with it, because, usually, when I am travelling abroad, as soon as I leave Spain, I am in the dark, don’t have data, nor do I incur in the hugely expensive and abusive roaming charges that the European Union keeps doing nothing about to our mobile providers over the course of the years and it’s starting to become a rather frustrating experience. Even more, when I suspect that Finland is not the only case where that pervasive Wi-Fi access and service have been phenomenal all along. Denmark would probably be also one of those exceptions at the same level as Finland in helping us all understand that things can be much different, once and for all! Like I experienced myself as well last Wednesday, while I was at the airport waiting for my connection to Helsinki and the free wi-fi was just as good! Yes, I guess that expectations have risen to a new level for yours truly, with regards to what a Decent Internet Access would be like, specially, while on the road, since, after having experienced a new wonderful world of fast, quality connectivity, things will never be the same. In fact, I keep questioning myself with such an amazing connected experience with the Web how come there are so few Tech related conferences taking place in the Nordics? I don’t think it’s about the weather, although last week surely was quite another experience!, but I know, for sure!, that is definitely nothing to do with the availability and accessibility of Internet connection, because over there, it just rocks! And I just can’t wait to come back to experience the future once again, … And perhaps with a bit of nicer weather I may have moved over there altogether! For now though, here’s an interesting question I would want to put together out there for someone, whoever that may well be, to provide an answer to it, to close this blog post: What do we, human beings, need to do to get some Decent Internet Access over here in Western Europe? Where did we go wrong? Anyone care to venture an answer for that one? Clearly we do have leading examples like Finland or Denmark, so what’s stopping us from truly empowering us to fully live the Social Web the way it was meant to be all along for all of us: universal, pervasive, free access to information, knowledge, AND connections, i.e. the people? Is that just too scary? Anyone?

Dinesh Tantri, Nikhil Nulkar and I are on a project together at ThoughtWorks and we share some incredible moments together talking through our social business approach at ThoughtWorks. The project is part of the reason I've been a little late to write my weekly post. I'm also fortunate to work alongside Sahana Chattopadhyay who's such an astute thinker in the field of workplace learning and collaboration. I learn heaps just being around them. Every now and then I run into situations where I see how social software can make work life so simple. That said, doing the simple things aren't often the easiest. The transition from the non-social way of working and learning isn't the easiest for organisations to deal with. Like every other system, organisations are a system with a state of equilibrium. This equilibrium brings in a state of inertia - an inertia of working a certain way. It takes a lot of effort to establish a new state of equilibrium and the discipline to do the right things. This includes avoiding the temptation to commit what I consider sins of social business. So, in today's blogpost I want to introduce to you what I call the seven deadly sins of social business - things you want to watch out for, if you really care for a social enterprise.1. An Obsession with organisation "Organizations lull themselves into a false sense of safety with their hierarchies rather than recognize the danger of discouraging information flow, keeping data out of the minds of people who need it." - The New Social Learning (Marcia Conner, Tony Bingham)A few days back I read a fun article by Gia Lyons of Jive Software. Gia had a guest blog post from a social business advocate who expressed her frustration with "highly structured document management processes" and heirarchical organisation. In my opinion upfront information architecture for social business platforms is a very bad idea. Let me explain. People often represent stuff heirarchically through bullet points, folder structures and what have you, but they end up finding things organically. If you're on a Mac, you're possibly organising your data in a really structured folder system, but perhaps end up finding your stuff using Spotlight or Quicksilver. On the web too, we try to find information through the shortest route possible - tags, bookmarks, search, mentions on Twitter. Heirarchies are not a representation of everyone's truth either. For example a piece of content that sits in Products->Consulting, could also sit in Products->Consulting.A great risk of heirarchies and prescriptive information architecture is that in our attempt to imagine the path people will take to contribute to the platform, we create empty containers that never have any content in them. It's quite easy to accomodate legacy behaviour and give into stakeholders that want a folder like structure to your social platform. I do think however, that what customers want is often not what they really need. So, let's remember that information is multi-dimensional. People represent information differently and metadata helps create a crowdsourced representation of your organisation's knowledge. Instead of creating walled gardens for content, let's think of ways that we can actually create information flows - perhaps to the extent that we make our organisational walls porous and harness stuff from the public internet.2. Throw the Kitchen Sink at ThemLet's face it, you can't force people to see every piece of information that you put on your intranet. People consume information by virtue of their interest and the people they trust. There can be a tendency to architect a system that sends everyone an email for every activity on the platform. That is a possibility as much as the reality where people have thousands of unread emails in their inbox. You could also clutter the landing page of your intranet to force people to see everything they 'should' see. There are several sites with that level of clutter that no one ever goes to. As in the Twitter world, people follow the people they trust and care about. They follow the hashtags that indicate a topic of interest. It's crucial that we allow people to manage their information stream. Personalisation is a key to making any social business initiative succeed - that's at the heart of PKM too. The huge complaint about information overload is really about filter failure, but you don't want to create a situation in your organisation where you don't give individuals the opportunity to place their own filters. 3. Impose Yourself Through SoftwareI've been speaking to my colleagues about the Articulate Community. It's a community of 57000+ practitioners, with three passionate community managers. Tom, Dave and Jeanette work untiringly to stitch together a community that is free of imposed structure, rules, and regulations. The Articulate Community is not snarky, doesn't have draconian rules, and allows people to contribute the way they feel appropriate. The community managers do what it takes to aggregate contributions from the big broad internet as well as through the community. As curators and connectors, they make sure that they balance informality and the lack of rules with constant communication. You should read about this community. There's a strong tendency to impose every 'business rule' through software. The frank truth is that this is not transactional business software. People will make contributions the way they please, and the key is to keep the platform frictionless, freeform and emergent.4. A Limited pilotHave you ever heard the suggestion of piloting your social business solution with one team, to see how it goes? Social business is all about serendipity and breaking down the walls. By opting for a limited pilot, there's no question of breaking down the wall, because innovation is within a closed group. There's also limited chance of serendipity because the chance of accidental discovery from our strong ties is less likely."Serendipity is possible when we’re collaborating with our close colleagues on a well-defined project, but that’s probably when it occurs least often. It’s much more likely during wide forays and broad searches, the kind that are so easy to do with current technologies." - Andrew McAfee.As McAfee quite clearly articulates, there's great value in going "as broad as possible right away". Even if all parts of the business aren't social from day one, it's important to have something up there that touches everyone's lives. To try and put this simply, my view of a pilot is one where we try address breadth first instead of addressing only depth for a particular function. Breadth promotes everyone's access to the platform and allows users to start exploiting the emergent nature of social software to decide how they'll use it.5. Nurturing Competing SystemsIn his excellent article, "Why Good Companies do Bad Things", Michael Idinopulos talks about innovation marginalisation. Firstly statements like "This is a cool, crazy experiment. We're just going to put it out there and see what happens. In a few months we'll decide what to do with it." This, as Michael says appeals to early adopters but scares everyone else away. The other big mistake is to nurture competing systems, especially the systems we transition from. Andrew McAfee talks about the 9x endowment effect, where "We value items in our possession more than prospective items that could be in our possession, especially if the prospective item is a proposed substitute." People are unlikely to shift from the inertia of their existing way of working to a new way of working, especially if it pulls them out of comfort zones. More importantly, why would you want to have multiple systems serve the same purpose?A flipside to competition is an unnecessary competition with email. Let's understand that email is the most ubiquitous tools in the workplace. Just like we haven't been able to weed out the telephone yet, we will continue to need to email to run business. So instead of competing with email, we'd rather use it as a way to engage late bloomers on the platform. Competing with a system that you can't kill is just a bad idea.6. An Obsession with RisksA lot of project management has to do with risk management. While this is a great project management competence, it can be a huge bane in the social business world. A huge part of social business is about understanding the risks, putting in place good community management and letting go. What can happen instead, is that project managers obsess about risks and block out features in the fear that users will misuse the system. Frankly, social media puts things out in the open - there are more eyeballs looking. The crowd can actually help surface abuse. In addition, I must say it's foolish to try and manage all risks through software restrictions. Community management plays a big part in not just educating users, but also in connecting people on the platform, and creating a meaningful structure. Andrew McAfee's article about Enterprise 2.0 insecurities is a great post about this very topic.7. Modelling the CxO's viewLast, but not the least social business is not about constructing a heirarchical intranet that models your CxO's view of the world. Leadership does often drive the business with a certain strategy in mind. While all of this is nice and dandy, a lot of CxO level representations don't necessary model a regular knowledge worker's view of the enterprise. The way you design your social intranet provides an entry point to a myriad of learning and collaboration possibilities for your colleagues. Just the same way as we design applications with users at the center, it's crucial that we design social platforms with the average employee, not the CxO. Do they view the enterprise as a collection of communities? Then model it that way and not as a collection of practices as your CxO wants it to be. Do people want project collaboration to be democratic? Then model it that way, not through a top down view of how a CxO believes a project should collaborate. Remember, social business is a great leveler and it's for the people, by the people, of the people.I tend to be a bit of a headstrong social media dude, and I guess my views can be too strong - though I try my best to balance them out the best I can. Having said that, I do have good reasons to stand by my views, so I'm looking at you to tell me what you think of what I've posted today. What do you think? Am I talking through my hat here? Or are you nodding your head in agreement? What do you want to add to this list? I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

