A bit early to speak of this, but I do have some tentative plans. The map below is indicative of my planned Summer 2012 trail. Now obviously, I can't do this by myself and I'll perhaps hold on for sometime to find people who want to join in. For now my plans are to do the first three destinations over weekends preceding the actual trail - so hopefully those should be easy ones for folks to join me on. More about this in a few months.View Big Cat Trail 2012 in a larger map© Sumeet Moghe

In the past we have talked a couple of times about the undeniable impact that social networking (for business) is having in traditional management and thought leadership by helping reshape and redefine some of their various long time existing conceptions . There have been, indeed, a few great articles out there that not only have they assessed the importance and relevance of social technologies to help define the next generation of management, leadership and employee engagement, but they have also ventured to state, and rather accurately, how traditional management would need to keep moving on with its own social transformation, if it would want to survive over the course of time. Long gone are the days of command and control. Long gone are the days of micro-management, of managing by fear, power, bullying or mediocrity, or, just simply, by believing that the mantra "I am the boss; do what I say … or else!" would still work in today’s current business environment. But if that’s the case I am sure at this point in time you folks would be probably wondering what’s the new role of leadership then in the world of Social Business? Can we define it nowadays in some sort of form or shape? Or will we have to create a new one altogether? Well, we may not. Once again, we may not need to go ahead and reinvent the wheel, since we may have had it all along over the last few hundred years and we never noticed… Welcome to the Era of Servant Leadership!  Indeed, Servant Leadership is  "[…] a management philosophy which implies a comprehensive view of the quality of people, work and community spirit. It requires a spiritual understanding of identity, mission, vision and environment. A servant leader is someone who is servant first, who has responsibility to be in the world, and so he contributes to the well-being of people and community. A servant leader looks to the needs of the people and asks himself how he can help them to solve problems and promote personal development. He places his main focus on people, because only content and motivated people are able to reach their targets and to fulfill the set expectations" (Quoted from Wikipedia’s reference article on the topic) and while catching up last week with my good friend, the always insightful and equally thought provoking, Stowe Boyd I just couldn’t help thinking about how we may not need to redefine much what was already hinted hundreds of years ago about servant leaders, but perhaps just fine tune a little bit more the work carried out eventually by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 on this very same topic, as a way to help define what will be demanded of, a few decades later, Leaders 2.0 in the knowledge economy of the 21st century where social technologies have finally introduced wirearchy in the corporate world for it to stay, moving right along, with traditional hierarchy.  And in that context I just couldn’t help thinking about this superb article at Inc.com under the suggestive heading "8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses" by Geoffrey James that has been making the rounds on various social networks out there and which clearly portraits the kind of shift that traditional management needs to make in order to help prepare the leaders of tomorrow, if not today altogether already. No, I am not going to spoil the fun and try to reproduce Geoffrey’s article with plenty of quotes here and there. On the contrary, I would like to encourage you all to have a look into that truly inspirational dissertation and be prepared to be wowed big time! As a teaser, here you have got the 8 Core Beliefs Geoffrey talks about, just to get you going:  "Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield A company is a community, not a machine Management is service, not control My employees are my peers, not my children Motivation comes from vision, not from fear Change equals growth, not pain Technology offers empowerment, not automation Work should be fun, not mere toil" Pretty powerful stuff, don’t you think? I am sure you would all agree with that assertion, but there is more, there is always more eventually!, because, just as I was putting together this article I bumped into a rather evoking image on Google Plus that can certainly help folks differentiate between traditional management, the boss, and this new kind of management, the leader:  And as I kept reflecting on that transition from bosses to leaders as the one that is going to shape up management as we know it within the business world, and all of that thanks to social networking, amongst several other timely happenings, I just couldn’t help remembering, quite fondly, the absolutely stunning blog post that Kathy Sierra (Gosh, how much do I miss her mind-boggling blog posts!) shared over 6 years ago!! under the title "Manager 2.0" with this brilliant image that would surely resonate quite a bit with that of servant leadership: I would happily recommend you all to go through Kathy’s article to realise how close Social Business has been all along, even right from the start!, on helping shape up the way we understand and embrace both management and leadership 2.0 nowadays, 6 years later, into something that perhaps we have been having all along, but that we just didn’t know it, or maybe that we have neglected and ignored for far too long. The reality is that if someone would be asking me to define the new role of leadership in today’s interconnected, instrumented, intelligent, engaged, smarter, trustworthy and transparent social business world the one single key concept that would keep coming up, in a recurring way, time and time again, would be what’s been there all along with us throughout history: Servant Leadership.  And here is probably the toughest question of them all that will keep coming up repeatedly, now more than ever, and that we all need to try and find an answer for: in todays social business world are your / our current leaders servant leaders? And if they aren’t, what can we do to help prepare them?

