I'm at what promises to be a great session with elearning's only bonafide rockstar - Tom Kuhlmann. Tom's the author of the rapid elearning blog and in my opinion one of the best community managers in the world. Tom's talk today is around lessons we can learn from the several rapid elearning gurus across the world. Tom's made a living out of helping people that are one or two person teams who have to do everything by themselves but don't necessarily have the budget or the skills to do it all by themselves. The rapid authoring tools like Articulate make course creation easier but now people have to do all of the work that originally a graphic artist, developers, instructional designers would have done in a team. Anyways, the Articulate Guru contest is such an amazing example of intelligent designers doing more with less. I'm going to catalogue live what Tom says we can learn from the 200 gurus who have submitted to the contest.Elearning can mean many things: Tom's talking about elearning from back in the day. If you look at the stuff you've done years back, you'll perhaps look at it and disown it! And then you look at cool courses around you and then you think what's wrong with you and what's wrong with your company? The key to remember that all the interactivity doesn't need to come from the elearning course itself. It could come from the classroom, it could be from a chat - think of your course as a media meatball. The top complaints Tom gets is that either they're not funny or they basically just don't have any point! Anyways, elearning can mean many things. We need to feel good about what we're doing because what we do can be useful to a specific audience and there's always room to learn and improve.Limted resources shouldn't hold you back:Powerpoint has been representative of several things, people seem to speak of it almost as a different literacy. From an animation point of view you can do a lot in Powerpoint. The only trouble is that you can't create much logic. You can definitely create interactive courses - the interactivity needs to be meaningful though.People like to laugh: If it's boring no one's going to look at it and the notion of humour changes over time. What was funny in the 80s may not be funny today. The challenge with humour is that 80% will find it funny and 20% will sue you. Also, we need to get beyond being stuck up. Just because a topic is serious doesn't mean it can't have humour. The idea is to not try to be funny, but to do real 'campy' stuff. People like seeing cult like viral things going on in the course, they like seeing their friends on video. The lack of professional polish is really cool because it makes things real. Tom's referring to this course when he's mentioning this. The campiness made it a memorable product though it wasn't the best in the world.Where's Waldo: People need to know where they are. This gives them a sense of how much more they need to commit to something, how much they've achieved. Think of how you read or buy a book. Could you read a book without knowing how big it was or what it contains or without having a table of contents? This is almost the way Steve Jobs presents - make your course easy for your audience to follow. Don't get people 'stuck' in a course, don't block the navigation. Give people credit for being adults - get them in, get them out and give them control. Just because you can doesn't mean you have to!How can you mix it up? If you just have scenarios after another, it can become monotonous. If you just have questions one after the other, then people are going to feel like you're interrogating them. We need to think through the pacing of our course and mix things up. This is also what we need to remember around not making our courses seem templated. Tom's got several rapid elearning models to talk about. Example being the the rapid situational interactive which he often talks about. But if he kept doing this screen after screen, it would be incredibly monotonous. The good courses are different from the bad courses in that they have variety.What is interactivity? There are several pieces of interactive things that you can do on a screen. Well from an elearning standpoint it's either a click and reveal or a mouseover or a drag and drop. Engage is a cool app for example. The trick that Tom mentions is that interactivity is meaningful when people are mentally engaging with the elearning. People do often get excited about mouseovers and things like that, but it's important that the interaction gives the learner something to do; eg: collect information and do something with it.Do you need to train people on how to use your course? Because if you do, then either you've done something hugely wrong or you've hired the wrong people. Do you really need to tell people that they need to click the blinking red button in the corner? Get over it!Beware of the Frankencourse: You don't have to do everything in one course! It becomes too much. Even Tom doesn't recommend that you use all of his tips in one single course. Don't just throw stuff together, develop a consistent look and feel and make everything 'blend well' together.Pay attention to details: Sweat the small stuff. Think about how you've placed objects on the screen. How have you justified text on your screen? Have you tested how your interactions work?Be creative and use the user community like free money: The Articulate community is one of the best, most supportive communities on the internet and is out there, responding to elearning professionals day in and day out. I must say I'm amazed at how cool the stuff on ScreenR is - people share such cool stuff. Some examples that Tom sharedTom promises to share links that I may not have posted here and you can take a look at these courses to get inspiration for your own stuff:Stephanie Hartnett's Motivation Course - great example of how you can do some really advanced stuff with humble toolsEWGA Dallas Chapter's Golf Course?SCA Supply Chain Academy's course on Understanding Safety StockThe Surgery Squad Rhinoplasty CourseThe Learning Nurse's Nasal SimulationKevin Thorn's Mission Turfgrass - it's so cool that you won't believe it's in Articulate! Tom mentions that the only criticism of this could be that there's way to many progress meters in the game.Mike Enders: Psyched in 10 - great storytelling, humour and narration. Nice easter eggs that get people attracted and then engaged. If you had to build just linear click and read courses, this is a great inspiration.Tom's encouraging us to use the community and become gurus ourselves. This was a great talk and great tips to take away. What a rockstar!© Sumeet Moghe

If you have been reading the last few articles I have posted over here in this blog, over the course of the last few months, you may have noticed how, as of late, I have become a whole lot more critical (Hopefully, in a constructive manner) around the whole subject of Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, in general, and, although I’m still a strong believer in the whole movement (I even think we cannot longer go back and do something else. It’s changed us for good!), I am starting to question the validity and merit of a good number of motives from companies to become successful social businesses, because in reality they aren’t. They are just grabbing the wrong end of the stick thinking and hoping it will work out eventually, when we all know it won’t, and get away with it. Well, it’s now time to up the game again and here’s another one of those thinking out loud reflections that’s been in my mind for a long while regarding Social Business and which I’m now more and more convinced it may be destroying our current business environment as we know it, more than anything else. Specially, in today’s financial conundrum. Here it goes: What if Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business are one of the main culprits why it’s taking us all so long to recover from this financial crisis? What if E2.0 and Social Business are the main reasons why we may no longer get the economy to recover as we could, or would, or should, have expected? What if we are all doomed and we are facing The End of a Job as We Know It? The first time that I read about that particular idea of how pernicious Enterprise 2.0 may well be to the corporate world was on a Twitter exchange with Eric Norlin, organiser of the always inspiring, thought-provoking and wonderful Defrag conference event, in Denver, Colorado, where he was mentioning how more and more he was convinced that Social Business, Enterprise 2.0 or whatever other 2.0 moniker, was killing the job market and current working conditions, because businesses were adopting this shift for the wrong reasons. A few months later, I am starting to become pretty much convinced myself that he was, perhaps still is!, on to something! If you look into the current business world out there you would see how one of the main reasons why corporations are adopting and embracing this social networking for business movement has always been cutting costs, i.e. optimizing the business with the right resources (apart from generating new business, that is!). That’s basically us, knowledge workers, still being treated as resources, instead of people, and acting accordingly when embracing all of these social technologies. HR still hasn’t made that transition from Human Resources into Human Relationships, at least, for the vast majority of businesses out there and this means that if Social Business can help them get their business optimise their resources they would be doing so, ignoring the people, and their needs, once again, and like it’s been happening for decades… Just think of it, how many times have we seen plenty of use cases on how beneficial social networking is in helping find the right experts within organisations, or find the right information at the right time, socialising business processes accelerating speed of response, improving customer satisfaction or just simply empowering knowledge workers to become much more effective and productive while getting work done? Far too many times, don’t you think? Well, right there it is when optimizing the business kicks in, because instead of thriving to become more sustainable businesses where people are treated like people, in a much more trustworthy, responsible and valued perspective altogether, we keep seeing how the business decides to go the other direction and optimises resources, i.e. continues further along with layoffs or resource actions, or doesn’t hire enough talent just to get by, since the current knowledge workforce keeps on being squeezed out all the way. Have you ever thought about when was it the last time that you worked 40 hours per week, or, basically, the number of hours you were hired for in the first place? Another example, when was it the last time that you were working only on a single project, with a single team, budget, mission scope, goals, etc. etc. Just think of it. Probably not in the last decade or so, if not longer! Shouldn’t we all be focusing on the long term strategy to become socially integrated enterprises where sustainable business growth becomes a norm, more than an exception? Shouldn’t we just leave behind that 20th century corporate mentality of just thinking on quarter after quarter, or on whether large corporations are pleasing Wall Street, or not (Don’t forget just how much Wall Street appreciates each and everyone of you! … Not!), and start thinking that if we don’t pay attention to such fundamental shift that social business is provoking in a proper manner we may eventually be sinking to never recover? I mean, just think of it, what smart, brilliant, young talented workforce would want to work for your business in, say, 5 to 10 years, when they find out knowledge workers are still being treated as resources, versus relations, i.e. people? When they find out making profits at all costs for the benefit of just a few is trumping those personal business relationships to rather alarming levels? When they figure out those older generations keep being optimised big time and they don’t have anyone out there, or hardly anyone, willing to transfer and pass on their knowledge, because they may not even be there in the first place? Aren’t we making it far too complicated, and, perhaps almost impossible, for future generations of the workplace to make a difference and have a significant impact? Let’s not forget how, as things stand out, right now, we are going to face a rather interesting business problem very very soon when the active working population will be outnumbered, big time!, by those people who are no longer working, i.e. retired, of those who are perhaps a bit too young to enter the workplace just yet… I am not sure what you would think, but I sense we are entering that stage of the point of no return, where Social Business in its purest form would need to come forward, make a stand, and show, and demonstrate, businesses, what a meaningful, purposeful, and successful social business that looks after both their customer base, as well as their employee workforce, is all about. Because somehow using Social Business, just like we did with Knowledge Management back in the day, to optimise resources to drive business revenue by cutting costs alone in the short term somehow sounds like shooting ourselves on the foot, to never recover from the injury… Do we really want to head that way, say, in the next 5 to 10 years? Probably not, so perhaps we should put a stop to it now, while we can and before it is too late. Last thing we would want to do is to keep making the very same mistakes over and over again. Haven’t we learned anything from the past experiences that have brought us to the current financial apocalypse we have been experiencing in the last few years? Can a business nowadays, in the 21st century, become a truly connected, transparent, nimble, successful and sustainable social business while optimising operations with layoffs is still lingering around in the background? I don’t think so. What do you think? Maybe, we need to rethink the current state of the business world, not just for the right now, but for the long term, and figure out whether social business can help us revert back and head into the right direction, because something tells me we do have the potential, the energy, the good effort, the excitement, the talent to making it happen, but what’s stopping us from realising it? Reluctance to change? To think and act in a completely different way than what we have been doing for ages? To perhaps come to terms with the fact that there is a better way of doing sustainable business and we may be too afraid of jumping the shark and live it? Well, maybe it is time to do so. Maybe we should. Before it’s just too late and can’t react in time any longer. There is just far too much at stake at this point, methinks, and not just for ourselves, but for those future generations of knowledge workers. What kind of legacy are we planning on handing over to them when we are all gone? How would you like to be remembered? As the one who planted the seeds to collect a wonderful harvest at a later time (by them), or as the one who just wanted to focus on the quarter by quarter survival without caring much about what will be happening next. Please do tell me you are made of the former kind rather than of the latter. Please. We need you. And very much so. Now.

I've just run into Connie Malamed's sessionabout research around visuals and I'm late. I'm going to start blogging right away. Connie's been talking about the power of visuals - e.g how Dan Roam simplified the US healthcare problem. Connie's the author of one of my favourite books - Visual Language for Designers. I'm going to struggle to give you the complete picture (pun intended) because Connie's book is really what you should read for this kind of thing. Here's what she's covering. Why we're wired for graphicsEveryone's worked on courses where the visuals could be better. We have 1,200,000 fibers in the optical nerve as against 30,000 auditory in the auditory. We're hardwired for visuals. This is why we have the picture superiority effect where an image trumps words for descriptions most of the time - what we call "a picture speaks a thousand words". Pictures are a much closer replica of our environment than words. So how do we process visuals. We have a store called sensory memory and we process from visual and auditory sources.  We take input from the sensory memory into the working memory. A lot less information actually comes through the working memory to get encoded into the long term memory. Working memory limits the information we process. That capacity is quite limited - 4 bits of information at a time. This is information from top cognitive scientists. Information in this working memory is quite short, it lasts only a few seconds. So how do we represent visual information? We represent images differently from works. These are internal representations that represent some physical characteristics of the real object. It may not be exact - maybe a line drawing of the actual picture. We represent things to ourselves very simply and that's a case for simplicity in graphics. Our capacity for remembering pictures in long-term memory is enormous. You could go to an image library and recognise all the pictures that you've ever used. People give meaning to the visuals that they process. You add context to the images you see, your values, what you understand, your culture, your beliefs. "The mind is not a camera" - Stephen KosslynWe're not just recording devices, we're adding to the worlds as we see it. This said, we can go wrong with graphics - take a look. Research inspired design can therefore help. It's based on evidence and facts and can be applied to the real world. How do you speed up your message?Preattentive processing - we're always scanning our environments and by doing that we create a coherent picture of what we see and how we make sense of it. What things pop out? We notice these features quite strongly. There are certain characteristics of visuals and graphics that we can make pop out to make use of preattentive processing. Grouping is another technique that helps people understand things that go together. Connie shows some interesting ways to do the 'pop out':Colour contrastUnusual elements in picturesSize contrastShade contrastDirection and position in pictures - what in visual language we call orientationMotion vs stationary Depth ShapeHow do we do the grouping then? How do you let your learners know what goes together?Proximity is an obvious way to group elementsColor is also a great way to group elements togetherSimilarity is also a great way to create grouping; eg: several colored circles close to each otherThe law of common fate - we usually group lines or anything that's going in the same directionConnectedness - objects that are connected with lines or another visual element seem groupedThe boundary principle. Anything that's within a single boundary gets grouped togetherHow do we make graphics efficientWhen elements of a graphic are consistent in meaning, the information is easier to process. Connie showed us examples of where we read the words RED, GREEN and BLUE in entirely different colours. This obviously was strange for the entire group. What if the arrows for a skydiving graphic go up instead of a downward direction that actually is the direction in which we would actually dive. There's something to say about reducing realism - it makes graphics cognitively efficient. Illustrations are a great way for novices to learn, as against elaborate 3D pictures. It provides fewer distractions, it takes less time to percieve, it minimises load on working memore and it's easier to encode this in our long term memory. So how do we actually achieve this?Reduce noisy detailIncrease contrastMake it minimalistic - silhouette instead of detailed pictures maybe?Fewer colorsLess detailSmooth surfaceMinimal shadowsGoing from high fidelity to low fidelity graphicsUse of line art instead of detailed picturesUse of iconic forms; everyday icons like shopping carts which people The use of symbols - people recognise this stuff very quicklyHow do we connect through emotions?Can your image create a reaction in your audience's body? Images have that ability to move us in some way. Emotion and cognition are really tied together. Emotions affect mental process. They capture attention, increase brain activity and can really improve retention. This is because we build associations with images based on experiences. We are also particularly attuned to faces - this is something I've observed too. Our eyes move towards even cartoon faces. In fact that's one of the first things that we see on a visual. It's almost a way to create a 'pop out'. Connie is showing us this image. Emotional images are definitely awesome for changing attitudes. Graphics with statistics can create emotion around the numbers. Think hungry child in Haiti when you're showing a graph on poverty.There's another side to emotion as well - surprise! Surprise results from novelty and humour. It comes from the unusal juxtaposition of elements and it comes from unexpectedness. How do we make the abstract concrete?Abstract graphics make understanding quite easy in some cases. Charts and diagraphs, graphs, maps, timelines, visualisations, etc provide an abstraction of the real images. You can use diagrams to show the big picture view to people. Diagrams can really simplify things for your audience. You can try to externalise people's internal mental models. For example if you're teaching the sales funnel, then use the funnel metaphor to explain it. Use graphs to present quantitative information. Maps can show so much more than geography. Timelines can show progression, evolution and history. Tables don't need to be boring and text based. You can use visual tables like this one!This was such a great, information dense, yet engaging talk by Connie. Explains why she's one of my favourite bloggers and writers.© Sumeet Moghe