As you may have noticed already, the last post that I put together over here in this blog was a bit over three weeks ago, so, once again, it looks like that quiet period is now over and it’s a good time again to resume my regular blogging activities. I know that plenty of folks out there may have thought that I have given up on blogging altogether, again!, after such a long time not writing much in it, but far from the truth! Coming back in full force and perhaps with a new direction for the blog as well, which I will explain in an upcoming new entry. However, I am sure you are all wondering what have I been up to then in the last few weeks, right?, and what prohibited me from coming back to the blog and keep up with the regular schedule. Well, how can I put it? Hummm, how about when a combination of business travelling, planned obsolescense, lack of consideration towards others’ own health, and @elsua v4.0 decided to kill my own productivity? Indeed, in such pretty demanding times, where more and more is expected from us, knowledge workers, where we are continuously asked to produce more with less, where remaining effective, if not even more productive, has taken a new meaning for all of us, it seems like we are doing a pretty bad job at getting rid of productivity killers and help us get better at what we are already doing. And I am not just referring to the things we can do ourselves to avoid those productivity killers, since I am sure we all know how we could get rid of each and everyone of those!, but talking about those that have been inflicted upon us and for which we do have very little to do to overcome it; but perhaps now it’s a good time to get rid of the silliness of it all. Cutting through the chase though, the main reasons why I haven’t been capable of resuming my regular blogging activities, as well as pretty much all of my external social networking interactions out there on the Social Web, and perhaps internally as well, has been due to 4 different productivity killers that apparently all decided to kick in at the same time, i.e. that period of three weeks!, and for which one has got very little to do about it all. Although, again, perhaps we need to start doing something about it. And here is why. Here are those productivity killers that I wish we would all know how to address them and get rid of them: Business Travelling After having seen, and experienced!, the future, as a result of a short visit to Helsinki, Finland, I am no longer too sure that I would be capable of putting up with being stuck at an airport, or in a hotel room, or at a conference venue, where the Internet connection is just not up to the standards of what one would expect to keep being productive. For example, on my way back home from Paris, after a wonderful Enterprise 2.0 Summit event, I was stuck for almost 5 hours in Barcelona airport, plus another 3 hours from Barcelona to Gran Canaria. And throughout all of that time I couldn’t manage to get a decent connection in order to do my job. That, right there, is already 8 hours of lost productivity! Yes, 8 hours that no-one is paying for! Now, as most folks out there may have seen it for a long while, in a good number of European countries things are starting to become a bit dire, with regards to the financial crisis, high unemployment rates, lack of decent jobs, etc. etc. Our governments keep telling us that we need to go through these little sacrifices in order to make it. They keep telling us that we need to work more hours, increase our productivity and perhaps become more conscious of the time we spend at work. In short, they keep telling us we need to be more productive. Yet, time and time again, they keep neglecting and ignoring the fact that traditional work is no longer the vast majority of the knowledge work happening out there. It’s no longer a physical location, or a place, or having a set of tools. It’s actually a state of mind. Work happens around you, wherever you may well be, and with whatever the tools you may have at your disposal, whether it’s your laptop computer, your smartphone or your tablet. Governments keep failing at understanding and embracing this new dynamic where for most of the road / air warriors out there work happens while we are on the move! On the train, on the plane, at a hotel room, at a conference venue, meeting up with customers, etc. etc. And when a whole bunch of us have made the transition into an always-on work environment relying on the cloud to deliver what we need, we just can’t afford failing at not having a decent connectivity. We just can’t be effective and productive enough if the external world doesn’t catch up with us! If governments would finally truly understand that. If they’d want us to be rather productive they need to help us stay connected, regardless of wherever we may well be! Now, you may be saying that I am a dreamer, asking and longing for such state of things for always-on work, the reality though is that I am not. Finland, and I would venture to state that for all of the Nordic countries, for that matter, keeps showing us, and leading!!, the way. And, let’s face it, it’s working! Look at they financial crisis in all of those nordic countries. See? Nothing. They just keep working! They may have other problems and other issues, but lack of productivity is no longer one of them. And I bet that pervasiveness of a strong broadband penetration has got a whole lot to do with it. So if they have managed to make it, why can’t we, the rest of Europe, follow suit? Couldn’t we learn something from them? Aren’t we all part of the EU after all? Shouldn’t we help each other raise our common stakes as productive European citizens? Something tells me we got a lot more to win than to lose, don’t you think? Planned Obsolescence But just as I was on my way home, when I arrived and turned my MacBook Air on, the unexpected, as usual, was about to happen. And again far too soon! Indeed, on the top left of my MBAir a funny rattling noise started to become more and more worrying and after some initial diagnostics I eventually found out the MBAir fan finally ceased to stop working. Oh, yes, MBAir machines *do* have fans as well. Oh, yes, MacBook Air machines are also very much trapped in this 20th century non-sense that we all know as Planned Obsolescence. I have been having this machine for a bit over a year now, exactly one month after the guarantee expired!, and bang! The fan is now history. After calling Apple Care, as well as the Apple Store where I bought it, it looked like it was going to take me quite some time to have it fixed and eventually returned back to me, and quite pricey, too! So, falling, once more, for that silliness of planned obsolescence, I decided to give myself a treat (Seeing a very special date coming up for yours truly, which I will mention shortly…) and purchase a new MacBook Air 13", which is the machine I have been using in the last couple of days. But it wasn’t the machine I originally got when I bought it. Somehow, at the shop where I bought it they mistakingly gave me the 128GB hard disk model, vs. the 256GB one, which is the one I wanted. And that basically meant that I had to go through 2 different installations over the course of one week in order to be up and running once again. And I did. I tell you, there is something out there on getting new shiny objects, but, more importantly, something that I have noticed myself over the course of the last few years as you get a new machine time and time again. Going minimalist. That’s right. Every new machine that I have been getting in the last few years I have gone one level deeper with regards to the amount of Applications, Software, Documents, Pictures, Files and what not I may have got on my machine to the point where minimalism has taken a new meaning for me. Yet, it was two different clean installs that I had to do over the course of a single week and that added, quite a lot, to the productivity drains I have been suffering from in the last few days, and those of you who may have done such recent move would probably confirm this as well. The key question though that I keep coming up with is when is the world finally going to come to terms with waking up and making a successful transition into becoming a full, sustainable, circular economy and leave behind those economy models that not only keep getting us in trouble, as we have seen, witnessed and lived over the last 4 years, and still going strong!, but at the same time, they keep destroying the most precious gift given to us, human beings, next to our life: our planet. When are we going to get rid of that pernicious obsession with wanting to own stuff. What’s wrong with borrowing, lending, making good use of stuff you need and then letting it go, with learning to live just with what you need, not what people keep implanting in your brain that you need? When are we going to fully understand that the resources we have got around us are finite. And we, too, are finite. That one day, if we don’t change our mentality, and start living more meaningful, respectful, purposeful and sustainable lives, we would be the ones that need replacing, that our long awaited planned obsolescence is very much overdue and that Earth will dispose of us, just as much as we are doing of her at the moment. Yes, please, let’s stop, and get rid of!, the non-sense of planned obsolescence and help us keep productive with what we have for longer periods of time. Planet Earth would be a much better place to live in, for sure! Lack of Consideration of Others’ Health Ok, moving into the third productivity killer for yours truly in the last couple of weeks. This one, in particular, is the one where I am planning to become a lot more aggressive to try to address it on my own terms, since I think it can be done easily. If you have been following my internal and external social interactions, to the point where I may have shared across some of them, you may have noticed how last week, the entire week!, I have been recovering from a rather nasty flu that I got from a good friend of mine, who, apparently, was just recovering from a severe bronchitis himself and he thought things were back to normal. Well, they weren’t! Because that flu knocked me down the entire week like you wouldn’t believe it. This winter season I have been having one cold and this one flu. So I guess it’s not too bad. The problem though is that, for me, this was the first time in my life that I had a flu, that I remember, that involved fever, muscle aches, apathy, strong headaches, and what not. And, as such, it required a whole lot more taking care of it and curing it than anything else than I can remember. And I am finding it a bit too ironic that I was in Helsinki with a whole lot harsher temperatures and extreme winter, followed by Paris cold weather as well, and eventually 3 weeks later, the lovely sunshine got me and knocked me down for the entire week! But why am I using the heading over here as lack of consideration of others’ health? Well, mainly because if that friend of mine had decided to stay home for a few more days a bunch of his friends, me included, would have been spared from a rather miserable week. One were my own productivity suffered quite a bit, just as much as that one from other folks, too!, because of him not being considerate enough that while he may have been feeling better, he obviously was not well enough just yet, because some of us got the flu virus after being in close range with him, while celebrating a special event I will talk about shortly. And this is what I meant that some times, specially, when you are not feeling well, but you feel you need to carry on with the world around you, it’s probably better for you to stay inside and spare that rest of the world some better times. I stayed home the entire whole week last week and will probably do so for most of this one as well. Sometimes it’s better to recover in isolation, getting well taken care of, than just being out there, trying to pretend like nothing is happening and bang! get everyone around you infected with the odd seasonal cold / flu. Believe me, the fact that we may not see you for a few days does not mean that we have forgotten you at all. Quite the opposite. The fact that you have helped us remember one of those unforgettable weeks of you dragging along all the way, surely is going to leave a mark, because I have come to the conclusion that if you can’t spare from your cold / flu, we may as well do it ourselves. So next time we meet up F2F and you tell me you are recovering from a cold, flu, or whatever else, don’t be surprised if I rather walk away from you, or ask you to stay away till you get better. No, I’m not being anti-social. I am just asking you to be aware that just because you are sick it doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone should be sick along with you. And since you don’t seem to be conscious / aware of it, we may as well do that for you. Not to worry, when you feel better, we will be paying for the drinks to celebrate your comeback! Oh, and if you have got to go to the traditional office to do some work, you may want to think about it twice, as well. Last thing you would want to do is to knock down your entire business for a few days, dragging along, just because you decided not to stay home for that little longer. Some times, it’s worth it staying home. Remember, whether you are there or not, the business will continue. If you get everyone sick, that may be another matter. Spare them. Spare us, please. @elsua v4.0 And, finally, the last of those productivity killers that has prohibited me from being much more active in the Social Streams out there in the last couple of weeks. But, not to worry, this is a fun one! One that although it takes a long while for me to admit, it’d only seem to be happening every 40 years! And the reason why it was a productivity drain was more than anything else because celebrating it meant being outdoors, more than indoors working along. Yes, that’s right, as some of you have noticed in several other places, a bit over a week ago, I reached that lifetime milestone of 40 years of age. Or, as I decided to call it, I just became @elsua v4.0. As you can imagine there were lots of celebrations on the side for such achievement and, while I have got a blog post coming up on the topic, where I will reflect on a few things I have learned over the course of those 4 decades, I decided that since it’s just such a special lifetime achievement, and given the recent issues with that nasty flu, I’ll be celebrating it throughout the whole year! Here and there, and right in between! Why not, right? What are the chances of being 40 again, don’t you think? Oh, yes, that, too! I can now then vehemently state how those younger generations making extensive use of social networking tools for both personal use as well as for business use, are actually not that young anymore. And how we may be much better off switching the discourse from that generational divide into embracing different working styles within the workplace. That’s what it is all about! And, to conclude this rather long and extensive blog entry that will serve as me getting back to my regular blogging activities, I guess I’d summarise the main key learning from @elsua v4.0 throughout the last 40 years picking up on a superb mantra headline that my good friend Harold Jarche has been using for a long while and, which, to me, has taken a new meaning altogether just recently: Life in Perpetual Beta: Be a Natural Enterprise (Slideshare link) "Find the sweet spot: identify your gift, passion & purpose Find the right partners Research unmet needs Imagine and innovate solutions Continuously improvise Act responsibly on principle" Yes, indeed, it’s good to be back, sustainably productive and Hippie 2.0 once again!