ThoughtWorks is a company of really smart people - we base our business on it. As part of my job at this company, I am privileged to work with the smartest of the smarts. Some of our best consultants come to ThoughtWorks University and that's what makes the program as good as it is today. On the side, I've become a bit of repeat practitioner in putting teams together in a high intensity performance environment. Over the last few years in this firm, I've put together over 20 teams and fortunately each team has made the company proud with its performance. You could say that I know a thing or two about making teams tick. While that may only a be a conjecture, I'd like to share with you what I've learned while working alongside some really smart individuals.Set ContextAt ThoughtWorks, my favourite word is context. Context is what we need to perform effectively. Context provides the background for why we do the things the way we do them. Context often illuminates the very meaning of what we do. To set context is perhaps the most important part of building a new team. My colleague Patrick Kua is an absolute hero with setting context. I use a lot of his onboarding patterns to get new teams up to speed with the rationale, background and mechanics of our work.Give them FreedomI strongly believe that when you put a group of smart people together and they agree on the goal they wish to achieve, they will find effective ways to get there. ThoughtWorks University v2 is a great example of this - even rookies prove this hypothesis. In my time at ThoughtWorks, I've noticed that it's usually enough for me to set context, share some broad guidelines with my new team and then just let them do their thing. Sure, they'll make mistakes. If we can plan some slack to allow people to learn, we can easily mitigate that risk. Sure, they'll need guidance. That's where my experience comes in.Avoid the 'postman pattern'One of my previous bosses was a nightmare to work with. All she ever did was pass on work via email. We never caught up, she never worked alongside me or my colleagues. She sat in her ivory tower, while her minions slogged away. I call this the postman pattern. I try to consciously avoid this kind of aloof behaviour. This to some extent has been my Achilles heel as well, but I believe the only way to have influence in a team, is to work within it. For as much as I can, I work with my teams on a daily basis. When I can't work alongside them, I try to step away and remove blockers instead. There's no point trying to operate by remote control. Either earn your right by working with the team, or be ready to relinquish it.Shorten the feedback loop When people are new, they will make mistakes. They will also taste success. The key is to ensure that they can recognise these occurences and know how to repeat them (in case of successes) or learn from them (in case of mistakes). This is where a commitment to continuous feedback becomes crucial. I'm a big believer in the value of continuous feedback - in fact I know some teams in ThoughtWorks that use Rypple to facilitate this process. Feedback doesn't have to be a grand event. It can just be a few lines that strengthen someone's confidence or improve their effectiveness. And by the way, there's no harm in letting someone know they're wrong. I created a course on this some months back - take a lookPlay the facilitatorMy colleage at ThoughtWorks, Angela Ferguson often used to speak of her role as a project manager being more like that of a facilitator. I think she's quite right. If we truly want to make our teams succeed then our biggest responsibility is to remove blockers from the way. Quite often it's also about absorbing external pressures so the team can perform effectively. Often it also means connecting people to people. This in my view is crucial. There are several problems to which a team may not have solutions. This is where connecting to people outside the strongly knit team helps -- tapping into the power of weak ties. I've been around for a while. My job gets me to know a lot of people and connect with them on social networks as well. I use this strong network to get my immediate team connected to other ThoughtWorkers when the need comes by. I'm obviously no leadership or team building expert. I'm sure there's heaps more one could do when setting up and working with new teams. All I've added here is from my own experience - do you have any ideas you want to add? Feel free to drop them in the comments section of this blogpost. Next week, we'll be back to my musings on social business.Photo credit: Éole© Sumeet Moghe

Ever since Clay Shirky first used the quote "It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure" at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, back in 2008, there has been an ongoing, everlasting, but rather passionate discussion from both sides of the story pondering whether it’s really all about facing and dealing with information overload or whether it’s just purely filter failure. I am sure that this is one of those topics we are never going to get tired of talking about, conversing, share our first hand experiences, try to convince others about our own point of view, etc. etc. You name it.  