In the recent past you may well remember a couple of blog posts that I put together over here around the subject of the Circular Economy, right?, as perhaps one of the most forward thinking initiatives towards sustainable, social, purposeful and meaningful growth, maybe much deeply inspired by the world of Social Business. Well, now, here it comes The Share Economy with a far too similar mantra that most of us, socially networked knowledge workers, have been embracing, and living!, for a good while now: Sharing! In a world where plenty of our activities, whether personal or work related, are always pretty much individualistic, as we are starting to come around group activities, eventually, with the emergence of social networking tools, even though there is a group of people out there who keep claiming that the (Social) Web has made us all far too isolated from the rest of the world, to the point where people decline any physical contact or fail to grasp social physical cues anymore, it’s rather refreshing to see new and very innovative initiatives like Uniiverse, whose motto is nothing less than a tremendously inspiring "Platform for Collaborative Living". In a business world, where 80% of the knowledge workers, so, that is, 8 out of 10!, are not happy with their work anymore, and probably with their lives either, since work / life are now so intermingled with one another that’s becoming quite a challenge to distinguish which is which, here comes Uniiverse, once again, sharing along how there may well be a much better approach out there to continue providing us with an opportunity to have a "happier, more sustainable and a better lifestyle", which doesn’t seem to be too much of a bad idea, if you consider the current state of things, whether on a personal level or a work related one. And all of that, because of a single magical word: share! Indeed, the folks behind Uniiverse have put together a rather interesting and thought provoking initiative where they have sparked the idea of sharing and contributing into building what may well be the next wave of social interactions, as Social Business keeps taking by storm the corporate world encouraging, if anything, not just connecting and collaborating amongst knowledge workers, but just something so fundamentally simple and, yet, so incredibly powerful, as sharing. Sharing for the sake of sharing. Like the good old Knowledge Management mantra, sharing your knowledge across for the sake of sharing it and without asking for anything in return (cf. "In the context of real need few people will withhold their knowledge" by Dave Snowden). What IF we would then shift focus and instead of hoarding and protecting our knowledge, as we keep thinking that "Knowledge is power", which, obviously, has not made things much easier for the vast majority of people, if we currently take into count the financial crisis we have been going through over the course of the last few years, we would go ahead and, instead, share it across freely, so that others could learn and become better at what they do, just as much as you would be able to do it yourself from the knowledge that others share with you ("Knowledge shared is power"). Wouldn’t things run much smoother towards that "happier, more sustainable and a better lifestyle"? If so, what’s stopping us then? Our ingrained ability to fight against each other to have a position of supremacy and power, over the others, as well as influence, which in most cases would only serve a few and no-one else? Or is it because we are far too scared of the huge potential behind that simple act of sharing? Imagine an example: what do you think would happen if all of a sudden, everyone in the corporate world, going from the bottom line to all the way to the top (i.e. Regular knowledge workers, and top executives alike), would come across in an exercise of radical transparency and share their pay slips, that is, their monthly salaries, like Rachel Happe was mentioning over three years ago in a rather thought provoking blog post under the title "Radical Transparency: Where The Rubber Hits The Road"? Do you think we would benefit from that act of sharing as a result of that transparency exercise? Tough one, eh? I think we would and here is why… With (knowledge) sharing there comes an opportunity to become much more open, transparent, nimble, trustworthy, agile, engaged, responsible, interconnected, bonded, etc. etc. Essentially, some of the various main key traits behind living and embracing a Social Business, and, in a way, if you look into it much closer, the folks at Uniiverse have actually shown us what it could potentially look like. Take a look into this YouTube video clip that lasts for a little bit over two and a half minutes and which shows the power of sharing and building an entire economy around it. Worth while a look for certain! Not sure what you would think, but with the emergence of all of these social technologies I sense we are a lot closer than what most people would think from truly realising that Sharing Economy. And somehow, just like the Circular Economy that I have talked about in the past, they both seem pretty good solid options to provide us with that sustainable growth for a better life. Our life. What do you think? Still consider that sharing doesn’t add any value to you, as an individual, or to a group, a network or a community? Perhaps we need to start re-thinking about our priorities and evaluate, once again, whether protecting our position, power and influence, that is, our knowledge, is worth while after all, instead of putting it to good use and help others become much more effective at what they already do. Somehow, the connection to Servant Leadership is clear, it’s right there!, and so is that connection of Social Business and open (knowledge) sharing. So what do we have to do to make it all work? What would make it click for everyone? It just doesn’t sound too difficult, does it? I hope not. Let’s hope not! Let’s do it then! Let’s share!

I've just run into Joseph O'Malley's session on Micro-Learning. Given my fascination with YouTube and things like 50 Lessons, this is a topic I'm quite interested in. So I'll just liveblog what I'm learning. Joseph seems to be a very entertaining guy, given the conversation he's striking before the talk begins. So I think the session (which is a full house) will be entertaining to say the least. Joseph is the senior director of knowledge for St Luke's Health System. Directors go to project meetings and take credit for others work. He's an average person who wants to do great work and wants to share. He hopes that we can take his experience and make it work for us. So we're sitting back and relaxing and letting him drive. His session is called 'How Britney Spears inspired learning innovation..." - LOL! St Luke's is a non-profit and the IT training team has three elearning programmers and four classroom instructors. In healthcare, there's a strong case for instructor led training and these guys take care of the entire life cycle of the learning.The challenge is that of time. Any time in elearning or training is time away from work. People in Joseph's session get ideas from many places, but this idea came from celebrity gossip! That's how Britney got involved in all this. Britney is unleashed and Joseph promises that you'll see her everywhere because of him. Joseph claims that his inspiration came from the Britney Spears umbrella incident where she had a bad day, shaved her hair and then attacked a papparazi's car using an umbrella. So Joseph's team got onto the web looking for the video and went to CNN and they noticed how the videos are just a few minutes long - two and half minutes at an average. If news agencies can educate the public on important topics in less than three minutes, Joseph's team should be able to do it four, shouldn't they?So what is micro-learning? The ability to provide short snippets of education electronically. They called it Knowledge Nuggets - memorable education delivered in four minutes or less. Joseph's urging us in his really funny way to not get caught up in who invented the term or the definition. So for the project they decided they wanted a large audience, geographically distributed. The topics would be high level concepts, detailed, step-by-step instructions wouldn't work. Minimum, simple retention and application of basic knowledge. The time limit was just four minutes and they were strict on themselves. That said post-tests and knowledge checks were outside this our minute time limit. The ProblemSt Luke's approach to quality improvement is called PI and they want all employees to have an awareness of it. They provided this education during new hire orientation and it used to be a 30 minute lesson delivered all in Powerpoint and the fact is that it didn't work. Only 6% could name the stages of PI correctly and the remaining 94% didn't know about it at all. Not good, eh? So what did that education look like - it was a 41 slide bullet point fiesta with a questions slide at the end! For better or for worse, Joseph's team used ADDIE to guide them through the development process. Here were the problems:Too complicated - too much information up front.There was no branding - the PI model didn't have links to strong imagesThere was no context - no simple story to understand how they could use it.There was no St Luke's - the education needed a familiar elementSo Joseph's team grabbed people from the steering committe and came up with education objectives and put a set of design objectives to keep it simple, engaging and short. David will now show us what he pitched to PI steering committee of St Lukes. He explained the micro learning concept, the simplicity and the intent to keep it engaging, humourous and fun. More importantly they decided to use real St Luke's people as actors. They went with some real graphics, real storyboards, tangible proofs of concept that helped the leadership understand what they were upto. They actually used real sketches to explain to the leadership what they were trying to do. Joseph's stuff looks like a really great story, helicopters on the hospital, a big problem and a crack team coming together to solve the problem. How the team actually came together and put together the solution modelled the different phases of the PI approach, a nice headfake to learn how the approach actually works. The management loved it but didn't believe that the team could do it in four minutes. They had a request - they wanted a knowledge check at the end of the module. They also had to have a compromise to use a funny mnemonic - Polka Dots Make Animals Itch. This is ridiculous to me, and for Joseph's team this didn't fit their story. They decided that they'll do two knowledge checks. One would be a high-powered executive PI Game. The other knowledge check would be Luke a dog with polka dots.Joseph's now going to now show us the actual knowledge nugget. The video looks really slick, but nothing you can't do with a little bit of effort. It's humorous and is very similar to the approach that common craft follows with their videos. The story they've got up there is not just funny but also attractive and engaging and it does end in four minutes. Joseph is showing us the knowledge check and the fact is that even without the knowledge check people were able to apply the model. The Luke dog polka dots knowledge check is really funny - if you get things right, the dog stops scratching and is happier. The PI executive game looks even cooler - they actually had people in leadership roles playing actors because they believe in this thing. This is a great example of how leadership involvement can be really effective. The leadership people were happy to do ridiculous gigs to support this. They used real people's voices too to give it that little extra. I'm so impressed - this is way cool stuff. They even gave their actors credit. The fact is that you can do stuff like this in Powerpoint.What were their results?94% of the employees who viewed the knowledge nuggest passed the post test on the first try. The course satisfaction score was 4.89/5.00. After 6 months 96% knew what PI was, 94% were able to cite the room signage story from the video as an example. 68% could list the five phases in the correct order. All this for 44 hours of effort creating the video, 28 hours to create the executive PI game and 14 hours to create the Luke game. The tools they used were digital cameras, Flash, Photoshop, Sound Booth and After Effects. Investing in things like pen tablets made things really easy. They've done more knowledge nuggets ever since like "What is Knowledge Management", stuff around the influenza vaccine, ER trauma, patient safety, etc.Joseph has really encouraged us to look out for inspiration just as their inspiration was Britney and I think this was one of the best presentations at the conference. You can follow him on twitter too.© Sumeet Moghe

First, we have the Circular Economy. Then we have the Sharing Economy and, upon my return from my last business trip to Antwerp (For #BLUG) and London (For the Melcrum Digital Summit), here we have got what I call a pretty cool, inspiring, thought-provoking, mind-blogging new initiative that takes the whole concept of sustainability and growth in a responsible manner into a new level. One where it’s proved that it can be done, where it needs to be done, if we would want to survive accordingly in the next few years, as a species. Welcome to The Co-Operative Ethical Plan 2012 - 2014 (and beyond)! It was a couple of years back, perhaps even longer than that, when I first read from my dear good friend Rob Paterson about that noble, innovative movement of localising global businesses, essentially, referring to that perspective of how, more and more, we are going to experience how everything is going to be run locally, business wise, except perhaps for a handful of rather large corporations that seem to be well established in the global markets, and we are entering that phase where local businesses would strive not only for good, healthy growth, but also a sustainable one; one where they would live to support the growth of their local communities, which in return, would help local businesses become more profitable, in a much more open, transparent, collaborative and community-driven manner. And that can only be a good thing, seeing where the other way has taken us so far. Well, I come back from those recent business trips, which I will be talking about shortly as well, not to worry, and lo and behold, I bumped into this absolutely delightful YouTube video clip, of just under three minutes, which describes what I would think Rob had in mind for that kind of localised sustainable and profitable business. The Co-Operative. Checking out their web site’s Join the Revolution entry could not have had a better mantra to live by: "we launched our groundbreaking Ethical Plan with one clear goal: to be the most socially responsible business in the UK" [Emphasis mine] and it looks like they are aiming big because they are also planning on inspiring other people from all over the world. And I suspect they would succeed doing so, because while watching through the YouTube video it sounds like they are already well under way to make it happen. And I thought that, instead of me telling you all how they plan to make it work and provide us with a better, more sustainable, and socially responsible business world, I will leave it down to them to convince you of the rest, like they did with me, when I watched that clip. If not, judge for yourselves: Truly inspiring, don’t you think? A couple of weeks back I put together one rather thought provoking blog entry under the controversial heading of "Why Social Business Keeps Failing to Deliver" and I guess, after having watched that video clip and the amazingly good commentary that sparked the post, that, to me, Social Business has now got a new mission. And a much more important one. Like I mentioned elsewhere, very soon I will be moving on away from the term Social Business (Leaving it for what it was meant to be all along in the first place!) and instead I will be using another concept I have grown to be very fond of to try to reflect what I mean with all of this social networking for business. But, for now, if open, trustworthy, public, transparent, agile, democratic, engaged, adaptive, empowered, interconnected, socially sustainable, etc. are what social businesses are all about, I guess The Co-Operative has just shown us all how it can be done. Successfully. And still while aiming for driving profit and growth. For everyone. Yes, I guess you can call me a utopian, a true Hippie 2.0 of sorts, but can you imagine the corporate world behaving in the very same way? Can you imagine what social business would be like eventually? Let’s not imagine it then. Let’s make it happen! Let’s show and demonstrate what true, real, successful social businesses are all about. We have got nothing to lose, but a lot to gain… Our very own survival as a species… Welcome to Humanity 4.0! Humanity 4.0 View more PowerPoint from Michelle Holliday  