So, you recently read Jane Bozarth's Social Learning for Trainers and followed it up with a read of Enterprise 2.0 by McAfee and The New Social Learning by Conner and Bingham. You're excited by the promise of social software for learning. You're already a Facebook and Twitter junkie and life couldn't be better with vendors announcing "Facebook for the enterprise". Wow! You're going to be a hot-shot social learning pro, aren't you? Errrm... think again. Life as a social learning consultant isn't a bed of roses and while the glamour of the Scobels, Hinchliffes, Ghoshes, Schrecks and others is inviting, you're likely to have a rough road ahead. Behind the glitz and glamour is a tough, painstaking albeit eventually fulfilling job, which you absolutely need to know about. So, before you get charmed into this shiny new world read my little disclaimer - it ain't easy!It's Not Really Facebook for the EnterpriseOk, ok I know you love Facebook and I know Jane says you could potentially use established tools like Facebook and Twitter for learning. Jane is right, I must say and I personally believe that the most mature social business implementations need to have porous walls. With that said, I have to also note that we're just not there yet! And frankly, there's perhaps a middle ground we need which'll just take some time. In the mean time, while you revel in the glory of Facebook, your employers need single sign on, integration with other systems, security, governance, uptime guarantees, content ownership assurances, and what not. Ah! That doesn't seem as cool anymore, does it? If you're heading the social learning route, remember that showing off the success of #lrnchat or the Learning and Skills Group is just the first step.You'll be a Consultant with No Direct Control Ever heard of organisational politics? It's the bad phrase to describe the tension between innovation, internal systems and organisational structure. Once you've gone ahead and wowed YOUR boss with that demo of #lrnchat or or that matter your own PKM approach powered by social media, you should really have a free rein. Or should you? Well if you're championing the cause of collaborative learning in the enterprise, you can't do it alone. You need to get IT to buy into supporting you. You'll need to get leadership to champion your proposal, and to do that, you'll need to champion some of their goals. As it turns out, none of them are your puppets - so getting the organisational machinery to start working in the same direction can mean several emails, presentations, meetings, arguments and consultative discussions. Forget about your role as an instructional designer - you're now only a consultant. You have no direct control. Hell, you can't even control behaviours for your 'learners'. At least in the classroom you could set a few rules for participation. Now you need to model their exisiting collaborative behaviours onto your system. You'll often feel that "Click Next to Continue" in elearning or "Let's move to the next exercise." in the classroom gave you more power. Are you happy to live with that for some time?It's Not the Kool-Aid You've been Drinking So, you're happy to rough it out - after all there's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow! I guarantee you, there is one, but it's far, far away. Before you can get to the wonderful effects that you've only read about it blogs, you'll need to do heaps of hard work. As a start, you may need to create dozens of proofs of concepts for the scores of teams in your organisation. It's not just about getting the executives involved, people are at the center of social business. Be prepared to sit at your desk for hours uploading files, setting up wikis, creating discussion areas and helping people wrap their heads around emergent collaboration. Be prepared to get laughed at and to take the feedback, go back, work and come back more resilient. Even when your community starts to thrive, things won't just happen by magic. There's a lot of unglamourous work involved in community management, I'm afraid. Take a look at what Donald Taylor does for the Learning and Skills Group and what Tom, Dave and Jeanette do for the Articulate community. In fact, with all the content curation, one-on-one support, online facilitation and constant manual gardening that Dave Anderson does, I wonder when he sleeps. It's effective, it's useful and it comes from a genuine desire to help people. It may end up being glitzy and glamourous, but don't count on it.You've Got To Build Comfort with "Good Enough"As an elearning pro and even as a trainer, you would have fussed hours, days, weeks and months to get things just right. After all, that slide needs to look polished. That activity needs to be instructionally sound. That elusive goal of perfection keeps you going everyday. Social learning has it's own levels of perfection, but that perfection doesn't come from the quality of content. A badly formatted, abrupt, but contextualised answer is good enough for a social QnA environment. It's not pretty, nor is it the most awesome content - it's just effective and works. It takes great patience to keep looking at gigabytes of user generated content that may not be as good as what you could have created but is so contextualised, that it's far more effective. In social business, perfection comes from being an integral part of the way we work. Perfection is when information flows seamlessly across the internet and the intranet, and people can consume byte-sized content when they want to, where they want to. It's perfection all right, but of a different kind.If you've read this far, you probably see my point - being a social learning pro involves a lot of hard work. It's immensely fulfilling; after a while a lot more than just doing instructional design or training. Be prepared however, to take the long, hard road there. Put your heads down, think big, start small and keep iterating. And when you really start to deliver value, which could be sometime away, the accolades may come too. I guess it's just a question of being patient. That's just my two cents - what do you think?© Sumeet Moghe

Now that I am back to my regular blogging schedule, I guess we wouldn’t have it complete without sharing across a relatively short blog entry with an Inspiring Video Clip of the Week, don’t you think? I mean, it’s been a while since I have shared over there the last one, so I may as well use this opportunity to share one that I have found incredibly powerful and rather thought provoking around the topic of Taking Risks (… and see what happens). You know, for a good number of years I have been postulating that for a business to become a truly Social Enterprise one of the traits that would need to come with the job is to not only know about risks and the potential failures they provoke, what they are, and what they imply, but to eventually encourage that same sense of failure as one of the most powerful learning processes for knowledge workers and organizations alike out there; that is, to learn from the risks they take and the mistakes they make, in order not to repeat them again. And continue growing through learning accordingly. And it looks like the folks portrayed on this short video clip surely know what they were talking about: If you’ve never failed, you’ve never lived… It’s been flagged as perhaps one of the most motivational videos out there and I would probably have to agree with that statement; to be honest, once you watch through it you will know exactly what we mean. It lasts for a little bit over a minute, but it’s worth it every single second of it and I can certainly vouch that after you watch through it, you would not be looking into risks, or risk taking, with the same pair of eyes. Quite the opposite. The metaphor of Risk = Life is just brilliant! If not, judge for yourselves. Here is the embedded code for you to play the clip right away: Incredibly powerful, don’t you think? While going through it though I just couldn’t help remembering a keynote session I attended while at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris a couple of weeks ago, where my good friend Richard Collin, shared plenty of amazingly inspirational stories and anecdotes on what it is like living an Enterprise 2.0. And, as part of that experience, one of the slides that I liked the most was the one I captured through live tweeting, and Twitpic, under the suggestive heading "The 10 Commandments To Take Back Home For You" that surely captures the essence, in my opinion, of what risk taking is all about in a corporate environment for all of those knowledge workers, social computing evangelists or not, who are trying to live and embrace Enterprise 2.0 and who are very much willing to walk the extra mile that most people wouldn’t want to, because the latter are just too comfortable getting the most out of the specific status quo they have inherited over the course of the years. Yet, over the course of time, and without them realising much about it, those 10 commandments tend to become their new mantra because it reflects, quite nicely, not only their new way of working, and getting the job done, but also their new way of living. And throughout all of it there is plenty of risk taking, as we can see from that list itself: "Remember it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission Come to work each day willing to be fired Circumvent any orders aimed at stopping your dream Do any job needed to make your project work, regardless of your job description Find people to help you Follow your intuition about the people you choose, and work only with the best Work underground as long as you can, - Publicity triggers the corporate immune mechanism Never bet on a race unless you are running in it Be true to your goals, but be realistic about the ways to achieve them Honour your sponsors" Thus when people asked me, during the event, to describe out of all of those 10 commandments which one would be the one that would represent the closest to what I have been doing in the last 11 years, as a social computing evangelist, I probably came to terms with realising that, all along, it’s been #2: "Come to work each day willing to be fired". Perhaps a bit too drastic and a tad too dramatic, I  can imagine, but I guess that’s what optimists and outrageous, rebels at work, trust agents, intrapreneurs, heretics, free radicals, etc. etc. have felt all along: risk taking in what you strongly believe as that next, new innovative brilliant idea is just as worth while doing as risking being fired for it. If not, it’s not worth it. Not worth the effort, nor the energy nor the support from others. Because if that happens eventually, getting fired, that is, there is a great chance that you aren’t working for the right business in the first place and a good indication that it may well be a good time for you to move on altogether… However, risk taking is not only one of those traits that you could apply to knowledge workers, in their ability to push the limits as social computing evangelists, for instance, or whatever other knowledge work activity, but we can also see plenty of that with executives themselves in whatever the organisation, and, I guess, that instead of me detailing what that would be like, I am just going to point you folks to a short video clip interview that Ginni Rometty, IBM’s CEO, did recently where she talked about taking risks and what it meant for her: So, now you know, next time that you bump into someone who may well be a bit too apprehensive and perhaps a bit too self-critical inside when taking risks they may just as well loosen up a bit, because, you know, as Ginni herself puts it rather nicely, "growth and comfort do not co-exist". So it will be up to us, knowledge workers, to decide how far apart we would want to go take both growth and comfort through risk taking while wanting to achieve our goals and go that extra mile. After all, when was the last time that you were about to be fired for the stuff you love doing the most? Has it happened yet? I bet it hasn’t, so why we do keep being so risk averse within the corporate environment? Something tells me we are the ones on the losing end and big time. Somehow we should probably start reverting that trend, and soon enough!, should we want Social Enterprise to succeed in the corporate environment. Is it worth it? Probably. Should we go for it? You bet!! Even if that gets us fired!