But what if we throw food out there into the mix? Yes, you are reading it right. What if the key towards dealing with information overload is not just filter failure but a matter of food. Actually, thought for food. For a good number of years I have shared across my admiration, praise and just pure delight for having the continued unique opportunity to pick up on the brains, and muse further on, from a great group of rather talented and insightful thought leaders in the Social Computing space, who, if anything, have always managed to get everyone thinking differently about certain ideas, trends of thought, and whatever else, around that social transformation of the business world; not to mention as well the impact of our societies going digital, and how we deal, in general, with information and knowledge to make some sense into it, without asking anything in return. One of those folks I have been truly admiring for a long while is JP Rangaswami, a.k.a. @jobsworth. Why?  Well, not only because of the superb writing that he keeps putting together over at his blog "Confused of Calcutta - A Blog About Information" or his various tweets, amongst several other online places he gets to share his thoughts out loud on, but mainly because, just recently, he may have given us a new way of looking into information overload and how we can deal with it making plenty of good sense, in addition to Clay’s mantra about filter failure. And it’s got to do that with one of my favourite topics du jour as well. Food! Who would have thought about that, right? Information / knowledge and food walking hand in hand to explain one of those current issues we keep facing in today’s more interconnected, intelligent and information abundant world than ever before. Yet, making perfect sense. Take a look and read further JP’s recently blog entry on this topic under the suggestively provocative title "Thought for food", where he referenced his recent appearance at TED Salon in Austin as he delivered a truly inspirational speech of a bit over 8 minutes long, that exposed one of those brilliant analogies that, when going through it, as you watch him further dive into it, you realise it just makes perfect sense! Why didn’t we all see it before?  Take a look into the TED Talk video clip itself that I have embedded below. Like I said, it lasts for a little bit over 8 minutes, but it really is worth while watching in its entirety. And you will see what I mean after you finish it off. So here it goes:  Basically, on that short dissertation JP comes to confirm what may well be the potential solution to how we deal with information in the knowledge economy. Yes, it may well have to do quite a bit with collaborative filtering; term I have grown to become rather fond of while describing how the networks you keep treasuring and cultivating are those very same ones that will be filtering the best, topnotch content available out there for you!, but it may well not be good enough. JP explained it beautifully with this quote on what really matters at the end of the day on how we handle such information abundance:  "Information, if viewed from the point of view of food, is never a production issue. … It’s a consumption issue, and we have to start thinking about how we create diets [and] exercise" And this is where it hit me. And big time! This is where I realised about that wonderfully inspiring connection between information & knowledge AND food. You see? There used to be a time when I didn’t care much about the food I consumed, nor the portions, nor the quality of the ingredients, or the variety, etc. etc. Whatever it was good to fill my belly up with and move on back to what I was doing was just good enough for me. Exercise and good working out sessions were out of the question, too!, for yours truly. I just didn’t have the time and I wasn’t that interested at all. Till around July last year when I reached what I would consider my own tipping point, that is, 101.5 kgs. / 223 lbs and on the brink of reaching 40 years of age. No, not to worry, no body warnings or body alarms blew off, but, right there, right then, I realised I needed to start doing something about it, because I was entering that dangerous situation where I was no longer feeling healthy, based on my food intakes and the non-existent exercise habits.  As you well may remember, I eventually blogged about that transformation I started right there, how by doing three simple things I have managed to change that dangerous path towards an unhealthy lifestyle with everything that entails. Those three simple things were:  Watch, much more, what I do eat, looking for variety and healthier foods (fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes, etc. etc.) in much smaller portions aiming for no longer feeling full meal after meal.  Start doing daily exercise and some workouts, in order to carry on burning all of that bad stuff I have accumulated over the course of the years. I started small, walking, then fast walking, then moving on into slow running, and, finally reaching a certain level of running where my body feels comfortable and I, too, fell comfortable without putting too much strain, but still getting the job done; then every so often a bit more of rowing, some yoga and off we go. The journey began… and it never stopped ever since. And, finally, ensure that every night I would get a good night sleep, of, at least, 7.5 hours, if not more, since that seems to be the best quality sleeping time I can get, as Sleepyti.me bedtime calculator taught me over the course of time. And that was it! That was my discovery journey into figuring out that I needed to start working my way on not only how I would consume food, but also how I would burn it all, or a large chunk of it, and how I would need to get better sleep which helps oneself, as you all know, fully charge your own batteries ready for the next day. Right now, as I write these few words, I’m at the stage that I would call on maintenance mode, having lost 19 kgs / 41 lbs; and if I were to describe how I feel at the moment, both physically and mentally I would probably be able to do so with a single word. This one: liberating! Indeed, feeling and being healthier altogether surely has got its traits and whatever other perks, and it’s just the beginning on to, hopefully, a better good quality life. To me, it’s just that experience in the last year that I have found strikingly close to what JP mentioned throughout his talk about how we should be looking into information, not from the perspective of what we produce, or see others produce, but more from the point of view of how we consume it. That’s what matters.  