I'm very excited to be at Michael Wesch's keynote at Learning Solutions 2011. Michael's from the department of anthropology at Kansas state university and is a well known figure exploring the effects of new media on society and culture. This is a topic that I'm particularly interested in and it really gets me warmed up to see someone from academia come up with a talk like this. I'm expecting a lot of real stories and empirical evidence. You should definitely look up Michael's YouTube channel - great videos and great stuff to learn. He's also a twitter god - 10,000+ followers?The place that Michael turns to for answers is his students. He has 200-400 students each year and he studies them like an anthropologist. Classrooms are the quintessential areas of learning in society and there's something really wrong with them. You get disappointing results such as questions like, "How many points is this worth?". The video above is an illustration of stuff that's so wrong with education today. Facebook through class all day - there's literally something in the air. The knowledge is all around people and a lot of advanced technology is so ubiquitous that it makes connection, organising, sharing and learning easier than ever before. In Michael's world people need to be knowledge-able, be able to find, share, learn, organise. We're in the middle of profound cultural change and only the knowledge-able can cope with that change effectively. Our Culture is ChangingMichael has spent a lot of time in New Guinea and it's a fairly tough place to live in given the things that people have to eat and how they survive in the tropical weather in rainforest. When he was there it felt to Michael as if he had a total loss of self. He says your self is reflected back to you by your context and he had to recreate himself in this new culture and environment. There was no media there to guide him. He realised just how important media was to him. The next 8 years that he was there, media helped the people there in a big way. For example population census - it should be really easy to write down the names and list the people in a village right? Except the people in village don't really have regular names. Their names are like 'brother', 'sister', etc. The other examples was disputes. People would get together in a village get together and fix the relationship in a group. When you bring in the written law, this obviously changes things dramatically. Media is therefore not just tools and communication - they mediate relationships. Media changes, relationships change and the culture changes.Think about how we watch TV. We watch TV for the content, but the content drives relationships. We watch TV while at dinner, we congregate in groups to watch sport. These are the conversations that create our culture. Now this kind of stuff should be showing it's effect on education, but it doesnt - 43% of students are bored, up from 20% in the 80s. How do people get engaged in American Idol and not as much in class?"What we are encountering is a panicky, an almost hysterical, attempt to escape from the deadly anonymity of modern life… and the prime cause is not vanity… but the craving of people who feel their personality sinking lower and lower into the whirl of indistinguishable atoms to be lost in a mass civilization."  - Henry Seidel Canby, 1926Let's understand this phenomenon. We use the word "Whatever". So what's a brief history of the phrase "Whatever"? Let's analyse it over time. In the pre-60s "Whatever" meant "That's what I meant". After the 60s it became synonymous with "I don't care" or a "Meh...". This reflects itself in the Nirvana lyrics of the "Smells like Teens" song. So why is American Idol popular, it's a way for people to raise their personality and not be indistinguishable. More people want to be important today - more people want to be the new American Idol. From the late 90s to now, people have adopted the "I'll do what I want" meaning for "Whatever". It's an empowered generation and free culture. This is embodied in the book, Generation Me. It's a very broad cultural phenomenon which is driving a search for identity and recognition. Our choices are so incredibly broad, you're not born knowing who you are and want to be. We all need identity and recognition and the media keeps bombarding us with messages of the kind of people we should become. The search for the authentic self leads us towards self-centered modes of self-fulfillment and disagreement on several things - values, views, approaches. We're more disengaged and more fragmented. The new media revolution is creating the cultural background for this kind of a change. A User Generated Knowledge EconomyWeb 2.0 is changing the way we connect to onother. We need to rethink ourselves as the video above will show you. Michael created this at home and it has had 11,319,629 over the last four years. This is when Michael shared it with four friends just to get feedback. Can you imagine that? Things got viral and he was soon topping Digg. This was a way for user generated filtering. Think about it - Michael created this video. That was user generated content and digg helped users to filter this out. People can go ahead and organise it themselves using delicious - this is a user generated organisation. Things like RSS feeds help people get stuff on their own systems and this becomes user generated distribution. This is a new knowledge economy that's shaping itself through the input of the users than a top down authority.Companies like Dorritos are letting users create videos for them to do their advertising. They ran a contest and selected the top 5 in their contest and one of the winning videos took just $12.79 to create. This is a sign that we need to rethink the way we do things. Ebay is changing the way we commerce. People are renting out rooms and cars and people are banking without without banks - 10% loans this year will be peer to peer and negotiated through the social web. We're doing politics differently - Obama's campaign was an example. But think of how we would do governance differently if we built society ground up on what technology have. We can design democracy fromnthe ground up. Ubiqutous, context aware, social, semantic social networks are changing our world.Why does this matter?This deeply matters. We know ourselves through our relations with others. New media is changing how we perceive ourselves and how we relate to each other. We have a cultural inversion today. There's a tension. We're expressing individualism like never before but we value community. We talk independence but we value relationships. The free hugs campaign was pre-social media but when it goes on YouTube it gets 67,900,361hits and becomes a global phenomenon. Think of how this kind of thing becomes revolutionary. This is how people are talking back to brands. The above YouTube video caused a big brand to bring users to the table and force themselves towards change. There's new possibilities all around us. There are great tensions and those tensions allow for creativity in learning.The first video on this blogpost was something 200 students collaboratively scripted and filmed using new media tools. What's important to note is that knowledge is all around us. The classroom is not the place where we should be going for knowledge. As architects of culture, we need to understand this phenomenon and our environment. The walls of the classroom are not the truth. Information is not just a part of these walls. Authority isn't single source. The uncultured project is an example of someone walking out of class to change the world - Shawn Anand's story is truly inspirational. Our understanding of this phenomenon is important. We have to create learning environments that help people be knowledge-able and live in this new environment. We need three things:Real world problems;People working together;Leveraging technology effectivelyMichael's students create free documentaries that get viewed the world over. This is an example of how they've leveraged collaborative technology to change the way people learn and be knowledge-able. Inspiring. Michael's rattling away examples before I can absorb them all. This is just so inspirational, world changing. Projects like ushahidi are changing the way we help people. This is a new knowledge economy - it's time to be knowledge-able.© Sumeet Moghe

One of my other passions, that, coincidentally, don’t get to talk much about on this blog, but perhaps I should, is that fascinating topic of Learning. And not just learning within the Enterprise, a la learning in context, learning while at work, or embedded learning, in short, where a bunch of really smart, evocative and rather insightful folks have been sharing graciously, over the course of the years, their experiences, know-how, knowledge and expertise, like good friends such as Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings, Clark Quinn or other incredibly inspiring folks such as Dan Pontefract, Stephen Downes, George Siemens, Donald Taylor,  Dave Cormier, amongst several others. I am actually talking about Learning in the wider, more general context of education, and where a good number of really inspiring stories continue to emerge to highlight how we may be on the tipping point of re-thinking learning itself and its purpose(s), as we have known it for decades, and, most importantly, how we have been dealing with it at schools, colleges and universities. It’s probably a good time now to, at long last, rethink the Essence of Connected Learning. While I was in London last week at the Melcrum Digital Summit, to present on IBM’s journey towards becoming a successful social business in the context of talking about BlueIQ and our internal adoption experiences (Check this Slideshare link for the presentation materials that I used), I had the opportunity to engage on a superb range of offline, face to face, conversations on various different topics and one of my favourites was that one with Barnaby Logan where we talked extensively about learning and how it seems to have shifted gears, finally, into becoming much more relevant, networked, interconnected, social, technology enabled and, above all, with a clear purpose: re-engaging both students and teachers alike as part of the same immersive and adaptive learning experience. Very inspiring altogether! Then as I come back home, after having finished up my last business trip, I get the opportunity to experience serendipity doing its magic, once again, and allowing me to bump into another short video clip, that lasts for a bit over six minutes, which points back to a rather inspirational Web resource: Connected Learning, under the suggestive title "The Essence of Connected Learning":   The Essence of Connected Learning from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.   In that video we get to see how a few folks get to describe Connected Learning itself as a "model of learning that holds out the possibility of reimagining the experience of education in the information age. It draws on the power of today’s technology to fuse young people’s interests, friendships, and academic achievement through experiences laced with hands-on production, shared purpose, and open networks", which I am not sure what you would think, but it certainly seems to be the right step in the right direction towards meaningful and purposeful learning activities over the course of time and taking into account the digital world we live in nowadays. And while drafting together this blog entry and reference both the video clip as well as remembering the great conversations with Barnaby (Thanks much for those, by the way, Barnaby!), I just came to the realisation that from here onwards I am going to make an effort and blog on a more regular basis about this topic of social, adaptive, emergent, interconnected, technology driven learning and the kind of impact that is currently having not only within our societies as a whole, but within the business world, in particular. When "work is learning and learning is the work", as my good friend, Harold Jarche, recently blogged in a beautiful article on "When learning is the work …", I guess we would need to figure out how we are going to continue to learn, unlearn and relearn, even from an early stage, if we would stay relevant in the 21st century, as my fellow colleague and good friend, Anna Dreyzin, recently talked in a short article she put together quoting Alvin Toffler: "The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn". And it is now thanks to making all of those connections to these interesting resources, conversations and whatever else that I have, finally, made the connection into "Net Smart", my good friend, Howard Rheingold‘s, latest masterpiece that I got on my way back on my Kindle App and that I have started reading recently, and where Howard gets to "provide evidence, advice and suggested practices for mastering today’s digital literacies of attention, participation, collaboration, crap-detection and network know-how". Ha! Talking about Connected Learning. I guess you will be seeing, from here onwards, plenty more articles on this topic over here in this blog. The spark just got ignited. Let’s see where it would take us. Care to join me / us? It would be worth it. Looking forward to learning plenty more on the subject along the way, too. No doubt!

Before I begin today's blogpost, I have to mention the biggest event in Indian cricketing history over the last three decades or so. India won the 2011 Cricket World Cup on Saturday and what a win it was! The eleven played like true champions against a tough opposition and at the end of it came out on top. For my non-Indian readers here's a moment for you to accidentally discover how big a deal this is in India. People actually took to the streets in celebration. If you bump into me over the next few days, you're likely to hear me talk about this win so bear with me please.Speaking of accidental discovery brings me to what I want to write about today. We're uncomfortable with accidents and uncertainty. That being said, a lot of social media based learning solutions rely on serendipity and chance discovery. Serendipity is quite a counterintuitive phenomenon. How do you know that you'll know the important stuff? Most of us from the '70s and the '80s have grown up on a diet of structured media, whether through the web or through books, magazines and education. New media on the other hand accelerates content creation in such a big way that traditional structure is destined to fall behind. A week or so back I wrote an article about the shape of knowledge management in the age of social media. Today I want to talk about the personal mindset that each knowledge worker needs to really exploit this rich, diverse, yet often confusing information explosion.We ask for structure, but do we really need it?It's amazing that when on company intranets, people expect structure whereas when on the internet, people don't even imagine browsing. It's no surprise that several people actually use Google as their homepage or as a means to start navigating the web. Why then, is search a counter-intuitive beginning to people's intranet experience. Granted that most intranet searches are just bad, but let's assume you could be confident that the information you're looking for exists, and there's a good search that can find stuff. People still find it tough to start with search. I believe there's a reason for this. Traditionally, company intranets had finite amounts of information. It's easy to build a taxonomy around this finite information and organise it in a browseable sitemap. With modern social intranets content creation explodes in such a big way that it's a bit foolish to even attempt structures. The only structures that survive are the ones that emerge ground up through metadata. Social media does it's bit to help search on the internet as well. Whether we like it or not we constantly keep accidentally discovering stuff on the internet, through various social networks. The constant discoveries help us know in our subconscious mind that we can actually find something if we tried.Don't drink from a firehose, just sit by a stream"Its a river of information, dip your foot in whenever its convenient." - Leo LaporteThe fact is that with modern social networks, serendipity is a knowledge guarantee but it needs mental preparation. It may seem that if someone provides you packaged, neatly organised content then you'll be happy, but the reality is quite the contrary. Let's forget about social media for a while. Regardless of how avid a news reader you are, it's perhaps tough for you to keep up with all the news in the world. Depending on the kind of news you're interested in, you perhaps customise your news intake. Not many people read the entire newspaper. Think of a time when you missed an important piece of news. Not many people really sweat over this, because if the news is really important, someone will tell you about it. Social media is quite like news. As Laporte says, it's a river of information. When you sit by a river, you don't try to drink all the water that's flowing by. You dip in your toe when it makes sense for you. But then what if you miss something? This is where you handle your learning just the way you handle news. If it's important, your connections will tell you. This is where having personal learning network (PLN) that you can trust, makes sense.It's not information overload, its filter failureClay Shirky said a few years back, "It's no information overload, it's filter failure." If the current information explosion was really a bad thing then the converse, an absolute lack of information, would make us happy, wouldn't it? Now that seems odd - I guess no one would be happy with that. Shirky's right then - the filters are crucial. As I explained in my last article, we're so individualistic these days that another person's organisation of content hardly ever makes sense to us. On the other hand if we have right filters, we can create a structure that makes sense to us and is tailored to our needs. And by the way, sometimes the best filter is another person on your PLN who you can trust. Just as we trust our friends to remind us of important news we've missed, we leverage our PLN to find the the learning that's important.If you still need structure, the tools are out thereOnce you know what filters make sense for you, there are several tools and services that can create meaningful structure around that filter. My latest favourite is Flipboard on the iPad (see screenshot above) though apps like Zite are worthy competitors. The truth is that you don't need a fancy iPad to provide you the right kind of organisation. Web services like paper.li can help you create really nice, structure around important information. Google Reader can give you some really interesting visualisation around your RSS feeds. Heck, there are thousands of applications and services just around Twitter. The key is to pick the services you care for, decide on the filters that make sense to you and follow the people that really matter. From that point you just need to trust that the important information will come to you. Just believe!Ever since Jay Cross wrote his book on Informal Learning, several people have spoken about the need to 'formalise informal learning'. I think that's just absolute rubbish. Informal learning benefits from the natural connections amongst people and the serendipity it fosters. "Formal informal learning" is the biggest oxymoron on the planet, I'm sorry! In my view the fact is that if you can't prepare for serendipity, you're not ready for the 21st century workplace. Structure makes sense when you're dealing with a finite amount of information. The only way through constantly growing information sources, is to be able to develop the skills of personal knowledge management and sense making. If I was hiring someone today, this would be a primary skill I'd look for.(Technorati claim: FRCHU6AEKYFN)© Sumeet Moghe