A year back, when I decided to go with the idea of ThoughtWorks University V2, I was seriously influenced by Jay Cross's idea of a workscape. We already had a very successful graduate induction program in the form of ThoughtWorks University, and to change it meant flouting rules like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But then, I think a bit like my friend Aaron Silvers - "We should be fixing things all the time". I wanted to move from a purely academic approach towards learning to an approach that we drove through real work. I wanted to rethink the reason we ran the program and if instructional soundness really translated into workplace effectiveness. Our team took a gamble towards workscaping the program. I can say safely today that we've seen results that make me proud to be part of the program and I believe we're making a dent in the universe like never before. Last Thursday, the team of graduates at ThoughtWorks University enabled a local charity Sukrupa by launching their website complete with a donations system. This apart, they've made significant progress with a student records system and an ecommerce project for the same client. In today's blogpost, I want to reflect on our experience of the last six weeks and share with you how real work has made ThoughtWorks University a better program for the company and the world at large.You Can't Train People on Values"Profit, smarts, and growth is essential, but the meaning of work-life must extend beyond the bottom line." - Jonathan WolterAt ThoughtWorks, our values and mission are at the heart of how we work. My colleague Jonathan Wolter, has written eloquently about our mission to advocate social justice. While our mission and values are at the core of our DNA, I don't believe we can train anyone on this. We can do great presentations and elearning courses and convince ourselves that we did a great job, but frankly you believe in a mission by pursuing it. You cherish values by living them. Teaching of any kind lacks the realism to drive home a passion for missions and values. At ThoughtWorks Univeristy, we set our graduates the task of enabling Sukrupa - a local school that's on a mission to educate children from Bangalore's slums. It's amazing how a challenge with a real world impact can galvanise people. In solving this problem our grads not only pursued software excellence and helped change the world in their own little way, but they also lived ThoughtWorks' values as a means to the end. If you read about our values you'll soon realise how a small, real world problem can easily help them live each of our cultural traits.Experience is the Biggest Teacher"Experience is what you get when you don't get what you wanted" - Randy PauschOften it takes seeing what doesn't work, to realise what could actually work. We took a risk by starting the project with little upfront analysis. In the initial weeks of the project we were literally playing it by ear, taking our clients' requirements as they came. While we took this chance knowing the potential benefit for Sukrupa and for the graduates' experience, the uncertainty and the lack of coordination on the team was disconcerting. There was even an occasion when our otherwise affable client was put off by our amateurish approach. When you put a group of talented, passionate people together though, problems are only an opportunity for greater responsibility. A quick shuffle of team roles and our analysts had nominated a testing lead, a UX analyst, a project manager and backlog cop. From that point on we never looked back. The graduates have forged such a strong relationship with our client, that it'll drive most experienced account managers to shame. Technically, and process wise - our graduates struggled; but their passion kept them resilient through ups and downs of the six weeks. The role of the trainers was just to be coaches - guides on the side, who would chip in with their experience and help the project along in the right direction. At the end of the day, the trainers have learned heaps about leadership and the students have learned heaps about client management and software delivery. We didn't teach them anything - they learned through experience.Nothing Succeeds like Success"You know that you've done well, if your customer breaks out in tears during a showcase." - Patric FornasierYou can teach people all you know, but they'll never know what it's really like until they achieve real success. In the past six weeks our graduates wrote real tests and real code, configured one-click deployment for the project, elicited and delivered real user stories, worked in a true Agile environment, and managed a real client relationship. As I sat through graduation on Friday, I looked at each of our 20 new consultants -- their confidence and energy was evident. As I later wrote to these consultants they aren't rookies anymore - they know what it takes to release software. They can now stand alongside their more experienced team mates and still be confident given their success on our project with Sukrupa. I hope it's heaps easier for them to pull their weight on a project, knowing that they've seen real success.This ThoughtWorks University brought for me, my happiest moments as a ThoughtWorker. It's been an absolute privilege working alongside each of these 20 young people - and it's an experience that'll take some beating. It's also provided evidence to my hypothesis that challenges and failure can be great catalysts to learning. I've seen that smart, passionate people, given a worthy task, will learn and rise to challenge. I hope our story can inspire you to make real work an integral part of your learning programs. Do chime in with your thoughts in the comments section - I'm very keen to hear what you think. And by the way, please donate unabashedly to Sukrupa - a small donation from your side could go a really long way for this really special school.© Sumeet Moghe

Earlier on this year, while at Lotusphere 2012 and at IBM Connect in Orlando, Florida, I had the unique opportunity and great pleasure to finally attend live a keynote session from the one and only Guy Kawasaki. As you can imagine, I had very high expectations about being wowed by someone who i have admired all along and whose books I keep constantly going back to in order keep learning more and more about a good number of different topics, specially, those related to social business. Well, that keynote was probably *the* best 20 minutes spent on attending any live session I have had in the last few years. I was certainly not disappointed a single bit! And I wasn’t the only one thinking that way, apparently. No surprise. In fact, just those 20 minutes made the entire week worth while! Eventually, it’s all about "Defaulting to yes!". In that keynote session Guy talked about plenty of really good tips on how to enchant your audiences, whether in real life or virtually, about your own product(s), whatever that may well be. This presentation in Slideshare covers some of the major items he talked about, although it’s not the actual presentation he used. But still equally helpful. One of those key messages he shared along was that one of always defaulting to yes! Basically, meaning the following, as Mitra Sorrells beautifully captured on a recent blog entry under the title "9 Tips From Guy Kawasaki on How to Use Social Media to "Enchant" Customers": "Default to a "yes" attitude. "Think to yourself, I will do what this person asks; I will be happy to do it; I will probably say yes even before they ask, even before I know what they are going to ask me to do. Always be thinking, ‘how can I help the other person,’" Kawasaki said" Very powerful message, indeed, which clearly resonates with the whole mantra behind living social, i.e. helping others excel at what they are already doing without asking for anything in return. That’s, usually, how networks and communities operate in the open Social Web at the moment. But then again, and I am sure you would all agree, at some point in time, it’s bound to fail. Why? Well, mostly because, as we, human beings, tend to do with almost everything out there, we keep abusing such good will and good hearted mentality of wanting to help others by answering yes to everything to the point where people will keep taking advantage of it all, even if it starts harming people’s own productivity. It’s just as if we don’t see it and just care for getting that help without thinking much about the potential consequences we over-impose on others. And perhaps till now we couldn’t do much about it, since we all know that we always find it incredibly tough to keep saying No to people. It just doesn’t happen. We are not natural at it, as we keep thinking, considering and pondering some more the potential consequences from that "No, thanks!". You know, who wants to hurt someone else’s feelings by rejecting and saying "No!" to their offer, whatever that may well be? Probably no-one, right? Well, here’s where we can all feel incredibly grateful to Dan Pink after a recent, rather thought provoking, blog post he put together under the suggestive title "How to say No . . . especially to things you want to do", which is some really fascinating read on the power of saying No, but, most importantly, on how to do it well and feel good about it, without that sense of guilt that we are all far too familiar with. And still keeping that flavour that Guy mentioned about always defaulting to yes! How can that be, right? Well, Dan explains it very nicely as perhaps one of our biggest challenges for this century; one for which it’s going to be rather tough to find a really good answer that would be applicable to everyone: "How do we say no to things we want to do?" Yes, I know, how can we possibly answer that question and still feel good about it? Well, perhaps we need to look into two things that can help already venture a potential solution, or a good direction for it altogether anyway. Think about productivity for a minute. Think about your own productivity and effectiveness for the work you do. Think now how if you keep defaulting to yes to everything that you would want to do, while helping others, would eventually mean that you would have very little time to look after your own productivity. And in the end you may fall behind. So, in a way, you need to be the first one self-protecting your own interests before reaching out to others to help them. As Elizabeth Gilbert mentions on Dan’s blog entry, you need to start becoming your own bodyguard for the work you do, because there may well be a good chance that no-one else would be able to do it for you. And that’s where the second element of the equation kicks in, which Dan also addresses beautifully with this insightful quote: "I wouldn’t want to return to a world of limited options and pricey information any more than I’d like to return to a world of scarce, expensive calories. But I think we all need a little help dealing with our new circumstances and saying no to things that we want to do" Indeed, I think Dan pretty much nails it when talking about how you can succeed when saying "No!" to not just the things you don’t want to do, but also the things you would want to, but can’t: get some extra help from others. That is, help others understand that as much as you would want to help out, default to yes, and participate in their initiatives and projects you may not be capable of doing so, for whatever the reason, and it’s totally fine to say no and feel good about it. No-one is going to look up at you and claim you haven’t helped them accordingly. It’s going to be a constant exercise of helping set the expectations of how far you can stretch yourself out without having to invoke that self bodyguard to protect you and your own productivity. And just like good, regular and constant exercise is good for burning those unnecessary calories and fat, so will it be setting up the right expectations on your willingness to help out others achieving their goals. it’s not going to be a matter of just plainly saying no, but more along the lines of helping people understand that some times it will work, and how some other times it won’t. And that’s just fine. It’s just a matter of adjusting expectations, your commitment to help others, and, finally, put a stop on abusing people’s innate willingness to help out while killing their own productivity in the end. At the end of the day, it’s all about respecting and fully understanding the productivity of others and, in return, they will respect yours accordingly. And, believe me, that’s then when great things will come up! So, what do you think? How do you say no to the things you would want to do while keeping up with your own productivity and effectiveness in the context of that mantra of always defaulting to yes without losing your sanity? An oxymoron right there? Utopian altogether? The 21st century chimera? I would love to know and find out more about it in the comments how you get around it…

I remember using a computer for the first time in 1990 - it was when I wrote my first computer program, in BASIC. Internet access in the nineties was an absolute luxury in India. In fact I had little activity on the internet until the mid nineties. I do remember reading some years back though, that in 1993, Peter Steiner had published a cartoon about the internet in the New Yorker. The cartoon featured two dogs at a computer, with one dog saying to another, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog". The cartoon seemed to symbolise the anonymity with which users could participate on the internet. The internet in those days was definitely a lot about content. People and conversations were not part of internet currency yet. In the last two decades however, the internet has changed and how! Social media has made the internet more about context than content and the fact is that today, if you're dog, you'll soon get figured out on the social web.The Only Social Media Rule You Need to Remember Last year at DevLearn 2010, my friend and industry colleague Cammy Bean said that the only social media rule or guideline people need is, "Don't be an @$#hole". While that statement is amusing, it's also quite profound. Frankly, it's not so tough being on social media. Just don't be ill mannered and don't do stupid things. Why then do some people still behave like absolute boors on the web? In the past year or so, I've gotten kicked out of at least two different social groups for simply demanding better behaviour. Now I'm not talking about non-assertive behaviour, I'm just saying good behaviour. And frankly it isn't rocket science.Real Authority and Respect Comes from Humble FacilitatonI got that response from a community lead of a fairly active wildlife forum on Facebook. To give you some context, I was responding to a fairly open question creating a second home for Asiatic Lions. I don't claim to be an expert on the subject - I just wanted to share what I thought and knew. The community lead chose to tear me to pieces on the forum and almost told me to shut up because she was sure I knew nothing! Again, I'm not an expert on behavioural science, but I know that if you want to grow your community, you want to invite opinions and encourage debate. Could she have handled her disagreement differently?Abusiveness only Portrays You in Bad LightThe message you see above is a real example of the kind of language I strongly object to. There's no doubt that the we all deserve the right to express ourselves freely. That said, language of this nature serves no one well. People who you're talking about will just read your language and reject you outright. People whose attention you wish to catch are likely to see your strong words, but understand nothing about why you're upset and why you feel in a certain way. Most importantly, a conversation that starts on this kind of a note is unlikely to be constructive. The only place it can go is south.Don't Defend Poor BehaviourIf you're a community manager, then you have a responsibility to make your community a safe place to contribute. There are no two ways about it. You need to be cognizant of bad behaviour regardless of who it comes from. In the above case, I responded to the abusive comment and asked if we could avoid profanity on the forum. The community lead came out and vociferously defended the original poster stating his experience in conservation as a license for poor behaviour. Soon after, I found myself kicked off the group and the community manager had made the group secret so I couldn't even find it if I searched for it. Wow! Isn't being respectful at least a bit easier?Don't Undermine the Feedback LoopWhen I publicly challenged the rude commentary here, I got some amount of support from a well respected member of the group. It seemed natural for the community lead to apologise for her boorish conduct, but all I saw was a justification of why she was right to behave the way she eventually did. I remember at another community, when I raised my concerns about the poor organisation of presentations at the group's monthly meetings, the community lead was so furious, she said, "If you think attending **** sessions is a waste of time, please don't bother attending any sessions". I took the cue and left the group for good. You could fault me, depending on the way you look at it, but the fact is that in each case, I provided feedback. In each case, it was the community lead's responsibility to take that feedback graciously. Instead, all I got in each situation was retribution. Frankly, I don't really care about being part of communities that don't believe in respectful conduct. That said, each of these social media participants have tarnished their own reputation because I and others will carry these stories across the web. After a while, it's a really small place to hide poor behaviour.While a lot of what I've written today comes from my own experience, I don't want this to appear as a sob story. I am really surprised at how people can say things they'd never say in person, just because they're on a social network. Social media attaches all of this misbehaviour to our public identities. Do we really want to build our identities this way? We deeply undermine our own credibility by being ill-mannered in our conduct online. It takes very little effort to be respectful. Just that little effort, and I hope the social web can be a much better place to participate. What's more, we can continue to retain the credibility we deserve. What do you think?© Sumeet Moghe