That’s where we need to realise that in such a world of over abundance of free information flowing back and forth, and just like we ourselves continue to be more proactive on looking after our own health promoting and living further along with a good number of healthier habits, we should probably be equally religious as well on figuring out how we are going to best consume the information that’s available out there that would matter the most for us and our needs. And I suspect that the key magic trait that would probably make it all work for us is, as JP brilliantly mentioned, how we are going to put in place not only those various different (information) diets, but, much more importantly, how we are going to exercise the mind into figuring out what works and what won’t work as part of that healthy and nurturing mental activity. In that matter I suspect critical thinking is going to play a key role, just as much as endorphins play it when we engage on some kind of physical activity. The key challenge though is whether we are going to be able to put a stop to the always tempting, increasingly everlasting, and irresistible urge of information gluttony. Because I can imagine that with the huge amount of information and knowledge available out there our brains, most likely, will continue to be enticed by that massive flow of abundance that’s probably going to be far too tough to tame, if at all. Collaborative filtering, as we all know, may well help out, but we may as well be much more effective if we start training our brain(s) about when to strike for the balance of consuming the right info, figure out the right portion, and exercise it well enough so that we can make the best out of it, without having that pernicious feeling of empty saturation. We probably don’t need it any longer. We will be, most certainly, much better off without it, don’t you think?

Most social business platforms are maturing quite fast. The landscape now has players that have been around for a while and provide functionality that'll put some consumer apps to shame. That being said, often times the stock platform isn't 'exactly' what you want. You may need to customise the platform to get the most out of it for your company. While this is quite common in the enterprise, it's also a big opportunity for you to destroy every chance of success that you can potentially have. We've done a significant amount of custom development on our internal social business platform, myThoughtWorks and our successes and failures have led me to a few lessons that I want to share with you in today's blogpost.Find a stakeholder who understands social business Social business is new and isn't necessarily compliant with the traditional notions of knowledge sharing, learning and internal communications. And let's face it, you're unlikely to have a free rein to build whatever you want to. If these two realities have to combine to a happy end then you need a stakeholder who understands social business. Easier said than done, I know but if you have to succeed then your business stakeholders need to be speaking the same language as you. Talk to Dinesh Tantri and Nikhil Nulkar and they'll tell you that the most successful enterprise 2.0 implementations they've seen involve stakeholders who were really passionate about the potential of social media in the enterprise. Sometimes we're not as lucky to have supporters of that nature. In that case, we need to do the best we can to educate our stakeholders on the potential of social business. Starting work with some common ground and common vocabulary can do a world of good.Evaluate well, understand your prioritiesSocial business may not be the most mature practice around but the technology is advancing quite fast. Companies like Jive, Yammer, SocialCast and others pride themselves on the user experience they've crafted and the approaches they profess. Now of course some platforms have a lot of features and others don't. This is where a thorough evaluation comes in. Look at your budget, look at your needs and find the platform that's a closest match. Now the key is to honour that match. Social business suites build their platforms the way they do for a reason. A lot of them have had a lot of success selling their tools. You could easily start rigging your platform to be 'exactly' how you want it to be, but there's tremendous value in running a near vanilla install with just your company's branding on it. This is not to say that customisation is not important - you just need to hold your horses. See how people use the defaults, understand them well. There's no point extending a platform without fully understanding its existing potential. While you take the suite through its paces, prioritise what you really need to build. In fact, I daresay that in the initial months any customisation that's likely to drive engagement trumps what you would consider 'business requirements'. Frankly, if people aren't going to use the platform enough, the