Over the course of time you come to realise how there are a number of different articles published out there that you know are going to have a higher impact than others on how you perceive various different things, whether personal or work related. But what happens when you stumble on perhaps the most essential and critical article you have come across in a long while that manages to question a good number of the things we have been taking for granted at work for years? An article that dares to question how the business world has been functioning and operating over the course of decades by claiming, loud and clear, how companies keep ignoring 150 years of invaluable and precious research on how we become most effective and productive while at work. Are you prepared to be challenged, too, about your core work beliefs? Really? Are you sure? I mean, are you really sure? I can tell you it’s going to hurt, but maybe we need it that way, as one of those massive, unprecedented wake-up calls that may mark the beginning of something new and rather powerful: a smarter knowledge workforce. A few days back I bumped into this very intriguing and rather helpful article put together by Jessica Stillman under the rather provocative title of "Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless" where she points us out to a superb piece of writing done by Sara Robinson at Salon under the suggestive heading of "Bring back the 40-hour work week" where she questions something that I am sure most of us knew, deep inside, from all along, but that very few have dared to even bring up as a topic of conversation. Specially, at work. Basically, when was the last time you worked 40 hours a week? Or, more importantly, does working more than 40 hours per week make you more effective and productive at what you do? Well, Sara claims on that article that, contrary to what we may all believe in, it doesn’t. In fact, working over 40 hours per week is the most unproductive thing you can do to damage not only your work or your colleagues’ work, but also yourself, as a knowledge worker AND as a human being. And she has got 150 years of powerful research to back up that argument! Whoahh! What do you say to that? I mean, really, what can you say to that? Right there, after having gone through that absolutely stunning piece (Long entry, for sure, but well worth reading every single word of it!), I came to the conclusion that in the 15 plus years I have been working in the corporate world I have never managed to make only 40 hours a week. And, notice how I am using the word manage, because I feel it fits in quite nicely in the whole context of how we have been taught over the course of decades that if you are only working those 40 hours a week you are just basically being underutilised and pretty much lazing around (Perhaps, nowadays even by checking out all of those social networking sites!). Well, it’s actually quite the opposite! You have just been abused left and right by the system into making you believe that working overtime is not only an expected behavior, but a desired one! By our employers, of course! But here’s the twist, by ourselves, knowledge workers, equally so, too! And that’s where things have gone horribly wrong. Apparently. I can strongly recommend you make the time today to read through Sara’s dissertation, as I am sure you will then be thanking her for sharing it across in the first place and for being capable of opening your eyes, and brain!, to the unthinkable, specially, in today’s current financial turmoil: you don’t need, you shouldn’t have!, to work more than 40 hours a week to be effective and productive. So stop doing that today! Stop working those unpaid hours that research has proved don’t contribute much to your overall performance, or to the overall business outcomes!, and for a good number of reasons. Stop working longer hours than you should and you will even feel much better as a result of it eventually. Although it looks like things were not like that a while back. Sara mentions how this work behaviour, and expectation!, probably, comes from something that’s been implanted in our work brain from all along. To quote: […] But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re "passionate" and "productive" and "a team player" — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs. But you eventually find out, through the hard way, you don’t survive it. And then what? That’s exactly what Sara covers successfully in her write-up. Like I have mentioned above, it’s a rather long column that she has put together, but in it she covers, in-depth, where the traditional 40 hour per week work schedule comes from (From the most of the unexpected places, I can tell you!), how and why it was established on that timeframe and how the whole concept of working overtime and staying productive is a myth. A myth we have been told to believe in all along, but that it doesn’t have any scientific validation it actually works. It doesn’t. At all. It makes us all sloppier at what we do. It drains our physical body, our brain, our capacity to collaborate, share our knowledge, innovative and think clearly; it damages not only our very own health, but also our very own healthy, and much needed!, relationships with the outside-out-of-work world: family, friends and relatives, etc. etc. In her commentary, Sara gets to build up the case how the 40 hour a week work schedule got started with the labour based workforce, and how when we made the transition into the knowledge based work we pretty much ignored that good practice thinking we could demand more of our knowledge workers, because, you know, after all, they are no longer working hard with their hands, but with their brains, so there is this assumption you can get more out of that than whatever you have thought about it. In reality, it’s worse! Apparently, knowledge workers can only produce good quality work in a range of 6 to 7 hours per day. No more. Yes, I know! Really!! I didn’t know that myself either! Fascinating! But it gets even better, because she then gets to build the case of when, how and why did we destroy the healthy and rather productive 40-hour week. Now, this particular section from her piece I find it really disturbing and rather uncomforting, because, in a way, she comes to claim how we, ourselves, knowledge workers, were the ones who demolished such well established industry standard of only working a certain amount of hours, before our work and output both start deteriorating. Very sobering piece for everyone out there to read through, ponder, reflect, and evaluate whether you yourself feel that you have contributed to it. I know for myself I surely have and having read the whole thing I’m glad I have now got an opportunity to do something about it. That’s just what she gets to cover next with some very powerful and inspiring counterarguments. "Can we bring it back?" Should we bring it back? That we is not only knowledge workers themselves, but employers alike. According to her, for employees: "[…] The fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life. How will you make up the lost time? Will you ditch dinner and grab some fast food? Skip the workout? Miss the kids’ game this week? Sleep less? (Sex? What’s that?) And how many consecutive days can you keep making that trade-off before you are weakened in some permanent and substantial way? (Probably not as many as you think.) Changing this situation starts with the knowledge that an hour of overtime is a very real, material taking from our long-term well-being — and salaried workers aren’t even compensated for it" For employers, she adds: "[…] the shift will be much harder, because it will require a wholesale change in some of the most basic assumptions of our business culture. Two generations of managers have now come of age believing that a "good manager" is one who can keep those butts in those chairs for as many hours as possible. This assumption is implicit in how important words like "productivity" and "motivation" are defined in today’s workplaces. A manager who can get the same amount of work out of people in fewer hours isn’t rewarded for her manifest skill at bringing out the best in people. Rather, she’s assumed to be underworking her team, who could clearly do even more if she’d simply demand more hours from them. If the crew is working 40 hours a week, she’ll be told to up it to 50. If they’re already at 50, management will want to get them in on nights and weekends, and turn it into 60. And if she balks — knowing that actual productivity will suffer if she complies — she won’t get promoted" Goodness! I am not sure what you folks would think about those two quotes, but I fear that she has described, tremendously well, and rather accurately, how the business world operates today, in 2012!!, and even more so when you start considering the current financial crisis and how precarious working conditions have become in most countries. So how can we rebel against that? How can we change the tide and revert back to what research over the course of 150 years has proved that it works just all right? I bet most of you out there would feel it’s not an easy task. Sara would agree with you on this regard, I would think. In fact, she offers a good number of options, and potential solutions, that would be worth while considering and pondering further. Go and read those, while over here I am going to take the liberty of adding a couple of suggestions myself on how we, both employers and knowledge workers, can get things back on track and into the right direction if we would want to survive further in this 21st century Knowledge Economy. For employers: Stop measuring the performance of your employee knowledge workforce by the amount of hours they put together on completing tasks or by their sheer physical presence at the office. Instead, measure the deliverables, the outcomes, the outputs, what they eventually provide as value-add to the company, i.e. to your customers, and if they can do that in, say, 4 hours, don’t add on them new tasks or additional work to do. Remember, there used to be a time when knowledge workers worked in a single project, with a single team, with a single mission and a specific set of goals. Bring that back, since you can only stretch productivity up to so much, before it takes a big hit on your overall business, which I am sure is the last thing you would want to do. Also, it would help if businesses would, finally, understand that their knowledge workforce are, actually, people, knowledge workers, and not just some resources or assets that they can shuffle around freely at their will. Those knowledge workers have got many more better things to do than being treated like those resources you can place here or there at your own leisure, just because you feel you are entitled to. Well, may be not. There is a formula out there that’s been around since the 19th century (in Britain) that pretty much describes it rather nicely: "eight [hours] for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will." It’s still a formula that works. It’s a formula that needs to come back, because, as Sara mentions: "[…] the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help" (Their as in industries and branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress). For employees: It’s going to be even harder and tougher altogether. I am sure you folks would have a good number of suggestions of what we, both employers and employees, could do about this important topic (And I would love to learn more about them in the comments!), but I sense that one of the key, important things that we could do, as knowledge workers ourselves, in order to make this happen, is to, finally, put a stop to that silly attitude of competing against each other to see and prove who is better in order to claim that well deserved promotion. When we all know, in most cases, no matter how hard you work, how competitive you have become with your colleagues, by protecting and hoarding your knowledge, assets, skills and expertise, or by how much you have managed to put down your peers so that you can stand out that, there is a great chance that you won’t get promoted. And then? Where does that leave you? … Exactly! Yes, you may get promoted, but you may not. The thing is that while I’m writing these words there is a single key concept out there (And it is not slacking off work, nor stop working altogether, just in case you were thinking about that! heh) that we need to have plenty more of in our corporate world to help us understand how we are much much better off helping each other than fighting each other. Everyone out there would probably want to become an executive or a senior technical leader at some point in time, but, time and time again, in the age of the Sharing Economy, in the age of interconnectedness, of earning their trust by merit (More than anything else you may have done in the past!), of transparency, of engagement, of passion, of intrapreneurship, even, etc. etc. I can imagine how fighting others is not going to be very helpful, never has, eventually!, nor will it help you advance that much faster. And, definitely, stopping others from excelling at what they do, so you can come on top, will take a whole lot more than 40 hours a week. Indeed, in order for us to revert back into that 40 hour a week work mentality where we continuously aim at helping each other becoming better at what we already do, we need plenty more of Servant Leadership. At all levels, but starting with you, not everyone else, but you. So, eventually, I couldn’t have agreed more with Sara’s conclusion on what’s at stake over here, in today’s business world, if we don’t take any action about it and just move on with what we think is the workplace of the future. I sense it’s got to be better than this, much better than this, because what’s at stake right now, and in the next few years, is our mere survival as knowledge workers, as human beings: "For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies [Or any company], and the future of the country [any country], this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth" A few times in the past I have been talking over here in this blog about striking for smart work and sustainable growth in our knowledge based societies and after reading Sara’s last few words from her conclusion I can only say it’s now our job, our duty, perhaps, to make it happen, and the sooner, the better; we probably cannot even wait much longer, specially (to quote her:) … "If we’re going to talk about creating a more sustainable world, let’s start by talking about how to live low-stress, balanced work lives that leave us refreshed, strong and able to carry on as economic contributors for a full four or five decades, instead of burned out and broken by a too-early middle age. A full, productive 40-year career starts with full, productive 40-hour weeks. And nobody should be able to take that away from us, not even for the sake of a paycheck" [Emphasis mine to which I would add as well that it's probably not even worth it any longer. It never was in the first place] So, have a good guess into what I’m going to start doing from next week onwards … How about you?

Cammy Bean is hilarious - and she's also just spot on. Some months back she wrote about her newly discovered syndrome - SoMeFat. My friend Neil Lasher talked about that on his blogpost to kick off the year. It feels like a bit of an epidemic to me, I tell you because I think the SoMeFat bug has reached me. Don't worry, I'm advised that it's a minor disorder and that I should be back to my vocal nature on all social media channels. I'm also told that my upcoming three week vacation starting 21st April, will bring me back recharged. In the mean time, I'm going to take the doctor's advice and not blog about social media or social business today. Instead, in today's blogpost I'll share with you three tips that can really help bring your presentations alive. Of course, there's several other things you can try - all I want to do is share some interesting techniques to bring the zing back to your slides.Use Contrast to your AdvantageContrast is a great way to lead your audience's attention to items that deserve their attention. There are several ways of creating contrast. You could choose a variation of size, colour or shape to draw people's attention. You'll see several presentation gurus use this trick all the time and it comes in handy when there are more than one element on the screen and you need to focus only on one of them. Take a look at some of the examples I've put up for you above.Build a Consistent ThemeI recently attended Tom Kuhlmann's talk at Learning Solutions 2011. Tom's obviously a great practitioner of slide-based presentations and his talk last month was no exception. What I was quite interested by however, was the consistent moon theme that he adopted for his talk. You should see the slides here. The slide design actually added an element of fun and consistency to his visuals and kept me engaged. Tom's made a habit of using a consistent visual theme, and you'll see that even on the presentation he did at DevLearn 2010. Actually if you look hard, you'll see that several illustrious presenters use this approach as well. Take a look at this presentation by Garr Reynolds and also this one. And while you're at it, don't miss Guy Kawasaki's enchantment, though I know one of the viewers found it disappointingly predictable!Use Hand Drawn, Organic GraphicsOne of the trends I've seen in recent years, is that of hand-drawn graphics. While Garr Reynolds did a bit of it in this presentation, I see it being more prevalent these days with a lot of us wanting to stamp our personalities with custom graphics. And what can be more custom than a hand-drawn picture? Take a look at Richard Lee's entertaining Pecha Kucha talk to get an idea of how you can use this style effectively. I've also added one of my presentations to this post (nothing really confidential), so you can see how some of this applies for real, business presentations. And by the way, if you were scared of sketching stuff out by yourself, there's help. The Articulate community has some really cool hand-drawn assets for download. If you do feel like sketching things up, it's quite easy - buy yourself a pen tablet and then just use Powerpoint as Dan Roam recommends. And if you have something like an iPad, then there are free tools like Adobe Ideas that are so simple that even I can draw!So, I hope that you like this little break from social media and that these tips help you improve your presentations in some small way. By the way, I am going on holiday from 21 April as I already mentioned. I am taking a three week break from blogging during that time unless there's some way I can find an internet connection and the motivation to write during that time. I do promise to come back and spew my thoughts on this blog as usual when I'm back, so hang in here if you do like the blog. Until next week - tada!© Sumeet Moghe

I am sure that if I would go and ask you folks about naming over here some of your pet peeves from traditional collaborative and knowledge sharing tools, you would probably be getting on a roll for a good while and share all of those gripes you have been exposed to and that you wish something could be done about them. I am sure that if I would go ahead and ask you the very same question for social networking tools, they may not well be the same pet peeves, but I am certain you could name quite a few of them as well. No doubt! Well, that’s exactly what the folks from Dice News did just recently, while at SXSW, by interviewing a whole bunch of people about that topic. Calling it rather revealing, thought-provoking, mind-bloggling and sobering would probably fall short altogether. Just think of it, what’s your social media pet peeve? Ready? Hang on for a minute though. Let’s go first and have a look into what some of the folks who were interviewed briefly by Dice News said about what were their main gripes with regards to social networking tools and the Social Web in general. Here’s the embedded video clip that lasts for a little bit under two minutes and which can surely make up as well for some really good fun to kick-off another week at work! Get your bingo cards out as well to see how many of those pet peeves you get to experience during the course of the day and check them all off! Oh, and don’t cheat!! This one is going to hurt a bit! Here it comes: Frightening, don’t you think? I am not sure what you folks would think about this one, but when I watched it for the first time I just couldn’t help identifying a good number of the same reasons why I stopped using corporate email at work living "A World Without Email" over four years ago, without opening up another can of worms along on my pet peeves on corporate email itself, thinking we could do better, much better, with social technologies, to help make us much more effective and productive at what we do at work, and yet we are finding out, probably through the hard way, that’s everything, but helping us out! I am sure that at this point in time you may be wondering what would be my main gripes, right? Well, at the moment, and judging by my own user experience over the course of the years I guess I could just nail it down, for me, to three different items: Social technologies themselves: I mean, when was the last time you were 100% happy and content with the potential and your overall end-user experience from any of the external social networking tools out there, as well as your favourite Enterprise Social Software platform? If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you can see how I still think we are at the infancy of defining truly inspiring, engaging, rewarding social technologies experiences and, when we do we seem to nail it, we mess up with other things like privacy, security, copyright infringements, and whatever else. And we are back to square one. Think of social networking as just another marketing channel: This just would apply not only to Marketing and Communications, for which it’s a given, as I am sure you would agree with it if you have been exposed to either of those groups in social channels, as they themselves call them. Well, no, this is out for everyone who thinks that social tools are just another means of blasting out messages, their messages, broadcasting them along with very little interaction along the way. If anything, social networking is all about building strong personal business relationships, networks of people with a common interest, a common passion, wanting to do things better at their jobs, while still having fun, and still learning along the way. Remember "Life in perpetual beta?" Well, 10 years later, it’s still about conversations! Distraction: This is probably the one that most of us would feel identified with big time and probably right so, because the amount of noise one gets exposed to over the course of the day on the Social Web is starting to become mind-boggling, if not too worrying! Never mind my cry-out from a few weeks back about embracing a much more focused and purposeful social networking experience. We still aren’t there yet! Therefore, we need to work harder, smarter, on it. And we probably won’t be able to address it and fix it properly during the course of 2012 either, as my good friend, Bill Johnston, annotated a couple of days back on a brilliant tweet he shared over at his stream:   IMHO, we will look back at 2010-2012 as period of mass distraction on the social web, vs. 2013 relationship building & focus on shared value — Bill Johnston (@billjohnston) April 2, 2012 Spot on! That’s what I will certainly be looking into over the course of the next few months, so that when 2013 kicks in, I’ll be ready, if you can ever say that for the Social Web, because you are never ready. It’s a constant learning experience where every day there are dozens of new precious gems you get exposed to that you didn’t know were going to help or benefit you, and, yet, there they are for you to embrace them and make you better at what you do, if you can find them amongst that noise, that is. So, a little bit of homework for us social networkers out there, I would think, if we would want to turn the tide around of bumping into more and more pet peeves around social technologies, and our consistent and growing abuse of them! We may as well start doing something about it, before it’s too late and break them like we have done with *cough* email *cough* over the course of the years. Now, I am not going to propose what folks can do, or should do, about it, since I have always felt it’s a very personal opinion, and experience, engaging with social networking tools, which is also the main reason why I have never believed in best practices for social networking in the first place, nor for knowledge work, for that matter! There aren’t any! What works for some people may not work for others, so where is the "best" in that? (More on this topic on an upcoming blog post, not to worry… hehe). What I’m planning on doing myself though is continue to focus and redefine the purpose of my social presence, both internal and external, with simple activities like doing a bit of virtual hygiene of the social tools I rely the most on, like Twitter and Google Plus, for instance, so that over time I can continue to fine tune the overall experience, reduce the noise to a certain degree, and bring back that building of personal business relationships that Bill mentioned on that tweet, but, specially, focus, even more, on that shared value, because, at the end of the day social networking for business is all about: the value add (that shared value) you can provide to those who care about you and your business. And that all starts by asking yourself how can I help you today to become better at what you do? Let’s bring back the focus on the WE, and move on from the ME. We will all be much better off. I can guarantee you all that!