A few days back, just before I embarked on to another business trip to both London (To attend and present at the #UCExpo event) and Paris (To present at the Lotusphere Comes To You event) - more on both of those wonderful events shortly!, by the way- I put together a blog post where I tried to highlight the current status of the Social Web out there and how it seems like we are entering a new era of mediocrity, where the overall user experience keeps deteriorating itself by having to face a good number of various different issues that consistently keep diminishing and destroying our very own rights, as end-users, specially, as we keep allowing, repeatedly, plenty of abusive practices from lots of social networking sites, without doing much about it apparently. Well, while we try to figure out a way out to rebel against that ugly landscape we’ve allowed to grow further along, in today’s blog entry, and as way to resume my regular blogging activities, once again, I would like to spend a few minutes covering Enterprise 2.0 or, lately, Social Business, which seems to be the term everyone has been embracing (Incorrectly, if I may add, judging from what Social Business is originally all about it, as coined by Prof. Muhammad Yunus), since things are not going much better either in that space, as the true intentions from most organizations are starting to show up. I have been involved with social networking sites for business since early 2001 and over the course of the years I have had a chance to get exposed to a good number of trends. Both positive and negative. I have been having hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations with the various parts of the Social Business ecosystem: vendors, customers, business partners, competitors, industry analysts and other thought leaders and, over the course of the last few years, one thing is starting to become rather obvious and evident regarding the state of Social Business within the corporate world. The fact that there are two different and distinct types of businesses wanting to embrace it: Those who are there for the money, your money, that is, the easy buck And those who are there for the true social transformation of their entire business ecosystem (Both internal and external) Yes, I know that this may all well seem like I am turning myself into some kind of a curmudgeon, but if you folks have been reading this blog for a long while now you would notice that’s not the case. Quite the opposite. I’m still that optimist, outrageous, heretic, rebel at work, free radical and hippie 2.0 (Now more than ever, specially!) who is finally understanding that we may well be at the crossroads of what one would consider the point of no return for Social Business, and that’s the one where businesses would, finally, need to make a critical decision: Are you there, in Social Business, for the money, for that easy buck I mentioned above, or are you there for the real transformation of your business, and your business processes, as you know it? The reason why I am starting to question the validity of Social Business in the current corporate world has got nothing more to do than trying to distinguish those businesses that are just there wanting to earn the easy buck out of you, and therefore are living on the hype & buzz from Social Business itself (which is what’s been happening in the last three to four years and counting…) from those companies that are challenging their current business models to see how they could, at long last, start, truly, living social. But what do I mean exactly with earning the easy buck, you may be wondering, right? Well, to me, there are two different types of businesses at the moment with regards to the world of Social Business and that transformation that we all keep talking about. Those that are claiming they are truly social businesses, because they are, indeed, living it all the way. They are transforming their business models to match the current needs and business landscape of the 21st century, where the knowledge economy, the relationship economy and the meritocracy economy, amongst others (Including a sustainable customer centric approach towards doing business!), are slowly taking over previous business models and are surely on their way to transforming their overall business ecosystem. And then there are those that are saying they are truly social businesses, because of how they have embraced the social networking / computing philosophy and traits like transparency, openness (through servant leadership), publicy, agile, trustworthiness, being nimble, full employee empowerment and engagement through co-ownership and co-sharing of responsibility, etc. etc. and yet they still keep operating with the same good old mentality from the 20th century, with the same business models; the ones where command and control, micro-management, controlling the brand, as well as the message, optimisation of resources, etc. still rule big time, where customer centric interactions do not exist at all, where they claim they have lowered down the barrier for decision making and the centre of gravity, but it hardly ever happens, where they keep stating how they continue to encourage an open knowledge sharing and collaborative culture, and yet, employees still carry on competing against each other to get better overall performance reviews to advance in their own personal careers, at whatever the costs (Oh, and never mind rewarding group / team / networks / community performance, because currently it just doesn’t exist); in short, where they claim they are now becoming sustainable, engaged, networked, transparent social businesses and in reality nothing has changed. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. At all. Well, those are *not* social businesses, I am afraid, and, in my opinion, they should not be considered social businesses and that’s why from here onwards I refuse to add that tag of #socbiz for any company out there that keeps talking about how they have become true social businesses, yet, they hardly walk the talk. Becoming a social business is something you earn. It’s a merit you work really hard for over the course of the years to provoke that social transformation that will help you carry out your business in a sustainable, meaningful and purposeful manner into the 21st century. It’s a lot of hard work, effort and energy of wanting to do things different than what you have been doing in previous decades. It’s a step forward towards a radical change in both management, leadership and transparency, as well as trust and engagement, from all sides of the equation, both the businesses and the employee workforce itself. The #socbiz is a tag that should be used carefully and sparingly, instead of being abused left and right by all of this mumbo jumbo talking that we keep getting bombarded with from all over the place; only if you are truly willing to not just say you are embracing it, but to eventually walk the talk all the way should you be worth it of that #socbiz tag. And I am afraid plenty of companies keep failing at delivering on this important business transformation. That’s why, to me, it’s now the time where we need to put a stop to all of the BS we keep getting thrown back at us (And please do excuse my French!). We are on that critical stage where the initial hype, buzz and enthusiasm about Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business is running over, where knowledge workers are finally finding out, through a massive awakening!, that all of their efforts in wanting to change and smarten up by becoming true knowledge (Web) workers 2.0 are not being met by the other half of the equation, the employers themselves, those businesses who pretend to have what it takes to live social, but that they haven’t delivered, nor do they want to!, since there aren’t any hopeful signs they will be changing and adapting any time soon. We need to start getting serious about this social transformation, ALL of US, not just the employee workforce, but also the corporate world, as a whole, as my good friend, Sameer Patel put rather nicely, just recently in a superb blog post under the rather thought provoking title "Social Business Facts and Fiction" with notable quotes like this one: "The first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that like to experiment have done so. Beyond those, a small number of executives who innately believe that collaboration is absolutely critical to execution have put their weight behind these programs. […] But there’s massive untapped opportunity out there to revise the value proposition for those numbers-driven businesses who will want to understand how all of this enhances what they’ve invested in for the last decade. Until then, this massive bucket of executives will treat "social business" as another Mickey Mouse program until they see how it matters to revenue increase, cost reduction and risk mitigation" Now, I am not sure whether I will be rather supportive of a Mickey Mouse programme, or not, as Sameer himself puts it rather nicely, in my opinion, but one thing for sure is that I think we all need to start challenging, and rebelling to a certain extent!, against those very same executives / business leaders and those other folks with the decision power to come forward, up their game, and truly state where they stand with regards to Social Business: up for the easy money, and quick profits, regardless of the damages they may continue to exert upon all of us (Remember Knowledge Management back in the day with vendors and consultants? Do we want to keep making the very same mistakes? Over and over again? Anyone?) or that social business transformation we, knowledge workers, have been anticipating all along over the course of the last few years and which we all know will help succeed those business into the 21st century Knowledge Economy, but that we keep failing in seeing it become a reality, our reality, just because we are not brave enough to challenge the current status quo of how business has been getting things done in the last few decades. Think of it, seriously, picture yourself into 2020, or 2030 even, do you still think you will have a job in your current company without realising the social business dream? Actually, let’s push the limit a little bit further. Do you think that your company will still exist by that date without having become a successful social business eventually? … That’s what I thought. We need to change that dream into reality, our reality. Our time to act is now! Not tomorrow, or the day after, or next year. Or in five years. But today!! If you would want to be known, and respected!, as a successful social business, you better start earning that tag with all of us. Because we are watching… and acting accordingly, if you aren’t. So, dear social business, where do you stand? By the money or by the social business transformation? Or, perhaps, somewhere in between? … If so, whereabouts exactly? Care to tell us so that we know where you stand in this Social Enterprise journey? I am sure we would all love to know, wouldn’t we, folks? You never know, you may be closer to it than you think.

Yesterday, I did an introductory talk on social learning at XConf - an internal ThoughtWorks conference. I got a largish audience which actually left me quite pleased and I thought the talk went quite well. I want to share my slides with you and if I get time, I'll record audio over these visuals so you can get the full message. Feel free to use these visuals the way you please. As with all content on this blog, it's under the Creative Commons license.© Sumeet Moghe