fancy business requirement means nothing.User feedback trumps imaginary requirementsIf you're building for users, then you need user feedback. You're not trying to release the next big thing in the market. Remember, people use tools such as these almost everyday in real life. So there's nothing sillier than to try and build stuff off your own wild imagination. That kind of thing may be necessary once you have the right level of engagement, but surely not upfront. Speak to users, seek their feedback. Understand their problems, help them find solutions within the system first. Check if it's only a clash of mental models. If it isn't then find out what's the bare minimum customisation that could possibly work. The key here is to make small, iterative improvements, to put changes into production and then to let real, informed use to drive improvements. If people aren't using it, then it's perhaps a case for you to look at usability first than to build new requirements. By churning out new functionality on a broken user experience, you'll drive users away faster than you can imagine. It's tempting I know, but resist the temptation to over engineer requirements - simplicity is the greatest sophistication.Keep the experience consistentI'll let you in on a dirty little secret about enterprise 2.0 platforms. They're so flexible that you can run them the way you like. You can create the cool, corporate equivalent of your favourite social media platform or you can build out a crap, 1990s style intranet. Now I don't know about you, but I'm hoping that somewhere in your firm you want to run social media like social media. And if that's the bulk of your usage then you don't want to saddle it with legacy style requirements. It's confusing for your users, it's a nightmare to manage. Not evident upfront, but I can tell you this from experience. This is a consulting challenge for most internal social business consultants, but I realise that this requires long term influence and stakeholder education. Again, you can choose to run new systems the old way or exploit them to the hilt by encouraging new business behaviours.Innovate fast - appreciate the consumerisation of ITIf I had to add one last piece of advice to today's post, I'll say this. Everyone knows what social media looks like and how it works on the big, broad, internet. To tell you the truth, we see the latest and greatest sooner than we see it in the enterprise. Think of user experiences for example. You can access Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Google Apps by just tapping an icon on your phone. No login required whatsoever, once you've enabled credential storage. How do you logon to your intranet? You perhaps have to key in a cryptic passcode. Think of Flipboard for the iPad - it's a magazine interface for all your social media intake. It's just perfect for 'keeping up'. In comparision, even a leading enterprise provider like Jive Software hasn't updated their iPhone app for over a year! With the recent announcement of iCloud, even email and calendaring as well will be heaps better than anything the enterprise offers. You could take every use case and people have access to better tools than you're providing them from the enterprise. The key is to focus your customisations on bridging the gap between personal and enterprise tools. How can we reduce the entry barrier? How can we help people's information intake? How can we increase engagement? These are key questions for us to answer.So, are you extending your social business platform? If you are, I'd love to hear how your experience has been. Do my musings strike a chord with you? Do you have suggestions for other blog readers? Let me know. Next week, watch this space for some more of my thoughts about social business adoption and maturity.© Sumeet Moghe

Here is an interesting study that I have just bumped into a couple of days ago, and which may resonate with plenty of folks out there on the relevancy of Social Business in today’s corporate world. It is not a pretty one, for sure, but rather revealing perhaps on what’s still ahead for most of us, and a clear indication we are just barely getting started with our journey to become successful social businesses: 70% of social media complaints are ignored!  In the world of the Social Web who would have thought about that, right? Well, perhaps time for a wake-up call for all of us social computing evangelists… Change is not happening as fast as what we would have thought and perhaps that is ok. It will take time, we all know that, but will we be ok about it though? About the fact that we may not even be able to witness that final business transformation we have been eagerly anticipating all along after all? That is one of the reflections that has been in my mind over the last few months and interestingly enough it keeps coming back as soon as I embark on my next round of business trips. Like today, on my way to London, to participate and present at the rather intriguing Social Business Strategy Summit and then flying to Milan over the weekend to participate on the event of events on Social Business in Europe: the Social Business Forum 2012.  