The tiger is not the only important animal in the forest. Spotted deer, sambhar, bears, jackals, and several other animals dot the jungle landscape. Add to that the avifauna of Kanha National Park, and the tiger's perhaps a minority amongst the wild attractions of this reserve. All this said, there's something that sets your blood racing when you come face to face with this large, magnificent, enigmatic predator. The fact that it is so elusive makes the whole act of tracking no less than a Sherlock Holmes whodunit mystery, and the act of finding one something to write home about.The first leg of my vacation was with a few friends I was meeting for the first time. Sahana and I has been to Kanha earlier and were familiar with what to expect. Sowmya, Pratima, Santosh and Pramod joined us as first time visitors to this amazing forest. I was particularly excited about this visit given my success spotting animals in the thick November forest last year. Javed, our trusty driver from last time was in tow - as always with a keen eye for any signs that the dusty forest roads or the dry tree branches offered.If you've been on an African safari, you'll perhaps find the notion of having to find animals quite weird. As it turns out, animals in the subcontinent are quite different from animals in Africa. Lions and cheetahs display sociable traits and are more accommodating of human presence than tigers who are reclusive and avoid human beings like the plague. I believe they're also developing an evolutionary response to poaching by staying away from humans as far as possible. Also, the dense Sal forests of Kanha and their expansive, tall grasslands provide a challenge for animal viewing at just about any time of the year.There's something magical about spotting animals in the wild despite these challenges though; I can say that in particular about our first tiger sighting of this trip. It was in the early hours of morning, 7:45 AM to be precise. We were scouring the forest for signs of predators. We'd run into a bunch of handsome barasinghas (swamp deer) and captured some great snaps. Our disappointment from the last day of not seeing tigers on the previous day was palpable. Three people in the group were still awaiting their first ever tiger sighting and there was a strange tension in the air. "I'm feeling lucky today.", I told Sowmya. She hadn't taken me seriously until we ran into another safari vehicle that told us they'd crossed paths with a tigress. "She crossed over to the right", said the other driver. Javed is a keen naturalist himself and his instincts told him that this was a mother on the move to rendezvous with her children. "I think she'll cross over to that road", he said.We wasted no time taking a turn and then we all held our breath and waited. "Tiger... look there, she's moving", said Javed. I must tell you, I saw nothing. I marvel at the eyesight of these local people - they see things that us city dwellers can never notice. "Don't worry, she's coming this way, right behind our vehicle." said Javed. I kept my camera trained at the fire line where we were expecting her to emerge. And emerge she did, resplendent in the red morning sun - the play of light enhancing her beauty. This was 'Collar-wali', Kanha's only collared tigress at the moment and a bold, breeding female. She seemed unperturbed at the sight of the safari vehicles around her, a quick disdainful look at all of us and off she was; disappearing into the bushes on our side. A few moments earlier, we were shivering in the early morning wind. Now, some of us were breaking a sweat!That encounter turned a corner for us, though the sightings that followed didn't necessarily measure up to her elegance. We saw her adolescent cub and another bold tigress in the Mukki zone in the following drives. Our trip was generally a pretty good one, though weather chose to play spoilsport for most of the afternoon drives. We saw most of the animals of any repute except sloth bears, leopards and wild dogs. Amongst birds, we saw and photographed several species as well. You'll have to take a look at my photographs for a more visual storyline.I'm now on the train to Junagadh to reach our next destination, Gir Forest National Park - the last home of the great Asiatic Lions. I can tell you I'd be jumping up and down in excitement if this cooped up railway compartment allowed me. The excitement of seeing these amazing beasts in the wild is giving me goose bumps already. More on that in a few days when I leave that destination.If you want to visit Kanha, talk to Gaurav Athelye of Jungle Lore to arrange Javed or his brother Shakir's services. He can arrange transfers for you and also help you select accommodation of your choice. For what it's worth, we stayed stour usual haunt, the Madhya Pradesh Tourism Hostel inside the forest, right beside the Kisli gate. I strongly recommend staying either there or at the Baghira Log Huts, a far more comfortable resort of the state tourism corporation. Both these places are in the middle of the forest and you'll often be lucky to see jackals, Indian bison, sambhar deer, chital and several birds in the vicinity. When night falls, the entire area goes pitch dark - leaving just you and the starlit sky for company!© Sumeet Moghe

I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- "The Magic of Sustainable Growth"), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating "Get a life!" we may as well need to do so! As we may be missing far too much of what really matters… because of work. Like I said above, the video is a short, crisp and rather powerful awakening call for all of those knowledge workers out there who may feel that their job is eating up not only all of their work time, but also most of their personal time, along the way, too! Now, I understand the video has got some strong language, but I think Pam gets the point across very nicely and in a tone that while I understand may not be getting through for some folks, I think it’s all just too down to earth, and rather realistic on helping everyone understand where we are and how we may need to keep on challenging a good number of the presumptions that we have always been taking for granted in a business environment when talking about work time AND personal time. "Go the F*ck Home: Engineering Work/Life Balance" is a rather provocative watch, for sure, but well worth the time to discover the real consequences of working overtime, of giving up your time, just like that!, for free, of constantly being used (and treated!) as an asset, of showing how there are better, smarter ways of getting the job done, of re-focusing on what you would need to do and do it!, in the time that you have been allotted, so that you, too, could get a life. I loved her comment about naming more than two things that we all get to do outside of work and if you can’t name more than two, you have got a problem. Indeed! Too much work time, too little play, personal time! Priceless! You see? It looks like the best option for all of us is to have an escape plan, something else to do, other than work, to occupy our time during the course of the day, when we are no longer working, and still have the feeling we are achieving something meaningful. And all of this going all the way to the top, including management!, who should be acting as leading examples, in the first place, helping their employees understand that they, too, have got a life and therefore should leave work, and do something else, before they would come to realise that their knowledge workers may be rather unhappy with their overall jobs, just as much as they themselves. When we all know that happy employees are the ones who produce the better outcomes: happy customers. After all, if Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg can do it, why can’t everyone else, right? What’s our excuse? And if you need an escape plan, how about having a vacation? That would probably help out everyone out there start up with making that separation between work and personal life, right? And stick around with it altogether as well, upon your return. After all, we all know how beneficial, relaxing, chilling, unwinding and healthy it is to take a good long vacation, of, at least, two weeks disconnecting from everything for optimal results (Yes, even my own boss is confirming that!). Even better, we all know and embrace the many other good benefits from having unlimited vacation days, as I have also blogged about in the recent past sharing the experience of the delightful Maggie Fox from Social Media Group So why not do it? No, don’t worry, contrary to what most people would think, knowledge workers, in general, would not slack off. Why? Because they are hard working professionals, remember?, the ones you hired in the first place, the ones who you have trusted all along to do the right thing, i.e. getting their work done. So they are not going to abuse it. All the other way around! They are going to become even more productive and effective at what they do and work harder, because they are the first interested parties in keeping things that way! Ohhh, that you cannot take vacation, because you can’t afford it? Even your work project won’t allow it? Well, let’s take it into the next level… How about *not* having any vacation, nor off sick time altogether? Let’s go to the other extreme. Let’s wipe out the entire concept of taking a vacation from the workplace and instead, like my good friend Kevin Jones blogged about just recently, let’s introduce this rather fascinating and refreshing new policy: "Need it, Take it", which goes pretty much as follows: "If you need time off, take it.  If you are sick, stay home.  Just continue to do amazing work" Yes, I know, if you have been reading this far you are probably thinking I am just crazy. But why not? Why couldn’t we just live without vacation days and, instead, shift gears ourselves and change mindsets thinking that you may not need to have a fixed vacation period eventually, but, maybe what you need is just taking the time off, when you need it, for the time you consider responsibly enough to take off and just go ahead and do it! Knowing that it will happen when you know it will have the least impact on the business. Your business. Smart companies like Evernote are already doing it and proving that it can be done and I guess at this point in time you may be wondering what you would need to do in order to make it happen for yourself, right? Well, something relatively simple: just ask! You know, like I have always been telling people, if you don’t ask, you already got the "No!" for an answer; if you do ask and get a "No!" for an answer, that’s just totally fine, remember you already had it. But if you get a "Yes!" for an answer you may find yourself you are right on track and you got it! A win-win situation for everyone, because when you get that "Yes!" you would probably be *the* most interested party in keeping things going that way. And I can’t blame you. I would do the very exact same as you would be doing. In fact, I have already been doing it myself for the last 8 years working AND living in Gran Canaria. Remember, for many years I didn’t ask, so I had a "No!" already. But then, one day, I eventually asked, took the risk, a good chance that things could work out, and, I got it! I got the "Yes!" and two weeks later I moved permanently to Gran Canaria where I have been living and working ever since. And still having a blast! But if you don’t ask, if you don’t provoke that conversation to take place, it will never happen. So you are back to square one. And I am not sure what you would think, but I do believe it’s worth while taking the risk of asking away (your immediate management or whoever else), because in a way you are also helping your management line to understand how they need to shift gears themselves and instead of measuring your performance by the amount of hours and days that you work, they would probably be much better off measuring your overall outcomes, your deliverables, your output, and understand fully how, in a good number of times, you would be providing that extra level of top quality value by taking time off to focus on what you need to focus on: yourself. Re-energise, charge your batteries and come back for more! After all, it’s a beautiful, wonderful world out there and every extra hour that we spend doing overtime or not having that time off for ourselves to do other things as part of that personal work life integration strategy you should all start working your way through on it, you are losing out. And you are losing big. As big and mind-blowing as this: Don’t you think it’s worth while asking after all? Don’t you think it’s a good time now to take your life back and instead of talking about work life integration you start living more that life work integration for yourself and for what really matters? You bet!

If you've never seen lions in the wild, it's quite something to be less than six feet away from one. If you have seen lions in the wild, then to see them crouch, stalk and get into the hunt is like watching poetry in motion. The big cat trail made it's second stop at Gir. Sowmya, Pratima, Pradeep and Santosh had headed back to Bangalore. That left Sahana and me to make the long journey to Junagadh, so we could connect to the last home of the Asiatic Lions (Panthera Leo Persica). Our journey took longer than expected and the comfortable, air-conditioned drive from Junagadh to the Club Mahindra resort was just the thing that we needed to soothe our muscles.The next morning we were on safari. Gir has a clearly demarcated tourism zone that has 8 separate routes. This is a small section of the 1412 sq km forest, and that affords the animals a really large inviolate area. Unabashedly so, we had our eyes set on lion sightings. I asked our guide Bali about lion sightings and he said, "I'll show you so many lions that by the end of your nine drives, you'll be tired of them!" I can't say I'm tired of lions, but having seen 28 of them, I can safely say my eyes have had their fill for this time.There are a few things you should know about Gir. First, lion spottings are aplenty on route 6 and route 2. This is because these are tracker assisted routes. From what I hear, Sandeep Kumar - the deputy conservator of forests at Gir is a pro-tourism administrator. Not only has he been instrumental in doubling the daily permit quotas to enter the forest, he's also made a significant change to assure visitors of lion sightings.Lions are social animals. Having brushed shoulders with the local Maldhari and Negro tribesmen, they've also become used to human presence. The local people are heavily involved in the conservation of this magnificent animal, which explains the evident disappearance of poaching and the continually rising population of big cats (411 in the last census). This being said, it's never easy to spot them, because lions like most cats, can relax in the shade for unto 16 hours a day. They go on the hunt or to patrol their territories mostly in the darkness of night. This means that your chances of spotting a lion by following pug marks or by driving down a route are quite slim. This is where the trackers come into play.Gir's trackers are men from the local tribes who've grown up in the forest. They don't just know the forest like the back of their hands, they know the habits and haunts of the lions. With Gir being the last home for Asiatic lions, conservation efforts need to be more than just the usual stuff. The trackers do a 14 hour job in the forest, traveling on foot, motorbikes or bicycles to personally monitor the health of various lions in the forest. If a lion looks ill or needs medical attention, they'll inform a crew so they can get to the spot and help the beast. It's no wonder that Gir's male lions enjoy a long life despite their violent lives.Coming back to route 6 and route 2, Sandeep Kumar has instructed the trackers to assist safari jeeps with sightings whenever possible, especially if the sighting doesn't interfere with the natural behaviour of the animal. Let me put this into some perspectives. We did four of our safaris on non tracker assisted routes and we ended up seeing two lions. On the remaining five safaris we saw 26 lions. I personally think this is a wonderful move from the forest department as long as visitors don't make a circus out of it.The lions apart, Gir is home to over 300 leopards and the numerous warning calls we heard for this elusive beast is testimony to their invisible presence. We could only spot one though - perhaps that's a reason for us to return. Combine that with the several species of birds and the great sightings of Asian paradise flycatchers and several birds of prey, and Gir becomes truly a wildlifer's heaven.If you want to visit Gir, consider staying at the Club Mahindra Safari Resort. It's not exactly close to the forest, but I must say their service has bowled me over. If you prefer staying closer to the forest, consider the Gir Birding Lodge or the government's Sinh Sadan guest house. The latter is quite difficult to get bookings for. You need to get through several phone calls to secure your spot. Safari bookings are usually through your hotel and it's useful to have hotel staff that understand your interests. Make sure you are vocal about what you want to see, so they can get you on the right routes. And by the way, don't be shy to walk around the buffer zone of the forest. You might just be surprised with some of the birds, animals and people you bump into!© Sumeet Moghe