Image credit: Faithful ChantPeople have identities. Whether we like it or not, these identities exist regardless of whether someone works at your company or not. People create and share content already. Whether we like it or not, they do a lot of this outside of your company. I'm a big believer of the notion that enterprise social software needs porous walls. The fact is that in real life your organisation's walls are quite porous. Most knowledge workers are fairly active on Twitter, some of them write blogs. Some speak at conferences and some use services like Tripit to manage their life and to stay connected with other people. Their connections include but are not limited to other people in your organisation. The eventual success of our social business implementations will come when we can actually facilitate information exchange across these porous walls. Can we use our social business platforms to build a composite brand for people using their activity from across the web? The technology to do this is commonplace, but to actually execute this we need to think human. How can we make corporate identities on social business platforms intermesh with people's existing brands on the public internet? Here are some ideas I've been pondering over:Twitter Integration: Can we design people's profiles in such a way that it automatically shows their Twitter stream, if they've added the Twitter ID to the system. Yammer already does smart things like integrating selective tweets with the Yammer activity stream. How frictionless is it for people to post to the enterprise social network directly from Twitter! As a corollary how tough can it be to send selective status updates from the enterprise social network to Twitter?Facebook Integration: Can people who are my friends on Facebook automatically be my friends on a social business platform? Could we at least get a way to scan our Facebook friends list and find corresponding friends on enterprise network? Just as in Twitter, can we have a 'lifestream' that allows people to see what we're upto in our daily lives? Can the integration of workstreams and lifestreams help build a connected enterprise?Blogs: While internal blogging is cool, most people are unlikely to retire their own blogs and they'll still continue to post great, useful stuff in there. How can we integrate people's blogposts from the external world into the enterprise activity stream? This could be a big win from an enterprise knowledge standpoint. It's also a recognition for people's personal brand - a small gesture that leads to great personal satisfaction.A Rational Approach to Privacy : There's always a certain amount of risk averseness towards storing personal data on SaaS platforms. This being said, most great social business platforms are SaaS solutions, where data isn't on your private servers. I understand there are some concerns particularly in Europe, around mandating storage of personal information on the cloud. I still believe that there are a few things to be mindful of. Most people already put this kind of information on services like Facebook, where they have no ownership of data. This indicates a certain level of comfort with storing personal information on third-party systems. With most SaaS providers we're protected by an NDA. As long as you can determine a practical exit strategy, should storing personal data be really such a huge risk? Frankly, the constant status updates that people will post are far more personal than a company phone number. And if push comes to shove, can we offer a choice to individuals about storing what they consider personal data on a SaaS solution? Until we ask, we'll never know who has an objection. It's always a bad idea to base design decisions around the outliers in your organisation - it only means that your system wil suck for the vast majority.Composite Profiles: People already have profiles all across the web. Can we find ways to integrate profile data from established services like Facebook and Twitter? In fact, as a step to that, do our profiles need a 2.0 twist to them? Social business implementations still capture only old-school contact information on profiles. Can we start to capture modern, context information such as Facebook and Twitter IDs, blog urls, etc on profiles? Eventually, these could be data sources to help you establish a strong social media presence on the web. Imagine how easy it'll be to have a constantly up-to-date list of your employees on Twitter. Or for that matter, a constantly up-to-date employee group on Facebook. Collecting context information is only a first step to this.Of course some of this can require significant heavy lifting in terms of customising your platform or building custom functionality. That said, I believe there's tremendous value in doing such stuff and all of us should at least place innovation of this nature on our social business roadmaps. Do you need to partner with your social business platform providers for some of this stuff and help them build it out as experimental functionality? Should we select platforms that allow us to create mobile apps that could actually bring these worlds together, much like a FriendFeed for the enterprise? There are several ideas that we can think of - the key is to ensure that we don't separate corporate identities from public identities. People are people and the corporate identity is no mask for who they really are.This article is an adaptation of an article I wrote on our internal blogging platform at ThoughtWorks. That in itself is an example of the separation between the real world and the enterprise. I had plans to write a completely different article this week, but the thought of composite identities was too compelling not to socialise on this blog. What's your view on the topic? Feel free to drop in your thoughts into the comments section of this post.By the way, I'm speaking at the Learning Solutions conference this month. I'll be at Orlando for the entire week, and am doing the following sessions:Social Learning without the Technology - Seven Patterns to Try Out: 1430, March 23rdWhat’s New In Blended Learning: with Julie Brink, Michael Tucci and Erin Gibbens. This is a Morning Buzz session on March 24thSocial Learning and Social Media - Their Role in Learning: with Terrence Wing, Julie Rochon and Kathy Jeep. This is a Morning Buzz session on March 25thI also want to use this opportunity to connect with as many of my tweeps and industry colleagues as possible. So if you want to catch up for a few drinks or do an evening trip to Disney World, count me in. Sahana Chattopadhyay of ThoughtWorks is also going to be at this conference, so if you wanted the India story of learning technologies, we'll be happy to catch you up. See you there!© Sumeet Moghe

Science. That wonderful and fascinating world that keeps escaping most of us, mere mortals, from trying to understand, or even, just simply get a glimpse, of how it works and how it makes the world, and the universe, turn around and around. Science. The one subject back at school that I always kept struggling with time and time again. And it’s now, several decades later, and thanks to a nearly two minute long video clip that I have finally found out why I had such aversion to it back then and how I’m coming to terms with it nowadays and start enjoying it for what it is: an open wide window into wisdom and knowledge sharing. Knowledge sharing with a passion! In a world where we keep worshipping, and longing to become at some point in the near future!, film stars, music giants, sports titans, TV drama queens or whatever other demeaning reality show protagonists du jour, or whatever other unscrupulous types, it’s always refreshing and quite re-energising to bump into amazingly inspiring pearls of wisdom that make, even the most complex of concepts, incredibly easy to understand and grasp. That’s just what I have experienced while watching this short video clip featuring Prof. Brian Cox where in less than two minutes he gets to explain in very simple terms how everything is connected to everything. Now, if we ever had any reservations about how well interconnected we, human beings, are not just with each other, but with the environment that surrounds us, including the rest of the universe, this would be the kind of video to show those skeptics. Prof. Cox, in just a matter of minutes, gets to explain the Pauli Exclusion Principle and, although there is some controversy as to whether he has got it right, or not (Read through this rather long blog post and the extended comments for more details), what I have found to be the most fascinating thing was not whether he got it right or not, but the passion that he thrives on when sharing stories about the topics you can see he really is truly passionate about. That passion that keeps him going on and on and on for endless hours talking, in very simple terms, about concepts that the vast majority of us would struggle with big time (Again, read the comments from the link I mentioned above to get a glimpse of what I mean …). How powerful passion can be in storytelling? How long before we can see empowering passionate stories being shared in a business environment to help us transfer knowledge, collaborate effectively, and connect with other knowledge workers? How long before the business world understands that all of these collaboration, open knowledge sharing and social networking are all about sharing stories and that the more passionate you are about them when you share them across the more inspiring they would get? How long before it clicks for the corporate world to understand that we, as human beings, live of stories, of sharing those stories, of relaying relatively simple messages to one another to connect, to build trust, to bond, to eventually be us, even on a business environment? You know, not sure what you would think, but I could venture to state that if I had science teachers, back then, in my younger years, as passionate and engaging as Prof. Brian Cox is, when telling and sharing stories, I bet that I would not have become an English teacher eventually. Oh, nothing wrong with being an English teacher really, and working for an IT firm over the last 15 years (And still having a blast!), but you know what I mean. Passion, or, better said, the lack of it, can surely help influence, in a perhaps negative manner, how we may all be moving along with our careers, with our commitments, with our own goals, with our lives, you name it. Maybe Prof. Cox has shown, in that very short video clip, and without him noticing it, the way for us, in the business world, to turn the tide on that demolishing statistic that 8 out of 10 employees in America (And I am sure that very same thing happens in a good number of different countries) are not happy with their jobs. Maybe the reason for that is that somewhere along the way we may have lost that passion for the work that we do; if that’s the case, we need to bring it back, it’s killing us at the moment. and big time! And even more worrying when thinking that two thirds of our lifetimes are spent on stuff that we are no longer happy about, nor passionate enough for. Think that one of those thirds is, finally!, getting enough sleep, now that we know it’s actually rather unproductive not having enough of it. So that leaves us to two thirds of our lifetime to enjoy, one where we do the stuff we are passionate about, i.e. our private, personal, out of work, quality time, whatever that may well be. And the other third our jobs, the kind of work we do. Isn’t it time then to bring back that passion into work again, not only for what we do, but also for the connections, and personal business relationships we keep building up and that we know are going to help us eventually get work done while we learn doing things much more effectively? Isn’t it due time that we bring back into the business world the power of passionate storytelling that we all once had? Prof. Cox, in that short video I am embedding below, so you can watch it through right away, surely has been leading the way in transforming a potentially too complex, too technical, too wordy, too boring subject like science is, into something fun, playful, educational, entertaining, enlightening, simple enough to grasp and understand and exciting to get involved with! Maybe, the business world needs to pay a bit more attention to science. At least, to those science pockets where passion is shining through for its excellence. We need it. We very much need it. And we need it NOW!

The last week at work was great. Against several odds, we launched our internal social business platform - myThoughtWorks. The uptake until now with just three working days of operation, has been tremendous. We've seen 1016 documents, 347 social bookmarks, 294 threads and 293 blogposts on the platform from about 524 contributing users. 1310 of our 1700 users are active on the platform and that is a huge win, given our vastly distributed nature. The last few weeks have also been a great learning opportunity for our team and while it's easy to surround ourselves with those statistics and feel good about them, the truth is that our journey has only begun. In today's blogpost, I want to share with you some of my musings and our team's collective learnings from the weeks gone by.Never Overlook CommunicationI was chatting with Mark Needham last night. For all his eccentricities, Mark is a very reasonable guy and someone who just gets social media and social learning. Mark however, was one of the people who was taken by surprise with our launch of the new platform. When I spoke to him, he mentioned that while he'd gotten the memos, none of them were interesting enough for him to pay any attention. It brought out a very interesting point. The meaning of your communication is in the response you get. If someone as connected as Mark knew nothing about the launch, it meant that we were perhaps not communicating effectively to get his attention. When we were launching MediaWiki in my previous firm, we'd faced a similar experience. Corporate communication means nothing if no one receives your message. The success of a social business initiative does depend on effective communication leading up to the launch. This ensures that the key movers and shakers are already warming up to the idea. Shocking high potential users doesn't do much good. If one way doesn't work, try another. In coming weeks we're planning several more roadshows, user meetups and other ways to make our communications click.Understanding User Context is Key to Success"Communication channels are highways of habit: people have their preferences and they generally stick to them." - Jono Bacon, The Art of CommunityEveryone in the enterprise usually wants to contribute to its success. If social business is key to the success of your enterprise most reasonable people will want to jump in. Provided of course, you communicate well enough. This being said, we need to be empathetic towards the slower adopters. It's often not a lack of will to contribute, but the limitation of the performance context that stops people from being gung-ho adopters. Let me give you an example. Our most recent social learning implementation rests on the Google stack. We use Google Sites as a wiki, Google Groups for discussions, Google Chat for chatrooms and Google Videos for media sharing. The heart of the implementation however is Google Groups. For consultants at client site who are often coding at client computers, the easiest way to stay in touch with the rest of the company is email. When you add to that, limited access to ThoughtWorks systems, accessing any other platform becomes a big challenge. Google Groups gets around this problem quite well by providing simple mailing lists for communities. It also helps that a vast majority of western software developers like mailing lists! The move to a social business solution is great for our enterprise if adoption keeps going up as it has in the last three days. Adoption also depends on our empathy and responsiveness for user mindsets and context. In coming days we need to find ways not just to make things like email integration and mobile access seamless for our onsite consultants, but also to ensure that we can build such relationships with our clients that it's not taboo to access the enterprise social network while onsite.Choice is not Always a Great ThingEvery time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision. - Joel SpolskySocial media has transformed my learning and there's no doubt about that. I do remember though that when I first saw Twitter, I couldn't wrap my head around it. It's quite simple isn't it? Just 140 characters! For some reason I just didn't get it. The process of finding people to follow, setting up a client that works for you, choosing hashtags that matter was just too complicated for me back in the day. I've struggled similarly with Facebook when it was new. Social media is like that. It becomes powerful when you make the right choices and personalise effectively. Personalisation however, is about making several choices and not everyone is happy to have choice. This is the part of the social business puzzle we need to figure out. While we want most people to make meaningful choices, how can we create useful defaults that the average user can get away with? The shorter the setup time, the easier it is to dive in and participate.Intuitive is an Overloaded WordWe use the word 'intuitive' way too loosely in design circles. We often debate pointlessly around little things that'll make our interfaces 'intuitive'. This often reminds me of the old BSD bikeshed painting analogy that Sriram Narayanan pointed me to. The fact is that the little things that make a platform intuitive for one are the same things that make it unintuitive for another. Intuition is really a factor of context, experience and familiarity. When my mental model matches the model that an application provides, it seems intuitive. When mental models clash, it's unintuitive. The catch with social business implementations is that they are unlikely to be intuitive to users that are unfamiliar with the social paradigm. In fact, I can say that even experienced users of social media who don't use it in a business context are likely to struggle at time. So instead of fussing over how to make the experience intuitive, it's crucial that we make the experience 'learnable'. There's also no substitute to providing people support when they need it. Complaints are good - they are opportunities to connect with users, educate them and build relationships. Nikhil Nulkar, our enterprise community facilitator (a.k.a ninja) is great at doing just this.Learning is a continuous process and after going through several social learning initiatives and experiments, I'm glad to be implementing a proper social business solution for my employers. I'm learning heaps about this stuff, and as time goes on I want to share these insights with you. I'd love to hear your thoughts about today's musings so please drop a line in the comments section and tell me.I'm going to be at Learning Solutions 2011 next week, so if you're in the vicinity please come and say hello. It'll be great to catch up.© Sumeet Moghe