Why does that reflection keep coming back then every so often nowadays? Well, as you may have noticed, once again, I have failed about keeping up with my usual regular blogging schedule over here on this blog. It’s been a few weeks since the last time that I have shared an article over here and although things at work are now more hectic and buzzing than ever (Specially, as we keep seeing how more and more executives are finally diving into the world of living Social, "dragging" along their teams and own networks), the main culprit, once again, has been my traveling schedule, not because of traveling itself, but mainly because, once again, I continued to fail on staying connected to keep up with my blogging and other social networking activities. As you may remember from my last blog post, I mentioned how I was on my way to Rotterdam, to present at the IBM / NLLUG Social Business event (Along with visiting a couple of customers in Utrecht to talk about adoption of social networking tools, networks and communities); then from there onwards to lovely Seville to participate and present at the first edition of the event "Congreso de Empresa 2.0 y Social Business - El Presente de la Gestión Empresarial", which was, by the way, a beautiful experience, not to mention spending a few days in such a stunning city as Seville is. And, finally, make my way to Barcelona, where I took a couple of days off to unwind and recharge my batteries to finish off the business trip with conducting an IBM workshop for managers on Why Social Business, Why Now and How to get started.  Phew! All in all, 7 different social business events in an 8 day long timeframe. Rather hectic, I can assure you all, but what an amazing experience! My head is still spinning, for real, with the great amount of ideas I have been munching on as a result of some wonderful conversations throughout the entire time! And I am certain over the course of the next couple of weeks plenty of those ideas would be making their way into several blog posts over here   So, why am I becoming increasingly skeptic though about the role of social media in the corporate world, specially, when I am on the road (Although not to the point of becoming a curmudgeon per se perhaps, I can imagine some people may perceive it that way, alas), and certainly starting to question some of the motives of those "so-called" social businesses? Well, probably because of a worrying issue that keeps growing further along over time: not walking the talk when being consistently confronted with bad customer service after having had some of the worst customer user experiences.  Social Business is a whole bunch of different things, indeed, perhaps far too many which may well be a bit of a problem initially as well, but one of the main key major traits is that one of businesses becoming more customer centric improving tremendously their own overall customer experiences engaging in meaningful conversations out there on the Social Web to try to address and fix their problems. Yet we bump into studies, like the one I mentioned at the beginning of this article, where 7 out of 10 complaints raised through social media are just basically ignored. Don’t you think it leaves plenty of ground to question those claims from companies stating they walk the talk when living Social, yet, time and time again they keep failing to deliver? Yes, they make me question it, too!  And that is exactly what’s happened to me in the last couple of weeks, while I have been on the road, that, once again, both hotels and ISP providers have kept failing to deliver on their so-called promises of being successful social businesses. Starting in Rotterdam itself, where I stayed 4 days at a rather nice, cosy hotel, the Hampshire Hotel - Savoy, but with quite an appalling experience regarding their Ethernet service. Yes, I get that, as a hotel, you may not want to provide free wifi / Ethernet connectivity to those mobile workers constantly on the road, because you may not make enough profit out of it, which is something I would debate, too, specially, after the superb blog post put together by my good friend Neville Hobson on this very same subject. But I *do* have an issue with it when you charge me 15€ per day for an Ethernet connection that doesn’t even reach 0.5 mbps download and then you claim that’s the standard service to stay "connected" after being told off by a customer support representative somewhere in India that is all I am going to get, including questioning my English skills to comprehend the situation. Welcome to the wonderful service of Quadriga, the Ethernet provider from the Hampshire Hotel - Savoy.  Want to know more about the story? Oh, don’t worry, there isn’t much left… It just ended up right there! No further discussions to compromise on providing good quality service for 15€ per day fee. Take it or leave it. I gave up, eventually. I had a superb time while in Rotterdam, for sure, enjoying some pretty amazing offline social networking interactions, but both Quadriga and the Hampshire Hotel - Savoy are now on my growing black list of service providers to avoid and hotels to never go back to. Life is just too short to have to put up with such an utterly disgraceful and disappointing customer service on all grounds. And, don’t worry, this would be another "social media complaint" that will go by pretty much ignored, because I don’t expect any response any time soon. Why bother, right? After all, I am just a customer. #lesigh Ok, time to see things improved, then! Off we go to Seville, to attend and present at the rather energizing and inspiring #e20Biz event, first edition of many more successful years to come, I am sure! and there we are at the conference event venue, the Hotel NH Central Convenciones, ready to get started with the event, when, once again, we all got hit by the next round of awful customer service. This time around by a rather well known ISP provider from yours truly, since I have put together a couple of blog posts about their horrendous customer service in the past. Of course, I am talking about Swisscom. As you may well know by now, Swisscom is the provider of the wifi services to all NH Hotels, and it has been a few years since the last time I stayed at one of those hotels, after some disappointing experiences. But this time around I decided to cut them some slack, once more, and give them another chance, why not, right? Well, big mistake! Not only are they continuing to provide some rather poor service to their customers for a rather pricey fee, but this time around they were also the main providers from the conference event wifi and it was just what you might not have been expecting: non-existent!!  