Over the last few days I have been relatively quiet on this blog, more than anything else because I have been doing plenty of thinking, along with drafting a bunch of blog entries, on venturing to re-design and redefine the corporate workplace as we know it seeing the huge impact social computing is causing on how we get work done. I already ventured to share some of those insights on previous blog posts, as you may have already noticed, but I’m now ready to share plenty more. So it’s time to pick up my regular blogging schedule and get down to business. How about if we take a look at the state of one of the most powerful use cases and success stories behind social networking and social media out there, Customer Service, and see whether we have got another winner or not… Hummm … not really. Colour me an skeptic then: "I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me" [by Charles Townshend] For a good number of years, actually, for as long as I remember, my all time favourite default Web browser has been Opera. I know that may sound as pure heresy by those who live on Internet Explorer, FireFox or Chrome, for that matter, but, it’s true. I have always been in love with that browser from the very first moment that I used it on Windows and now on Mac. Something that I cannot say for any of the others, as they have taught me, over the course of the years, to not trust them much for doing an effective job or for making my Web work any easier. Opera did though. For those folks who may not be familiar with Opera it’s that massive swiss knife-like Web browser that allows you to do a bunch of various different tasks and activities without leaving the application itself: email (Ha! Before you run into the wrong conclusions, like when I mentioned this over on Twitter, I still use *personal* email for private exchanges, specially, with those folks who loathe social networking tools or for those other who haven’t bought into it just yet, but it’s still my personal email, not work related); newsgroups and forums; Internet Relay Chat (a.k.a. I.R.C.); RSS / Atom newsfeeds; torrents, etc. etc. It’s all you need in a browser to help you become a powerful knowledge Web worker. And it works. It *does* certainly work. Till you lose 7 years of history.  That’s right! Last week, I got a prompt to upgrade Opera v 11.62 to v 11.63 on the Mac through the Mac App Store. Free upgrade, as usual, rightly embedded into the App Store experience for the first time *ever* and ready to take the plunge. And there I went, and there I lost 7 years of both personal and some work related stuff. Ouch!!! The upgrade went all right, or so I thought. No glitches noticed and in a matter of minutes I was upgraded. The problem though became apparent when, after starting the browser, I could have access to everything (Bookmarks, links, speed-dial options, etc. etc.), except the Mail folder. The folder that contained all of those personal private email messages, several hundreds, if not thousands, of RSS feed items, newsgroups, forum posts, and so forth. All of that completely wiped out. Gone! 1.76GB of data smashed as if they never happened.  Initially, I thought that the folder may have just been misplaced, or it may have been located elsewhere, but when trying to use Grand Perspective and WhatSize I just couldn’t locate that 1.76GB of disk space anywhere. Just anywhere. I looked and looked for a couple of days and nothing to be found. All deleted. Wiped out. Completely. No more available and slowly entering into panic mode at that time! One of the reasons why I have delayed blogging about it because you know how it goes as one of the golden rules for blogging: never blog when you are upset or angry. But I was. I *certainly* was. Right there, last week, I was prompted to upgrade to a new version of my all time favourite browser and right there it managed to destroy that trustworthy relationship of the last 7 years. Panic mode growing stronger by the minute. So I turned to Opera’s customer service hoping they might be able to help out. But, no, they couldn’t. In fact, they didn’t. Or worse, they never ever even responded! Talking about the power of Social Media in providing good customer support / service… Not! I opened a Forum post at the Opera Forums for Mac users. 4 days later I’m waiting for the first response / reply from any of the support folks from Opera itself. Nothing has happened so far. So in an effort to get back to normal, I decided to reach out to them on Twitter and experience their customer support through social media channels. Just as inexistent, and still waiting for a response through a Mention, Forum Reply or whatever else. Yet, nothing:    .@opera I could do with some further help on this thread > is.gd/A8JTde please? So far not much support offered Thanks! — Luis Suarez (@elsua) April 19, 2012   I know at this point in time most of you folks may have been thinking that I’m making too much of a fuss with all of this, since I could just fire up my most recent copy of my data stored in my Time Machine, copy it across and move along. I did do that already and I managed to recover almost entirely from it, having lost only two weeks of data, but I still think it’s beyond the point. If I am a customer, and end-user of your product, and I have run into trouble because of an upgrade you are advising me to take upon, the least I’m going to expect is for you to be there when I need you. When I need your help to get me back in business, because something may well go wrong, like it did. What I was not expecting at all was not perhaps a feedback comment that I had too much of bad luck, but the fact that there hasn’t been a single reaction, *at all*. Again, talking about customer service in the era of Social Media engaging through social channels. Colour me skeptic once again, because it’s just not happening! And Opera is not just the only recent occurrence of this lack of customer service through social channels. In the past, and just through my own personal experiences, although my good friend Euan Semple has also got a recent, rather interesting, upsetting story on poor quality customer service from an ISP provider: Orange, other businesses like Delta Airlines, Movistar, Swisscom & NH Hotels have been running into the same issues of poor customer service and they have never gotten in touch. Months have gone by without anything happening and, at this point in time, I won’t expect a response either. And the same would apply for Opera. Thus just like I did with all of those businesses (No longer flying with Delta, no longer supporting Movistar, no longer staying at NH Hotels who employ Swisscom as their wi-fi providers), over the weekend I recovered fully from the huge mess the upgrade caused and I have now stopped using Opera altogether and have moved on to RSS feed readers, specific mail clients (Sparrow), and both FireFox and Chrome as my new browsers.  Now, I know I won’t be trusting them to do the right job, since they never have done it properly in the first place, the browsers, I mean, but I already know that. I’m on guard with both of them and keeping an eye on my data to ensure it’s all there in a consistent manner. However, I trusted Opera. I have trusted it for over 7 years to do the right thing and it has done so all along, but for one instance where a big mess was caused the last thing I expected was a lack of response. Not a single comment, not a single reaction. Sorry, but that hurts. Customer loyalty takes years to build effectively, just as much as trust does, but it just takes a split second to destroy and to not recover it again. So time for me to move on and don’t look back, since they have done so just the same.  I can imagine that plenty of businesses are buying into the whole mantra of using social media to be closer to their customers and help support them accordingly. The thing though is that you eventually need to do that. If you are going to be there, be there, be willing to actively listen to not only the wonderful, positive feedback that you get from your customers about your products, but also the rough commentary, the constructive feedback that people share kindly with you without expecting any kind of compensation except than you fixing your own problems with your products so that they can be happy customers again. If you are only willing to listen through social media to the kool-aid and how great your products are, you are just use social technologies as another marketing thingy, whatever name you would want to insert there, and we all know how much we, dear customers, loathe that kind of cheating behaviour. End result? What I started this blog post with:  "I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me"

Ranthambore is my favourite park.", Gaurav reminded me as I spoke to him on the phone. Gaurav Athelye's a friend and runs Jungle Lore - a wildlife tourism outfit. He'd suggested to me that I should definitely visit Ranthambore and promised to help us organise the visit. Our big cat trail landed at the town of Jaipur on 4 May. A harrowingly long drive got us to the town of Sawai Madhopur, where we'd camp for the next two days for four drives into the forest.Our hotel, the Hammir wasn't exactly in the lap of luxury. The fact that the AC wasn't working in the extreme heat when we arrived wasn't very comforting. That said, the hotel manager is quite willing to help guests out and help he did. I'd definitely recommend the hotel if you're backpacking and are looking for budget accommodation. I'm inclined to try the RTDC hotels or the Ranthambore Bagh the next time I go there, but I wouldn't recommend against the Hammir.Our first drive was in the absolutely picture postcard - Zone 3. Mind you, Ranthambore is a huge forest (1400+ sq km), but the tiger reserve itself is only 392 sq km. To ensure minimal disruption to wildlife, the reserve is divided into 6 zones and the officials are quite strict to ensure that vehicles don't cross over. Zone 3 is truly a wildlifer's dream - we didn't see a tiger (clearly), but the quality of wildlife and bird sightings were to write home about. The zone's centerpiece, the Rajbaug lake attracts birds and animals alike. You could sit by it's edge for hours and never tire of the sight. Our drive ended with a sighting of T-28 (a.k.a the 'Star Male') in deep sleep at the hunting palace in the distance. Disappointing drive for tiger sightings, but full marks for everything else.Our next drive was in Zone 2. Yet again pretty good bird sightings, but nothing out of the ordinary with mammals. Well, let me be fair. For a long time we kept listening to chitals, peacocks and sambars screaming their lungs off with warning calls. After an hour of investigation, we decided to probe further at a bush which we suspected was hosting a tiger. Our driver reversed the jeep into position. Saad, our naturalist cried out "Tiger!". Excited as we were, we squinted but couldn't see a thing. After much pointing and gesturing, we saw the stripes of a tiger as testimony. No, we weren't hallucinating. I have a photograph to prove it. Our second drive had gone by without seeing a tiger. Damn!Our third and penultimate drive on 6th May morning was unusually dry. We had to go to Zone 1, a picturesque, hilly part of the park. Unfortunately for us, the forest chose to show us nothing that morning. For the most part, it was a long drive through the forest, with neither mammal nor bird sightings. I have so little to say about the morning, that Zone 1 remains my least favourite part of not just Ranthambore, but perhaps the entire trail. For some reason, Saad was very stressed that we hadn't seen a tiger. We didn't mind all that much, but it was going to be disappointing to leave without seeing the big cat in action.Come afternoon, we decided that if we were really desperate to see a tiger, then that called for desperate measures. In India, when on important 'failure is not an option' kind of missions, we often wear a bandana on our heads. I got myself just that from a nearby handicrafts store. We couldn't let India's most famous tiger reserve let us go without some tiger photos. Our drive had an auspicious beginning- we were heading into zone 4, home to Machili, the world's most famous tigress.Our drive however, was quite eventful until we reached the top of a hillocks that seemed to have way too much human activity. "There's got to be a tiger about.", said Saad. As we made our way to where everyone was looking, we saw a celebrity retinue of vehicles make their way to a better viewing spot. It was Priyanka Vadhra, daughter of one of our ex-prime ministers. That if course was secondary to the fact that we had spotted not one, but two tigers - together possibly to mate. On a second thought, it wasn't. You see, India has no dearth of very important people (VIPs) and people will go to all lengths to please them. So as it turns out, Priyanka and her family got the best viewing positions. Not that we has bad positions, but I wouldn't have complained about being in her jeep that day. As far as the tigers go, they were pretty relaxed even with so many human beings around them. They lazed around for a while, snuggled with one another for a few moments, took a few quick drinks of water and then were promptly on their way to enjoy each other's company in seclusion.As we returned back to our hotel in readiness to hit the road, we talked about how awesome this sighting was. We'd heard no end of the quality of Ranthambore sightings and this one surely lived up to the mark. I personally thought that I'd just gotten a sampler of this wonderful, enigmatic forest - I've got to come back here next year to truly enjoy the forest for an extended duration of time.If you wish to visit Ranthambore, remember that it's one of the most tourist friendly parks of the country. Finding accommodation is quite easy as is booking safaris. The only catch is that you're likely to get a different driver and a guide each drive unless you do something about it. Especially when you're new to a forest, you're better off having the same naturalist guiding you through all your drives. The way to do this is to ask your hotel or to contact a wildlife tourism outfit such as Jungle Lore. That apart, just enjoy the Ranthambore forest (photos here) and the several surprises it keeps throwing at you. As far as we are concerned, we're now heading to Delhi so we can get our connection to Bandavgarh, our next stop on the big cat trail.© Sumeet Moghe

Positive Psychology. Goodness! How cool, and how timely, is that concept? At a time where we are constantly being bombarded by all sorts of various different news items, most of them on the negative side of things, about the global financial crisis, the need to reboot this or that other country in order to get back in shape, their own public institutions, their own business models, or their societies in general, here comes positive psychology to go and change all of that and demonstrate to all of us how we may have been holding, all along, the wrong end of the stick! Well, time to change all of that! Welcome to "The Happy Secret to Better Work". If you have been following this blog for a while, you would probably know by now what a big fan I am from TED Talks. Those rather inspiring, thought-provoking, mind-blowing at times, truly life transforming presentations / speeches by incredibly amazing talented folks on a wide range of topics. Well, in the last couple of weeks I have bumped into one that would fit in that profile and so much more! The beauty of this one is that it’s totally unexpected on its final outcome, and you will see what I mean shortly, and on the good side of things it’s just a bit over 12 minutes long. So rather easy to digest, pause and ponder, and even worth while watching several times!  This particular TED Talk I’d like to spend a few minutes on today is coming from Shawn Achor under the rather suggestive title "The Happy Secret to Better Work" and in it Shawn shares plenty of insights around some interesting issues that we seem to keep neglecting and that perhaps we shouldn’t, like the dangers of measuring the average, because, according to him, that’s exactly what we are going to get: the average, instead of excellence. His views on wanting us all move the entire average up, so that we don’t just focus on our current average, is just remarkable.  Essentially, he comes to proclaim that in order to become better at what we do and to become better at who we are, we need to focus on the lens which the brain sees the world and change that lens so that we would also be capable of changing reality, our reality. That way, by shifting that focus, we would have a great, unprecedented, opportunity to change our happiness, our education, our business. Anything. And everything. Mind-boggling, to say the least! But it gets better as you move along through the TED Talk. What he then comes to state in rather powerful messages is how we need to shift gears into changing, or even better, reverting the formula for happiness and success with a rather simple equation: focus on the positive and not on the negative. Going away, slowly, but steadily, from that mantra we have lived on over the course of decades along the lines of "If I work harder I will be more successful, if I am more successful I am happier". More than anything else because every time our brain hits success, you already get to change automatically that goal of success, meaning it’s already embarking on to the next piece of success. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success we will never reach that state of happiness. What we have done, according to Shawn, is "push happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society". WOW!!! I told you, mind-blowing! But there is even more, because coming close to the end of his dissertation he mentions how what we should eventually be doing is focusing on raising everyone’s level of positiveness in the present, so that the brain would experience what it’s called a happiness advantage. Meaning that if our brain is positive it will perform significantly better than thinking neutral or negatively. Yes, I know. Think about it, it makes perfect sense, don’t you think?  So essentially, what we would need to do in both our work and personal lives, is to find a way to become positive in the present, then our brains will work even more successfully. Doing so it will make us all happier, but it would also turn on all of our learning centers in our brain allowing us to adapt to the world in a different way and better. Much better. Wrapping up his TED Talk presentation, Shawn proclaims that when thinking about small changes rippling outward we could surely start creating lasting positive change with a good number of very simple, yet, incredibly powerful, things to consider, such as these: "3 Gratitudes Journaling Exercise Meditation Random Acts of Kindness" No, don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil all the fun explaining much in detail each and everyone of those items I have just quoted above. Instead I would strongly encourage you all to make time (Like I said, a bit over 12 minutes…) and allow Shawn to wow you big time by watching the video, because he’s certainly going to do that, I can guarantee you! In fact, I would take things even one step further and state that Shawn’s Talk will not leave you indifferent. Rather the opposite. Forever. It will challenge you to think there is a better way out there, a way you can certainly influence right off after you finish watching the attached embedded video clip:    Because, like he just said, by doing that not only would we be creating "ripples of positivity", but eventually we would be creating a real revolution that we can all relate to and feel even more attached, engaged and committed to providing us all with much better quality lives, lives where fulfillment and happiness rule big time altogether over everything else! And that’s just such a fine feeling, don’t you think? You bet! It’s already helped me think about things in a completely different manner, whether work related or on a personal level, to the point where something I was not expecting did eventually happen. Moments of happiness galore, if I can say that! WOW!! Rather liberating and incredibly re-energising to say the least… Yes, you should try it, too! Thank you, Shawn! 

It's not often that you see 10 tigers and still retain a sense of disappointment. Happy as we are at the end of our Bandavgarh safaris, we see a huge scope for improvement with the tourism policies at this reserve. More on that in a bit. If you were ever in two minds about which Indian tiger reserve is likely to afford the best guarantee for tiger sightings, then it's got to be Bandavgarh. Why? Take a few factors into perspective. The Tala tourism zone is just about 102 sq km and has about 22 tigers in it. That gives you a tiger density of about one in every five sq kilometres. This apart, you can seek the assistance of the tracking elephants which when they find a tiger, will mark the spot where the tiger's resting and then take turns to transport you so you can view the tiger in it's natural habitat. Don't listen to what armchair conservationists may say in criticism of the tracking elephants. These animals do not interfere with the big cat's natural movement and make far less noise than safari vehicles. When observing secretive animals, using any intelligence and assistance is never a bad thing. Add to that the presence of some really bold tigers like Kankatti, B2 and the new and upcoming Bamera male, you have a heady mix for tiger sightings.This being said, the park management needs to get it's act straight with it's tourism policies. Wildlife observation is a matter of luck and patience. Depending on the kind of wildlife you wish to observe, you'll need to invest time and energy to get the sightings you want. The park management has made this very difficult. They've divided the zone into four tracks - A,B,C and D. These tracks combine to make four 60 km routes (AC, CA, BD, DB) that safari vehicles have to complete whether they like it or not. When on safari, the prescriptive routes make it really difficult to stop even for a 5-10 minutes near an animal you wish to observe. I hate the Bandavgarh route system with a passion, if you haven't noticed already. The park management seems to be hearing the visitors though and there's talk of potential changes next year. The management plans to halve the number of vehicles allowed in the zone and double the safari prices. This'll ensure that we can reduce the disturbance for the animals and also keep the park revenues intact.Now that's a lot of background information, so I'll keep the rest of the experience report short. We stayed at the White Tiger Forest Lodge of the MPTDC which in my view is just unbeatable, comfortable accommodation right by the edge of the forest. The air-conditioned and the air cooled rooms are equally comfortable and with all three meals included, the deal's a steal. In addition, you have some really hospitable staff who will do all it takes to make you happy. If you book the safaris from the lodge, then be sure to ask for Yadav as your driver. The gentleman has been at Bandavgarh for two decades and knows the park like the back of his hand. Most importantly, he's developed a great intuition for all of the park's tigers and can often guess with great accuracy the routes they're likely to take. You will of course need a good guide, but since that's really out of your control given the park's rotation system, you're well served if you have a knowledgeable driver.We didn't have Yadav as our driver for the first drive, but we more than made up for it in the next two drives which had us bumping into 8 tigers in a day - my best tally ever. In the following drives we saw a tiger each, bringing our tally to 10 tigers in Bandavgarh. We didn't get the best photographs at the park given that we didn't have the opportunity to wait at most of the spots for long and if we'd found tigers resting we had to leave them before they got into a good photo position. I'm not complaining though - every moment you spend with this regal animal is an absolute privilege and something to cherish regardless of whether you get a photo or not.I need to also put in a word for the Bandavgarh Interpretation Centre which is just near the Tala gate. It's a great showcase for this small, yet incredible park and has a great photo gallery on it's first floor. Bandavgarh is famous for tiger sightings but the interpretation centre is a good place to visit just to learn about the incredible biodiversity of the park and the things you should keep an eye out for. All in all, Bandavgarh gets high marks in my book (photos here) and the only reason it doesn't get a perfect 10 is because of the accursed route system. Hopefully that changes soon.If you're visiting Bandavgarh, try seeking the help of MP Tourism to arrange your transfers, stay and safaris. The fact that we paid just about INR 7500 each for this awesome experience tells you how inexpensive they can make things for you.© Sumeet Moghe