Happy Saint Patricks Day!!, for those folks who may be celebrating it anyway… Today surely is a special day for a whole bunch of people all over the world. Well, for me, too! No, it’s not because on the Internet apparently it’s my birthday today, which it isn’t (Thanks ever so much everyone for those kind and warm wishes shared across though!). Once again, and like I have been doing for a couple of years now, I *lied*. My actual birthday date is in February (Yes, I am a true Aquarian!), as I have hinted elsewhere already, but in a way it is my birthday today as well. At least, what I would consider having been reborn again into the current life I have been enjoying for the last 8 years and counting… Indeed, 8 years ago, on March 17th, 2004, on such a special occasion as St. Patrick’s Day, I moved to Gran Canaria, as my permanent home. And I haven’t gone back anywhere else ever since! If you have been reading this blog for a long while you will notice how, despite the odd and awkward experiences here and there with my business travelling, I do enjoy traveling all over the place quite a bit. It’s probably the best option out there to get to know places, people, their languages, their customs, their traditions, their cultural traits, and whatever else. Amongst one of the best learning experiences in life. It’s also probably the best option to meet up a good bunch of close friends who no longer live near you in the same city, country or whatever, but that thanks to the wonderful world of the Social Web they are scattered all over. But, to be honest, the main reason why I love traveling, is because every time that I do it gives me an opportunity to treasure and appreciate why I work and live in Gran Canaria. My home. You know, time and time again, when I get to present at conference events, summits, workshops, seminars and whatever else on the initiative I started over 4 years ago on living "A World Without Email", and how the world of Social is helping us transform the corporate world of the 21st century as well as our societies as a whole, it surprises plenty of people how I can still get away with having ditched corporate email, rely quite heavily on social networks for business and still live and work in Gran Canaria. Even more when my own boss is thousands of kilometers away from me… Well, that’s my story. And I am surely grateful to my current employer, IBM, as they have been employing me for the last 15 years to give me an opportunity to demonstrate there are other ways to contribute, make yourself useful, have an impact, and enjoy with a passion what you do on a daily basis. Regardless of where you are in the world. It no longer makes a difference. Remember the blog post I put together a couple of days ago on "Everything is connected to everything"? That’s what I have been trying to prove all along. That with the emergence of much more effective and efficient collaborative, knowledge sharing and social networking tools we now have an opportunity to redesign how we do work, where we do it and with whom. And how it’s that flexibility and work life integration that would surely help knowledge workers become a lot more attached to the work they do, with a rather strong sense of belonging, ownership and co-responsibility for wanting things to work out just all right. To always want to improve the way your business does business, even if that means facing as well the ugly parts, to try to solve them in a meaningful and purposeful manner. All in all, to become more engaged, transparent, open, nimble, in short, sustainable and smart enough to carry on for a few decades more in perhaps one of the most complex, yet exciting, times in our lifetime as a species. That’s why I am celebrating today my 8th year anniversary since I arrived in Gran Canaria. I never expected I would be staying over here that long. In fact, after my family’s home, it’s the place in the world I have lived the longest in a row. And while I don’t know how much longer I would be living over here, since that’s something that you can never plan anymore these days (Welcome to the world of uncertainty! hehe), I can certainly assure you all that, to me, it’s all about enjoying every single minute of it, yes, the good old carpe diem, because you never know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Oh, well, hang on, yes, I know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Actually, beginning of next week, when I am on the road again for a couple of business trips to Belgium and London (again!) and where you can imagine how much I would be looking forward to coming back home and be greeted with something special , something that 8 years ago welcomed me to be part of its family, its extensive community, and still accepts me to be there for who I am. Yes, that’s Gran Canaria. That’s my home. That’s my life. We may as well enjoy it, don’t you think? Again, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, for those celebrating it, and happy 8th year anniversary, @elsua 4.0! Time to go off now and enjoy plenty of the beauty this paradise on earth island has got to offer! Ohhh, and if you ever come to pay a visit on your holidays or next business trip, get in touch! I would be delighted to show and guide you around … Or check my Foursquare’s checkins for some of the best places to hang out, as well as enjoy some of the most beautiful surroundings with incredibly friendly people and superb food. Oh, yes, I am a #foodie, too! But I am sure you have noticed that already, haven’t you?

Last week Dinesh, Nikhil and I encountered the second stage of our social business journey at ThoughtWorks. Over the week, we had a few conversations with other ThoughtWorkers focussing on one common question, "Where do I put x?". While our platform itself places no restrictions on where users can post content and while we have a really powerful search engine, the mental model of folders to place your information is still prevalent. It's been about four years since I last created a very structured folder system on my computer. Today I just save files where I please and then let Spotlight or Quicksilver find the files for me when I need them. Coming back to our social business platform though, the primary driver for this initiative was to answer a long standing knowledge management challenge at ThoughtWorks. Our aim at least when we started off, was to map our organisational capabilities and make them explicit for the average ThoughtWorker. While social media seems to have lowered the barrier for content creation and sharing considerably, there's a separate question about structure that we need to answer. How does the traditional world view of knowledge management fit in the world of social business?Prescriptive Structure Leads to Empty or Neglected ContainersUseful content doesn't come up by magic. Content also doesn't come up as a result of an imposed structure. Content arrives on platforms because some people feel a strong ownership for it and believe that there's value in sharing it. Over a period of time they use metadata such as tags, ratings and comments to provide a layer of information and commentary to the content. Given a reasonable amount of time, the structure for all the content on the platorm starts to emerge. Tag clouds help create a map for users so they can browse through the content. Search engines start throwing intelligent results for searches. User commentary, ratings and flags provide a layer of quality control over the content, helping all members of the community find the best content for the purpose. This is the phenonmenon of emergent structure that Andrew McAfee has spoken about in his book - Enterprise 2.0. The key however is in understanding that while content is valuable, context is significantly more precious. To know your colleague who wrote that phenomenal blogpost, to be able to see how people used her ideas, to be able to look at the other contributions by this user, etc are a generative side to the knowledge management puzzle. It's a side that opens up possibilities for serendipity which traditional content focussed approaches are unlikely to achieve.No Structure is a 'One-Size-Fits-All'The same presentation that I upload to a conferences space could be the one you look for in the technology space. While I like a Twitter style approach to finding interesting content, you may prefer a Digg style model. While one person may choose a communities of practice model to personal learning, another person may just look for a more structured sitemap/ folder approach. Regardless of which approach you choose, you're likely to marginalise a certain group of people. The modern internet has given us so many options that we're almost spoilt for choice and everyone looks at stuff differently. The key is to give people a way to personalise their knowledge intake in a way that suits them. Flexible consumption is the need of the hour. Personal Knowledge Management and Sense Making is the KeyThe modern workplace requires modern skills. While it's all too well to complain about chaos and information overload, a key skill in this age, is the ability to set up filters that help you make sense of everything. As Clay Shirky explains in the above talk, it's not really information overload - it's filter failure. People also need to be comfortable with missing stuff. If things are really important, they'll come to you. Others will repost it, there'll be heavy discussion and the content will rise in popularity. A huge part of the 'information overload complaint' also has to do with the gluttony and greed to be 'on top of everything'. Managing digital knowledge that matters to you, requires deliberate practice. Harold Jarche calls this the practice of personal knowledge management. Knowledge workers need to develop the skills to connect with others, exchange ideas and to contribute effectively to a knowledge collective. This requires inward facing categorising and sorting skills to deal with the flow of information. Organisations need to support knowledge workers through the journey of learning these skills, since it's crucial to their own success. The role of the knowledge management organisation then perhaps shifts to a higher touch, personal productivity consulting role. Over a period of time knowledge managers need to move into community facilitation roles because the traditional responsibilities of uploading documents to repositories will no longer exist. The only structure that's likely to make sense, is self selected structure.I'm keen to learn how other social media/ business consultants are answering the structured KM question in their organisations. Do you have an experience to share? Please drop in a few lines in the comments section and tell us your story. If you're keen to tell me face to face, I'm at the Learning Solutions Conference all of this week and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is there a balance I'm missing? Let me know - I'm all ears!© Sumeet Moghe