I really like Inc. I mean, I really heart it. I discovered it by pure chance a few weeks back and I am now completely hooked up to it, mostly not only because of the top quality articles, publications, videos, etc. etc. they keep putting up on their Web site, but also because of how helpful it’s proving to be as an essential resource "to help entrepreneurs and business leaders succeed". Seriously, if you are looking for topnotch quality content that could very well help you redesign the workplace of the future look no further than those folks. They are doing an outstanding piece of work so far! Ohhh and talking about the workplace of the future, how about if today we spend a few minutes talking about redefining that space embracing over 100 years of research, instead of ignoring it like we have done in the last few years. Ready? Well, here it comes: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week. Seriously, it’s not helping you become better at what you already do, and, definitely, it’s harming more than you would know, and realise about, and not only your own work, your colleagues’, your customers but, eventually, your business itself in the long run. That is, indeed, the rather thought-provoking premise from a recent Inc. article put together by Geoffrey James under the title: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week which comes out in a rather timeline manner, since I, too, recently blogged about this very same topic under "40-Hour Work Week - The Magic of Sustainable Growth".  I am not sure what you folks would think, but I’m starting to find it a rather fascinating topic, that is, how we actually manage work, without trumping our personal lives at the same time. When we all know, giving the current financial turmoil, how more and more is being asked from knowledge workers nowadays, i.e. work longer hours, while on the road, while at your home office where telecommuting is no longer there, therefore you have a couple of extra hours you could make use of, while on vacation, etc. etc. or at a time where we see how pervasive work has become with the emergence of social technologies, but, mostly, also, because of the huge impact on the corporate world by mobile altogether. Yes, it’s expected that we should be putting longer hours on what we are working on; it’s expected that if we don’t do that we are slacking off; it’s assumed that if you don’t work those longer hours, you just basically don’t have enough work, which is, obviously, not seen as a positive outcome, as a knowledge worker. Essentially, it’s just like we can no longer have an excuse not to put longer hours at work, for free, and not only our very own managers would be frowning upon us, but even our very own colleagues, too! Yes, I know, I can sense all of you out there nodding away in violent agreement with that scenario. But how wrong is it? I mean, there used to be a time when we all used to think that those who remain behind at the traditional office were pretty sad souls who just couldn’t get their work done in 8 hours and therefore were punished to stay behind till they would finish it. Gosh, a few years later, it looks like things have turned around 180 degrees and nowadays it’s actually the opposite: if you leave your (home) office by the end of those 8 hours, something is wrong with your productivity: rather your fault or just basically not having enough work. Where do you think you are going, Mr.?, is probably almost everyone’s perception when you decide to leave the office on time.  The reality though, as I have blogged in the past, is that numerous decades of research have proved that we start dropping off on our productivity levels when we reach 40 hours, beyond that we keep failing to deliver, yet, we expect people to stick around just because we feel it would make us more productive and therefore provide better business results. How wrong! It’s actually quite the opposite, as Geoffrey nicely describes it on that article I referenced above, as you basically would just be accounting for burnout and eventually be creating more trouble than helping out. Yet, we keep expecting it to take place. Yet, we all feel guilty if we "leave the office" before our colleagues do and we get frowned upon if we don’t stick around long enough. And that long enough is no longer according to your own terms, but someone else’s! We need to stop that. And the sooner, the better! Yes, social networking tools for business, as well as mobile, are making that job really tough, since work has finally transitioned from a physical space, a la having to go to the physical office every day, to a mental state, where work happens wherever you are. You are work, work is you, as some folks would say, but at the same time You are life, life is you, I would say.  And in most cases we are the only ones who know how to get the best out of it not just for ourselves, but also for those around us, the ones who we care the most about in the first place! So if that extensive research has proved that 40-hour long work weeks are the best option to remain productive, why don’t we stick around with that notion, instead of giving in to that work and peer pressure? You know, there used to be a time when, back in the day, I always felt sorry for those folks who had to stay behind at the traditional office finishing up work because they just couldn’t finish it off on time. I would try to help as much as I could on my own ability, but time and time again they ended up being on their own. Few years later. I am still sorry, but this time around for those folks who, on purpose, decide to "stay behind in the office" working a few extra hours, for free, without having anything in return, just because it looks good to their bosses and to their peers, because, you know, if you don’t do it, it would look like you would be lazy around. Seriously, why do we keep having this obsession of endless work days with 7, 8, 9 or even 10 hours of meetings, and then have to finish off work, when it’s just that same research I have mentioned above the one that has proved time and time again it’s just an unsustainable model in the long run? What are we trying to achieve eventually? In a way, we are just killing ourselves, slowly, but steadily, and without even realising it. Yes, I know, we may be all working really hard, specially, now with the pervasiveness of social networking tools within the workplace, because they enable us to put up more work hours breaking the barriers of timezones, geographies, and whatever else, but what at what costs? Is it really worth while sacrificing your only one single life on this planet and those who matter to you the most for that promotion, for that advancement in your career, for that looking good to your boss and colleagues, when eventually, according to that research, you won’t be even capable of enjoying it to the fullest just simply because you would lack the energy, the good health and the ability to do so? Really, do you think it’s worth while the fight? Or aren’t out there much, much, better things that you could be doing instead? It’s interesting to note how time and time again I always have plenty of people admiring how religious I have become in protecting my own personal, private time, versus work time, in becoming a zealot on how I split up what’s work and what’s everything else. Basically, what I have been talking about in the past around "Work Life Integration", versus work life balance where I have always claimed that there isn’t such balance because work always wins. What most folks may not know though is that I have become so good at it, because I learned, through the hard way, as usual, how to do it. It goes back to 2004, January 22nd, to be more precise, when I learned that unless you look after your own personal life and make it count, no-one else is going to do it. And I had to reach the state of being in a rather poor healthy status to realise about it. Stress was one of the minor worries at the time. I was very happy I was in time to react and acknowledge that I no longer need to apologise to anyone when I am done with work within those 40 hours. There is no reason to do it. It’s not even worth it. Yes, you may think that you may be risking your own career, but let’s face it, do you want to risk your career or your own life? You know, you still have the choice. Always have. At a time when most knowledge workers spend 3 years per average on any given job, if not shorter altogether (More on this one shortly!), I guess it’s time that we, knowledge Web workers, start protecting more, and set the boundaries of both work and personal, because at the end of the day, if we ourselves don’t do it, no-one else is going to do it for us. And don’t worry, there isn’t even a need to apologise. To anyone. After all, you are all looking after your own health. And that’s just priceless. And much to treasure for, regardless of what other people may think or say. You would still need to break the chain and keep challenging the status quo to keep your sanity intact. You need it. They need it. We all need it.  Oh, by the way, if you have got a chance, take a look into the 4 minute long video clip, towards the bottom, (Wish I could share the embedded code below…), included in Geoffrey’s article, that features Lisa Price - President and Founder of Carol’s Daughter - sharing plenty of insights on how she manages it all, no apologies to anyone either, and you will see why I titled this article in the way I did…

There couldn't be a better way to end the big cat trail. While my photography form didn't hold it's own at Corbett, I can safely say that being in the Terai is the real deal when it comes to Indian forests. There's no other forest in the subcontinent that is home to 227 tigers, several thousand Asiatic elephants, 585 species of birds and more than 30 species of reptiles. In short, an extended stay at Corbett has to be a wildlifer's dream. Corbett does have it's ills, but let me blend them into my experience report.Corbett is one of the most frustrating parks to book accommodation for. You'll be surprised that I say this, because a web search will yield several hotels around the park. The fact is that if you're serious about wildlife you want to stay away from the noisy boors who'll come to park for a drive because they have nothing better to do. Staying in one of the outside resorts means that you'll enter the forest with these people and each time you see a tiger, there'll be a mini traffic jam with people shouting like it's a fish market. So, most wildlife enthusiasts choose to stay at one of the several forest rest houses in the park - the most popular of these being Dhikala. Dhikala is about 49 kilometres from the Dhangari gate of Corbett Tiger Reserve and is in the thick of this magnificent jungle. Only residents at the rest house can drive through the safari routes here and getting accommodation is so tough that only enthusiasts take the trouble.To tell you the fact, the reservation system is from the dark ages. You fax them a request months prior to your arrival. You keep calling them every day to follow up on your request. You then send them a demand draft when they confirm your booking (yes, even electronic transfers don't work). All this, and you now need to find a good safari jeep and a good driver. After all that trouble, I still wasn't able to get accommodation at Dhikala for both my nights and I ended up getting a night at Dhikala and a night at Bijrani, a rest house slightly more on the outside of the forest. Getting accommodation at Dhikala is truly an insider's job and in hindsight I recommend you take the services of either of the following folks to take the load off your head:Ramesh Suyal (highly recommended on most travel guides)Dhikala.inTigerland Safaris and ToursDhikala is a great place for spotting wild elephants, hog deer, barking deer and a wide variety of birds in a really dense, forest. Tiger sightings are a matter of chance and more so here, given the dense cover they have. We almost missed the only sighting we had here and the tigress we stopped for was so offended by the fact that we'd blocked her route, that she lunged at us in a mock charge emitting a huge roar. Before we knew it, she'd lunged across the road and neither of the five cameras trained on her had an opportunity to get a photograph. A great sighting - one that left our hearts racing. In our one day at Dhikala, we ran into several elephant herds and saw several exotic birds. Before we'd even sampled the zone properly, we had to head out of the zone and check into our rest house at Bijrani.The Bijrani rest house is quite old in itself. Established in 1928 as a hunting lodge for the British, it serves as an in forest accommodation for tourists. The zone however, is shared across both day visitors and lodge residents. This tends to make the zone quite noisy, despite the fact that your accommodation can get you several minutes of tranquility when at the rest house. Do remember that you can get out early each morning and stay back late each evening when all other vehicles are likely to be racing against time to reach the gate. Bijrani is also a comparatively drier zone which makes game spotting somewhat easier.Now did we see a tiger at Bijrani? You bet we did - a young female who chose to sleep in a little cave in almost human fashion. It seemed to make no difference to her as the guides and visitors on the hillock above her made a huge ruckus about her presence. We left her fast asleep, only to come back in the afternoon to watch her lounging in her private pool after the long siesta.I must put in a word for the elephant safaris at Corbett. In my view there's no better way to experience the forest. Remember that it's not the best perch for photography or to get the best sightings, given the elephant's always moving and that it's a lot slower than a safari vehicle. However, the ability to see the forest from the inside, on an all terrain animal is quite something. No gorge is too deep, no slope too steep. If you had to follow a tiger into the bush, the elephant's your best bet. It's also a great way to experience first hand how man and animal can be such good friends. The trust and understanding between the elephants and their mahouts (handlers) is something to see so you can believe. The mahouts also have really interesting tales to tell so even if you don't get great wildlife sightings, you can have a really entertaining ride through the thickets.Anyways, Corbett was the last stop on the big cat trail this year. It's been quite amazing - we've spotted 49 big cats; 28 lions, 20 tigers, and 1 leopard. I think it's quite humbling to be stuck one short of a half century; nature's way of showing she's still in control. I am returning to Bangalore enriched by this experience. I've learned so much and I am more appreciative of this country's biodiversity than I was ever before. The big cat trail will be on the road again in the summer of next year and my plan is to visit the following parks:TadobaPenchRanthamboreCorbettDudhwaSunderbanKazirangaWhile it's quite impossible to upload all my photographs from the big cat trail, I've put together a small selection of photographs here. As always, my work is under a Creative Commons license.© Sumeet Moghe

Ok, back to Social Business. After the last few days where I have been blogging a number of different times about some musings on redesigning and refining further along the workplace of the future, it’s time to get down to business again and continue to share further insights around social networking / computing for business or the good old Social Business itself. By the way, stay tuned because very soon I will be putting together an article where I will explain why I’m going to move away from the social business concept into another one that I think is much more accurate and fitting in helping explain where we are today with the whole mantra behind Social. But till then, how about if one of these days you come to work and you bump into a rather controversial article, a superb read, actually, that questions the whole social business industry, right where it hurts the most:  Social Networking for Business doesn’t count much on today’s CIO’s top priorities, after all. Disappointing or a huge opportunity? Both, eventually! A couple of weeks back Prem Kumar Aparanji, a.k.a. Prem, put together an article where he was reflecting on a recent research study by Gartner (Strongly recommend going through the links he references to get a better grasp of what the survey tried to accomplish), where some really interesting data came up; the most thought-provoking piece was probably that one where it was mentioned how Social Networking (for business) wasn’t a top priority for CIO’s out there in 2012. Not all CIOs though, but about 100 of them who took part in the survey study, which I still think is significant enough to notice. You would expect that it would be rather worrying that, still in 2012, the whole area of Social gets questioned and even misses the point of reaching the Top 10 priority list from CIOs. In this case it comes up as the 11th priority. And, it may well be, indeed, worrying to some extent, but it is not new. It’s been happening all along for a good number of years already. But with a different name.  Indeed, I am referring to good old Knowledge Management and Collaboration, once again, just to detail a bit more the parallel roads both fields have been running all along. And it’s interesting to notice how when I used to work within the European Knowledge Management deployment team inside IBM, about 11 years ago, we faced the very same upsetting reality: KM (And Collaboration, for that matter), wasn’t the business top priority at the time. In fact, it didn’t even show up on the Top 20 priority list for Lines of Business. Thus, a few years later, seeing how social business is coming into the Top #11 is not such a bad achievement. On the contrary. Lots of opportunity in here! So, I know what you are thinking now, if social is not in the Top 10 priority list from (some) CIOs why is that? I mean, what’s happened for that scenario to be so gloomy and yet strike us as a common reality for the last 18 years and counting… First with KM and Collaboration back then and nowadays with Social Business. Well, I am not sure what you folks would think, but I tell you what my gut feeling has been telling me all along: KM, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Social Networking AND online communities have always been "taken as a given" by both IT and the business. And the higher you go in the organisation the much more ingrained that perception of being a given it is. Just think about it. When was the last time that you, as a knowledge worker, received some kind of formal, (or informal) training, or education, for that matter around how to collaborate effectively, or share your knowledge in a much more open, transparent and public manner? Even through email (Yes, I know, quite an oxymoron right there, right?!?). Probably never, I would guess. But then again when you join a company that’s one of the traits that is expected of you: be a team sports, of a rather open and collaborative manner, that is, a good team player who can collaborate across the board, otherwise it would be rather tough. Or simply put in another way, in today’s current working environment, would you be capable of getting work done on your own, in a single project, on a single team, and with a single set of priorities and goals without having to collaborate with others? I will go and answer that one for you… You won’t. You never have. You never will.  That’s why collaboration, whether traditional or social, is no longer a nice-thing-to-have but more than anything else a business imperative. Yet, it’s hardly embraced by the corporate world. Why? Because everyone feels that every single knowledge worker out there is a collaborator by nature and as such it’s a given that everyone would know how to collaborative effectively. When we know that’s not going to happen, at all, and to prove that we have got the perfect example that’s been demonstrating and showcasing it decade in decade out and we are still struggling with it: email. I probably don’t need to say much more about it, right? Although I can perhaps formulate a single question to try to address and answer that concern: do you feel you are effective and productive enough in your day to day collaborative work today using email, or traditional knowledge based repositories for that matter? Like I said, no need to provide an answer on that one, although I think we all know it already. I think we all know what really needs to happen to turn that situation around 180 degrees and start thinking it’s a good time to shift gears and realise about a single fact that would change the way we do work today: never underestimate the power of (social) collaboration.  Whether you are the CIO, the CFO, or from whatever other high end of the org chart, you should always consider the fact that not everyone is a true collaborator, that not everyone knows, and fully understands, how to use (social) collaborative tools, that not every knowledge worker out there would know how to get work done in a open, collaborative, transparent and public manner and that as such you would need to accommodate an opportunity for knowledge workers to get properly trained not only on how to make use of the various knowledge sharing, collaborative and social networking tools, but also the behaviours that would involve such change. Social collaboration is all about a mindset. In fact, I would come to question the validity of using social networking tools to collaborate effectively. You can still do that, that is, become much more open, public, transparent, trustworthy, engaged, committed, etc. etc. without perhaps even relying on (social) tools. They are more cultural traits of how knowledge gets shared across. And for that, it’s always important to have the right level of support and don’t expect other people to embrace new ways of working, because they are just simply not going to work.  That’s why the role of executives, in whatever the organisation, is so important and rather critical, and in the context of social business, even more! Because knowledge workers, as they become more aware and excited about new, smarter ways of getting work done, would need plenty of support, sponsorship, servant leadership, commitment and proper attention to ensure the right mix is put together. I mean, imagine what would have happened if back in the day, folks would have been educated, and trained, on how to use email properly as a powerful collaborative and knowledge sharing tool, instead of being considered today a huge productivity drain, provoked by ourselves, in the first place!  That’s certainly something that we wouldn’t want to have around nowadays with regards to Social Business, don’t you think? Take, as an example, the recent entry posted over at Mashable under the suggestive title "5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work" and think about it for a little bit. Here are those productivity wasters:  "Trying to contact customers or colleagues Trying to find key information Duplicating communications Attempting to schedule meetings Unwanted communications" Now, if your company suffers from any of those business pain points, do you feel that having proper education and training on social networking tools AND habits would help you address and fix some of them accordingly? Take the example of tagging. Done and shown properly, it’ll help address #1, #2 and #3 right there! With very little effort, and yet with tremendous potential and huge benefits. And that’s just tagging. Think now of the huge amount of unwanted communications you could reduce by adopting that social mantra of narrating your work, working out loud or just simply observable work. And the list of use cases goes on and on and on… Here’s another one: how much time do knowledge workers waste on inefficient meetings? Those meetings they get dragged into time and time again for hours no end every single day. Well, imagine what it would be like if those same knowledge workers would reduce, dramatically, the time they spend on meetings and get work done smarter, not necessarily harder, using social, collaborative and knowledge sharing tools.  Still think that Social Collaboration is a given, and therefore should not be in your Top 5 priority list? Hmmm, you may need to re-think again the business pain points you are trying to assess and a find a solution for. Because you may have it already right there! Waiting for you … 

When I went to Ranthambore this year, I was pretty awestruck by the glory of the men's moustaches there. As some of you know, I was inspired enough to grow my own moustache. A week down the line, when I was back at work I thought of the Movember tradition and wondered if people would be willing to donate to a charity if I kept growing my moustache. My colleague Nikhil's been growing one of his own -- we could potentially double up. Without a second thought, I posted a poll on our social business platform - myThoughtWorks. Now wait a minute - was that related to work in anyway? Was there an ROI to allowing a posting of that nature? Errrm... no! I personally think there's value in such a thing though. That value is fun.In a way, I consider myself fortunate to work for a company that lists 'Fun' as a value. It's quite easy to get very uptight in social business. It's quite easy to forget that the water cooler has gossip, the team rooms have jokes, colleagues have fun with each other and that we often strike strong personal relationships at work. A true social business platform needs to mirror these real aspects of human behaviour. In today's blogpost, I want to outline a few patterns that you may actively want to foster in your community to encourage the value of fun.Help people find others with similar interestsIf you've read the book First Break all the Rules, it links to a Gallup study that claims to reveal the formula for innovation in the enterprise."Employees who have best friends at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their jobs, while those who have at least three "vital friends" at work are 96% more likely to be satisfied with their lives." - GallupThere obviously is a certain importance of emotional connection to the enterprise. You're less likely to leave if you have friends in the company. Friendship stems from common ground. Common ground emerges from common interests. Simple implementations such as profile tags and people search can help people find other people with similar interests. What's the ROI? Is retaining your employees valuable for you? Is 96% employee satisfaction valuable for you? Does employee engagement mean much to you? If the answer to either of these is yes, then you perhaps should care.Simulate the Gossip LoungeWhether you like it or not, your people are saying things. Some of these are useful pieces of information, some are musings, some are questions, some are pieces of feedback for you to react on. Think of the way you react to your network on Facebook. Simulating the gossip room on your social business platform allows you to have a constantly updating view of what people are saying to each other. It's fun for people to broadcast their views - it's valuable for you to listen to them. What do people care about? In my case it seems to be the speed of myThoughtWorks in Australia. In your case it could be a fascination with moustaches!The Gamification Phenomenon"In other words, with games, learning is the drug." - Raph Koster (theory of fun)Still a topic of debate, but we can't deny that we're brushing shoulders in the workplace with a gamer generation. Heck, this may not even be a new phenomenon. As Byron Reeves says though, the current 'gamer' generation has a few strong beliefs:competition is funfailure doesn't hurtrisk is part of the gamefeedback is best when it's immediatetrial and error is the best planbosses and rules are less importantgroup action is commonIn his talk at DevLearn, Byron argued that play is not the opposite of work. Play on the other hand can facilitate interest in work. In that talk, Byron showed us how doctors are playing games at $15 an hour to only improve their diagnosis skills. This can't be opposite of work. There's some obvious benefit that gamification has towards individual motivation. There's perhaps a reason why you're so addicted to Angry Birds on your iPhone or Harbour Master on your iPad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that you can make a dull job interesting by gamifying it. That's just putting lipstick on a pig. What is interesting is how badges, points, reputation systems can help add a fresh level of interest and motivation to knowledge sharing, feedback, personal learning and challenging work. How can people get immediate feedback for desirable behaviour on your platform? How can you recognise the most active contributors? How can you reward achievements without promoting a class culture? Check how Foursquare gives badges - can you try something similar?Learning at work, but not just about workPeople are people and have more dimensions to them than just work. People want to learn about photography, origami, art. They may want to practice a sport. Going back to the thought about helping people find others with similar interests, it's also crucial to help people pursue their non-work passions through the company. For example, I've discovered a passion for photography; I work in a company of geeks and many geeks like photography. The fact that ThoughtWorks allows us to have a special interest group on photography on the social business platform means a great deal to some of us. It's an opportunity to share our work amongst people we know and learn from each other about lenses, photography tips and what not. This has no direct impact on the company's bottomline but again it tells me that the company is willing to share their investment in my personal growth and also it allows me to make connections with others in the enterprise. If you believe Granovetter, then it's the weak acquaintances that have solutions to your toughest problems. The guy who runs the photography interest group could be the business analyst who can help you with that tough problem on your project. Who knows what solutions some of these weak ties can lead to? While I think we're starting to cross the chasm with adoption of social business platforms in the enterprise, there's still a great amount of thought we need to put in so these platforms mirror common human behaviour. To overuse a cliche, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and perhaps an even duller knowledge worker. The ideas I've put out on this blogpost don't even cover the tip of the iceberg for this crucial aspect of social business. At ThoughtWorks, we take fun seriously but even we have miles to go with the way we're integrating fun into our collaboration platforms. I'd love to hear of ideas that you may have in this space - fun means heaps to this company. Comment unabashedly so I can learn from you!On a sidenote, I'm hosting RubyConf India this week and while it's quite unrelated to the stuff I blog about I'm quite excited to be master of ceremonies for a second time. If you happen to be there by any chance, do say hello. I'm sure it'll be great to catch up.© Sumeet Moghe

If earlier on this week we were talking about the increasing concerns on how high level executives, CIOs mainly, keep taking for granted social collaboration and how perhaps they need to shift gears and stop considering it’s a given, here’s today’s blog post where I will reflect on a recent article put together by the always insightful Rachel Happe at The Community Roundtable under the troubling heading "The Community Strategist Squeeze", where she comes to highlight the current state of what’s been asked of community managers, facilitators, leaders, builders, stewards, or whatever other term you would want to use: deliver plenty more with a lot less. And the more you do of that, the much better off for the business. Never mind the community facilitators. They never have.  As you well know, Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable, along with Jim Storer, a rather smart, helpful and very resourceful and talented peer to peer network of community builders that has been around for a couple of years already and that time and time again they keep producing some of the most amazing reports, and other brilliant deliverables, that one can find out there on the Social Web around the art of managing online communities, whether internal or external. Their latest example is The 2012 State of Community Management, a superb white paper / report that I strongly would encourage everyone to read and go through to see what’s happening in this space of facilitating effectively online communities and where we are at that daunting, yet, exciting and rather rewarding task. I will be putting together another separate blog entry at a later time on that very same report, but going back into the actual piece that Rachel wrote I thought it was incredibly revealing how little things have changed in the last 10 to 15 years, perhaps even more, with regards to online communities. Yes, I know, we do have nowadays better community tooling all around with all of these emergent social technologies, but it looks like some of the most fundamental, deep routed problems are still alive and kicking: businesses keep ignoring the value of online communities, and continue to treat them as just another project resource. When we all know that’s not the case, quite the opposite. They are rather dynamic, living organisms that keep corporations alive providing them with an identity, a corporate culture difficult to surpass and, above all, a strong sense of belonging and ownership by the community members that cannot be found, nor seen, anywhere else within an organization to the point of going the extra mile in getting work done. Just because they all share that common passion: wanting to help and learn from others on that particular subject matter that gathers them around. Yet, online communities keep being treated as mere resources you can exploit to your own abilities, needs and wants, without realising that they, too, have got their own that you, as a business, would need to feed and nurture if you would want to keep your communities alive in the medium, long term. Communities are different beasts. They are not (project) teams, they are not networks, nor organisations, yet we keep treating them as if they were. See? Nothing much has changed since the late 90s and beginning of the 2000s.  Back in the day, around 2000, when I was still doing traditional Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Learning, plenty of businesses invested, initially, rather heavily, on the concept of Communities of Practice, the traditional formalised, structured communities and for a good while they were rather successful. However, as time moved on and as the businesses realised how they could start squeezing them one by one to no end, demanding more and more by the minute from their community leaders, having and providing less, as well as the members, with very little in return, the whole model broke down when people stopped relying on them to a great extent.  No, they didn’t disappear, they never disappeared; in fact, they have always been there, but what at some point were the core critical engine of interactions amongst knowledge workers soon turned out to be that essential resource that everyone could poach to no end till they would eventually drain them to die a painful death by refusing to nurture and feed back some of the most essential, key roles in those same communities; mainly, community leaders / builders / facilitators, core team, knowledge brokers, community managers, etc. etc.  You would have expected that with the emergence of better community tooling with social networking tools that things would have improved quite a bit and the reality is that they have made things a whole lot better. Key concepts like social capital skills, open knowledge sharing, collaboration, engagement, commitment, passion, trust, etc. etc. are stronger than ever before, but, unfortunately, so is the community leaders squeeze that Rachel talks about on that article, highlighting, once again, how businesses seem to have put very very few resources on helping facilitate effectively online communities hoping that everything will work out and that things would stick around. Yet another time. The thing is that they won’t. If not, judge for yourselves, to quote Rachel, on the list of pressures that community leaders are facing at the moment:  "To assess, reconcile and coordinate the ‘social’ approach across a wide range of enterprise functions To justify not just their progress but the ROI when many are still in a highly fluid and experimental state To train the entire organization on social media, internal social software, social business, social processes and workflows and community management To educate legal, HR and compliance groups about the dynamics and specifics of online social environments To understand and report back what is going on - from a conversational perspective - in the online environment To share their expertise both internally and externally with a wide variety of groups To hire a set of individuals that are hard to find and which their HR departments don’t really understand and then mentor and educate those groups quickly To coach executives individually To keep up with the ever changing technologies and analytics options To integrate internal social environments with closed communities with open communities and with public social channels and none-hosted communities in their markets To set up enterprise-wide governance processes and regularly coordinate efforts and approaches globally To help the entire organization see the opportunities that social approaches might bring to specific workflows and functions" And I am certain that’s just a pretty small list of those current pressures. I bet you folks out there would be able to share plenty more in the comments below about the ones you yourselves are currently facing at the moment (Feel free to share them across, if you feel they would contribute into raising some further awareness about them on this post). The reality is that businesses have been playing with fire for a long while, as Rachel quotes accurately with this trend of thought:  "[…] the limited investment in and strategic exposure of social and community teams is one of the biggest risks to progress in the social business and community space right now  - both in making progress and in keeping staff" Burnout comes up pretty high as perhaps one of the main reasons that could take the whole thing apart and disrupt it in such a way that it would be rather tough to recover from. And that’s just one of the potentially negative consequences. I am sure there are more. Yet, while I am putting together these thoughts, and as I keep thinking what may well be the potential solution, I can’t help to acknowledge that perhaps the very same ecosystem that we created in the first place around community leaders is the one that’s causing and creating such squeeze. If you think of community management as an outsourced activity away from the business and its core activities, which I would think most people would assume it is, right there you have got the main problem. With community management what we are basically telling businesses out loud, even at the age of the Social Web, is that they don’t have to worry about doing such piece of work themselves, i.e. maintaing, facilitating, nurturing online social interactions in communities, because someone else will do it for them and effectively enough that I can squeeze them to provide me with what I need as a business and don’t provide much in return, as a result of it. Now I do see the value of having community builders, facilitators, stewards, leaders and whatever other term that you would want to use in this context. I think they are critical to help a community succeed, pretty much like any other of the traditional community job roles themselves, but I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t have put too much preeminence and paramount importance in the exclusivity of their role, because right there we have given carte blanche to businesses to disengage, withdraw support, sponsorship, leadership and what not, thinking that those smart community managers would be able to pull it off themselves, when we know that they would have had a much better and easier job if the businesses would be involved in helping manage and facilitate those communities themselves.  So if in my previous blog post I questioned how CIOs should not take for granted social collaboration, because it’s not going to happen just like that, I would come to question as well how we are already passed the tipping point as a business to understand how helping your online communities, as well as your community managers, is going to be a critical core activity of your day to day business operations. And the easiest way of achieving that is realising that you, as a major driver of that business, company, organization, i.e. as an executive, with your business priorities, would need to take charge, come forward and become another community facilitator / builder, so that you could understand each and everyone of those pressures that Rachel mentioned above in order to help address and fix them accordingly, so that online community management activity is no longer seen as an outsourced activity, but more of an integrated, critical, business process of your day to day operations. The way it should be. The way it should have always been. Only then would we be capable of seeing the job role of community managers survive for the next decades to come. Failure to do that would eventually mean we are already starting to witness the slow, painful death of what it is like being a community manager. Squeezed to no end because their business just didn’t understand how communities operate, how they could help bring further along more business value and sustainable growth and eventually how they themselves, the businesses, didn’t understand right from the beginning that a successful online community management strategy begins with them being at the forefront supporting the efforts, in every which way, from those with a passion to transform the way we do work through networks and communities versus traditional top-down hierarchies. Welcome to the wonderful world of Wirearchy!