Here we go again, already done with another one of those crazy, rather hectic and buzzing Mondays, and embarking on what promises to be quite an interesting and exciting week, as I am preparing for my next business trip, which, once again, is going to take me to two different cities in two different countries in the next few days. First to Antwerp, Belgium, to attend and present (On Being Social, as a panelist, and on #lawwe as a speaker) at the stunning BLUG event, where the agenda seems to be more impressive than ever; then, over the weekend, heading over to London, UK, where I will be staying till Wednesday, participating and presenting as well at Melcrum‘s fine Digital Communication Summit, as I will be talking about IBM’s journey towards becoming a social business sharing the experiences, lessons learned, hints & tips, and adoption techniques of our now 5 year old Social Software Adoption program called BlueIQ. Phew! You can imagine it’s going to be a rather intense week (Another one of those!), where perhaps stress will make its presence more than once, and, just now, when thinking about it, I can sense it’s going to show up a few times eventually. Nothing new, really, right? I mean, in today’s current business world who doesn’t that have feeling that some times, and, hopefully, just some times, there are just so many things going on at the same time that even juggling with them to see how many balls remain on the air proves to be quite a challenge on its own. My good friend Jacob Morgan captured, really nice, on a recent tweet, what the actual impact that stress is causing into the business world and although his tweet was just specific to the US, I can imagine how it would also be applicable in multiple other countries. If not judge for yourself:   did you know that the annual impact of stress in the workplace for the U.S. is over $400 Billion? — Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) March 16, 2012 Now, I can imagine that there would be plenty of various different things and activities you could do to help tame that stress and bring it back under control, since we all know that negative stress has never been rather helpful to one’s productivity and effectiveness. But yet, since we are all so busy doing multiple things and juggling with multiple projects, and whatever else, there is one key question that keeps popping up: Where do you get the time? You know, we are all so busy, we just don’t have it any more! We cannot even control it or have a little glimpse of what we are doing with it. It’s become the new economy. Along with Attention Management, of course, for that matter. But what if we would have that opportunity to address, manage and tame that stress to reasonable levels with something so relatively simple as one minute? Yes, you are reading it right. One minute! Nothing more, nothing less! Who can’t afford a single minute going by here and there then to achieve that new goal of living a stress-free work life and get so much more done? I am sure you may be thinking that I am dreaming, once again, or that I have become a bit of a utopian. But what if it were possible? Would you do it? … I bet you would! So allow me to introduce you to this absolutely delightful video clip of just over 5 minutes that will introduce you to the wonderful world of Meditation. In this case, One Moment Meditation by Martin Boroson. I bumped into this video late last week on my of my Google Plus circles and, of course, I just couldn’t help watching it through to see what it would be all about. And, I eventually, got to practice it!! Whoaahh. Really. And it works!! There are lots and lots of things that I could say about the video, how incredibly inspiring it is and all, but once again, I am not going to spoil it for you folks and I am, instead, going to encourage you all to watch through the video, right as we speak, even if you are not stressed out, so that, when you are, you know exactly what you can do to avoid it and move on with your work. I tell you, I tried it out while going through it and I can certainly vouch for how effectively it works, to the point where it doesn’t feel like you are doing it, and, yet, you are and getting the best results! Just brilliant! And painless! Again, you may not need it just now, or you may need it pretty drastically; the good thing is that after you watch it, it is just so easy to carry it on with you that no matter where you may well be, or what you will be doing, or what you will be working on, as soon as you notice that negative stress kicking in, it’s time then for that One Moment Meditation, and get back on track. Seriously, it’s that effective. What do you think? Does One-Moment Meditation work out for you as well? Feel free to drop a quick comment or two and let us know whether it is working out for you or not, and if you have other tips and techniques to help tame that negative stress share them across as well. I bet we would all love to know about them!

Over the course of the last few weeks, perhaps couple of months, I have noticed how I am starting to post articles about a good number of different topics on this blog that have expanded beyond the original intent to talk about Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Online Communities, Learning and Social Computing / Networking for Business. In particular, I have begun to become more and more interested in those subjects related to work life integration that are surely part of the business world, too, specially, when time and time again plenty of folks have been talking all along about that work life balance, but time and time again we have never seen it become a reality. Well, what if that balance didn’t exist in the first place? Most importantly, what if that work life balance has never existed, right from the beginning, despite what we may have been thinking about all along? Time then to wake up to that new reality of always-on, (inter)connected, and readily available, regardless of where you may well be, what device you may be using, who you may be connecting with, and what you may be working on at that moment? While I was in London a couple of weeks ago participating at the #UCExpo event, where I did a keynote session on the topic of Living "A World Without Email" (See this great article put together by Guy Clapperton to get a glimpse of what I talked about or this other link for the recording of the session itself) and the subject of work life balance came up from the audience when asking me how do I balance it all out not relying on corporate email anymore and instead having made the transition into social networking tools for getting work done. One of the attendees brought up the whole concept of work life balance and how important it is in today’s business world and how we all seem to keep neglecting it big time, and I just couldn’t help getting a chuckle or two, because, in reality, I have always thought that such balance just doesn’t exist. It is a big myth. It always has been! In most cases, indeed, it’s a myth that most corporations have made us, knowledge workers, believe is possible to have in today’s work environment as a way to combine our work lives with our private ones, when, all along, I have always stated that such balance just doesn’t exist and for a single reason: work has always won (and it will continue to win!). It has trumped life all along and it will continue to do so for many decades to come. Instead, a long while ago I have made the transition into what some people have been calling work life integration, where one of key words / concepts that has started making the rounds in the last few years, that is, flexibility, is gaining more and more importance and relevance as we move forward. Work life integration, and that flexibility, starts kicking in when both knowledge workers and employers begin to understand how we need to make a transition into measuring business performance by the outcomes and deliverables of what you produce, regardless of the time that it would take you to complete such tasks, rather than by just your mere physical presence, working a good number of hours, even if there is no more work to be done. It’s all about autonomy and how you are going to manage your work hours in the wider, larger context, of how you are going to live your own personal life. And we should all remember that we just got ONE life, and perhaps MULTIPLE jobs (Seeing today’s new reality, in the dozens!). Just recently I read this fascinating article, over at Lifehacker, that points to this other, much longer, but equally worth it, piece of research by Sara Robinson about how if your work week extends beyond the 40 hours per week you may be having a huge problem with your own productivity that you would need to tackle. And soon! There is no denying that in today’s corporate environment becoming even more productive and effective knowledge worker is going to ever increase our stress levels because more and more is being demanded from us, by multiple projects, teams, networks, communities and some times it’s difficult to juggle with it all. But what if we would take a step back, and realise that not everything is about work? That not everything is about being chained to whatever the computing device to get work done. That there are more important aspects out there, in our lives, that we should treasure perhaps even more than work, and I am not even taking into account the private quality time that we spend with our families, friends, relatives and loved ones, which we all know has been decreasing quite a bit over the course of time anyway, in the first place. In this particular case I am talking about something so fundamental as health, our very own health. Indeed, that aspect of our lives that we keep taking for granted, day in day out, till it’s perhaps too late and we cannot longer back out of it, because we didn’t pay enough attention to it in the first place. One of the things that I have come to terms with over the course of the last 4 years, when I started with this initiative of Living "A World Without Email", is that us, knowledge workers, are not that fundamental, critical to the business and indispensable that we think we are. In fact, we aren’t. Whether we would like to admit it or not, the business world will always continue to move on, with us, or without us, and things will be just fine. You know, it’s something that’s been happening all along, but that we have never realised about it till probably now. We all go on holidays for one, two or three weeks, or longer, if you are lucky enough! (Fascinating read that one, by the way, that I will be picking up on another blog entry), and we try to disconnect, relax, unwind from everything work related. We may be more or less successful in achieving that, but one thing for sure is that when we are not there, things keep moving on just at the same pace as before, if not even faster, judging by the amount of catchup most of us have got to do upon our return. That, in itself, is an indication of how we, knowledge workers, may need to start shifting gears and become more focused on what work is all about and what our personal lives should be about. It’s that integration between work life that needs to kick in, to understand that some times you will be working really hard for over 12 to 14 hours straight, because work would require you to do that, and then there would be other times where you may just be working 2 to 4 hours and the rest of the time you can dedicate it to spend it doing something else. The key challenge though would remain on how willing would those businesses be to allow for that kind of flexibility in the corporate environment and whether they would be able to support it or not. In my opinion, they surely would, because, amongst other things, they would haven’t have much of a choice, if they would want to retain their talent in fear of those knowledge workers moving elsewhere, i.e. to another business that would be much more accommodating for that same flexibility. That’s why, over the last few months we have seen how plenty of corporations have been paying attention to one key fundamental aspect that affects them, just as much as their knowledge workers: our very own health! I am not sure whether you may have noticed it or not, but plenty of companies are starting to carry out rather intense campaigns to raise awareness of how important and critical it is for knowledge workers to look after their own health in order to be able to perform better. I am sure most of you folks out there would have plenty of reasons to share across on why businesses are finally paying attention to such important matters, but one thing that is undeniable, to me, is that in this matter if one self doesn’t look after their own health, no-one else would. So, I am really glad we are now finally seeing this topic coming up on the table. It’s an important one. That’s perhaps why as of late, I am becoming a whole lot more interested in that work life integration from the perspective of taking into account other important aspects of how we can conduct work in a meaningful way, rather than in work itself. After all, we all know it’s going to happen eventually anyway, so if we can remain focused and purposeful about it, we should probably take into account other important aspects, like this one on health. It all became a lot clearer to me way back in July last year when I decided to take a bit more of a proactive approach in taking care of my own health by growing up the habit of doing daily workouts (and plenty of exercise!), a good healthy diet of learning to eat smaller portions of everything and get plenty of sleep, as I have detailed on a blog entry at the beginning of this year. From there onwards, interest grew in me further along as the results of my overall performance at work have been much better eventually in the understanding that the healthier you become, and no need to go through to the other end of the extreme!, the much more productive and effective you end up being. And that’s why I wanted to put together this blog entry over here today to highlight a short video clip I bumped into over the course of the last couple of days that I am sure most folks would find quite a fascinating watch, not only because of how relevant it is to this whole discussion of living a healthy life, while getting work done and enjoying plenty of good quality private time with your family and friends, but also for covering some stunning facts about how something so relatively simple as 30 minutes of physical activity on a daily basis can be so beneficial for us all. Indeed, in 23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health? Dr. Mike Evans gets to describe a whole bunch of facts as to why regular physical exercise can help boost not only our health levels, but also our intellectual capacity, which is rather remarkable, because it comes to confirm how we may need to stop obsessing too much about getting work done, and perhaps start obsessing more with looking after own health, if we would want to become better at what we do. Very little more to add at this point on such important matters, other than perhaps include the embedded code of the video clip over here, so that folks could have a look into it and start pondering how and when they would need to start injecting such energy boosts that come along from that daily exercise in order to provide us with a higher quality life, which I guess is just as good as it gets. And don’t worry, work will continue its course. It always does. Right now, as an example, I am stuck in a hotel room in Madrid, trying to get some work done, but, alas, I can’t because my VPN connection to the Intranet is currently down. So, you see? The world doesn’t stop. It just moves on. Like you should be moving on! This time around the key challenge, and the good fight for us all, is all about trying to figure out how we can integrate it (Work, that is) effectively with other more important tasks dropped on to each and everyone of us: live fully a better quality life. See? Don’t you think it’s worth it every minute? And it’s just only 30 minutes per day… What’s our excuse not to do it then? Please don’t tell me it’s work, because it surely isn’t. It’s never been about work. It’s always been about how much good care you would be taking about yourself and what really matters to you. And I bet work alone does no longer cut it, does it?