And while talking to the event organizers, who did their best in addressing the issues, we found out that they payed big bucks, and I mean big bucks!!, for a wifi service that even at our very own homes is much much better! Why do we keep putting up with this? Seriously, who do they think we are? Wouldn’t you think that after having paid a rather expensive hotel room, even pricier wifi connection for what we got, we would deserve better? Apparently, we don’t, because their only response, several hours later than expected, was only a timid tweet that got through advising on what we have already done a few times earlier on in the day and the rest of the conversation died off right there! Not surprisingly, since I wasn’t already expecting much more from Swisscom in the first place. They know better, but they consistently keep failing to deliver. Go figure.  So what did I do then? Did I give up on that one, too? Yes, I did! In fact, I gave up on both Swisscom and NH Hotels a long while ago and that experience in Seville just confirmed why those two companies are also on my black list of service providers to avoid, and for a good reason. Thus I decided to go local, since I was in Spain; I decided to rely on my 3G connection for my iPhone and iPad and on my 3G USB modem or my Mac. And while I was expecting a good, reliable connection, the results were different, much different! There I was, struggling, once again, even with my own 3G options, but this time around a bit worse, since the 3G USB modem is not my own, but from the company that employs me, IBM. For the entire remaining of the week and even when I went to Barcelona for the following 5 days I kept failing to get consistently connected after experiencing some rather poor performance, right at the city enter from both Seville and Barcelona. How can that be? I mean, I know for sure that my company is paying big bucks, once again, to allow its mobile employee knowledge workers stay connected, while on the road, and we can barely make it, since Movistar‘s service barely provided more than 1mbps download / upload. Yet, it doesn’t happen. Time and time again we have to keep up with the frustrating experiences of staying connected and eventually give up (before we would go all go crazy to no avail). Once again, that is exactly what I did! Over the course of the last couple of years I have learned to tame myself with the frustration, trying to stay connected reliably while I am travelling, since I have come to the conclusion it is no longer worth the fight and it is starting to become, even, rather unhealthy. So I decided to switch off completely and enjoy something that I am starting to appreciate more and more by the day: talking more to people offline and nurturing those offline social interactions. Over time, not only is it proving to be rather a healthier activity, but overall I am finding it a whole lot more refreshing and energizing altogether!  And, for that, I would have to thank, and very much so!, plenty of my physical social networks for coming to the rescue of this poor mobile social networker, who can no longer keep up with the virtual world, while on the road, because it just dies a simple, uncomplicated death. And in the mean time 7 out of 10 social media complaints go by unanswered and pretty much ignored! There is Social Busines and customer service for you, going down on a rather dangerous spiral of no return apparently. And you know what is the worst part of it all? One thing that I never expected it would happen in today’s rather interconnected, distributed, pervasive world, specially, in the Social Web of today: that, more and more, I am starting to feel rather disconnected from the virtual social networking world with the growing feeling of disappearing into thin air, because I keep failing to resurface into my virtual social streams, to the point where some of my closest networks are starting to question where I am and what I have been doing. So much for all of that "narrate your work", "working out loud" and "observable work" mantras, eh? #lesigh Well, I am right there, for sure!, it is just that while I wish I would be more active sharing openly plenty more of my knowledge, experiences, skills, abilities, know-how, and whatever else around all things social, including getting involved in multiple conversations where I feel I could add my two cents into the online dialogue, I keep finding it’s not happening as often as I would have hoped or wished for, and somehow I am starting to suspect it’s becoming rather damaging for my own online digital social presence out there. At what costs? I don’t know, probably you folks would be in a much better position to judge that than myself, but somehow I sense I may not recover from it in a long while seeing the way things are moving on, as I keep reflecting on it while putting these few words over here on my way to London, then Milan, then Boston (mid-June), then Madrid, Barcelona, Seville again till mid-July… Finally, after such a rather lengthy reflection (Thanks much for sticking around this far!), that I needed to get out of my chest before it becomes rather unnerving and unhealthy, you may be wondering whether I am expecting to see any kind of reaction, or even a slight service improvement, from both the hotel business, as well as the ISPs, in general? Will they ever become successful social businesses? I have no doubt they will, eventually, perhaps in the next few decades, but for now please do allow me to remain skeptic about it, because I just don’t see it, despite their claims they are getting there. For as along as their social media complains remain ignored and neglected, nothing will change. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Perhaps time to move on? Thus, my dear European Union, since those businesses aren’t doing much to change the situation, due to their ever growing monopolies, and since countries have got their hands tight up in the process, what are you going to do to empower your mobile knowledge Web workforce to remain productive and help them get you out of the disgraceful econoclypse you have been experiencing in the last 4 years and still going strong? What do we, European netizens, need to do to wake you up and help us help you get back on track by empowering us to be productive and rather effective, even while we are on the road? Tell us, we are eagerly awaiting. Please, tell do us soon. We can’t wait much longer…

Image Credit - T HallI recently came across that picture on Flickr and I thought it could be a nice title shot for my post today. As a company that values Entrepreneuralism, you'd assume that ThoughtWorks would be a fast moving, risk embracing mean machine. In more cases than one, that's absolutely true. In some less than ideal situations we do end up freezing up in the face of risk - much like deer in the headlights. The only difference is that deer eventually move on, but we often get stuck worrying about risk. Why does it happen at ThoughtWorks? Well, we're human after all - and frankly it's commonplace to fear possible loss than embrace possible gain. You've perhaps already read about in the 9x endowment effect and the sunk cost fallacy. Now don't get me wrong, I don't believe in being a cowboy - risk management is a crucial project management skill. I find extreme risk averseness however to be a deterrent in moving a project forward at a motoring pace. It hurts innovation, and obsessing over risks takes away a lot of energy and momentum from real, productive work. At the end of the day, risk management isn't a deliverable - real work is. Risk management is only a tool to facilitate work. I don't claim to be a great project manager, but I do have some thoughts I want to share with you today, about risk management.You don't know how big it isLast week we had a challenge. We needed to close out a legacy knowledge repository in view of the fact that we have new social business platform in place. As a team, we wanted to give the company 30 days before we archived the old system. Now for any medium or large sized company this brings about a set of risks. What if we lose data? What if we upset people? What if people need help and we can't support them? Are all these risks real? They probably are. How big are they however? We don't know. Now we can either freeze up and do nothing or ask ourselves - what's the minimum we need to know to move ahead.Here's what we did. To check whether we'd lose data, I tried out an experiment on a test domain. Turns out that you lose no data whatsoever, you can turn the service back on and retrieve data whenever you need to. A quick, dirty experiment is often all you need to gauge the impact and mitigation for a specific risk. For the other two risks, no matter what we analysed, we would only be conjecturing as to how big the risks were. We've made the announcement and ever since, less than 15 people have reached out to us - most for tips to migrate their data, some for thorough guidance and just three who wanted us to actually assist the migration. Turns out, that no one really was hugely fussed about the move. In the worst case, if when we do shut down the service someone comes back saying they were on vacation and completely missed our warning, we can pop the service back on a weekend and help the individual move over. Risks addressed, we move ahead.All risks are not equalRisks are these little mystery balls. Some have a large impact, others have a negligible effect. Some might have a high likelihood and others are highly unlikely. Your plan is really conditional on how you evaluate these risks. The key in my view is not to over evaluate. In my world, risks have three parameters - the likelihood, the impact and the mitigation plan if the risk does manifest itself. The key however is to not over analyse. If the impact is low and the likelihood is bleak, then do you really want to spend all the time in the world analysing what you will do about it? The cost of analysing the risk far outweighs the cost having to respond to it without a pre-defined mitigation strategy. On the other hand, if it's a high impact, highly likely risk, then you want to do what you can to avoid it and not even have to get to the point of mitigation. The key is to look at likelihood and impact as a balance with mitigation strategy. From that point, it's about incremental changes, iterating and moving fast. Keeping everyone aware of how you percieve the risks just ensures that everyone knows what to do when you move ahead. Finally, risk management is conjecture - the key is make this systematic conjecture than just pure obsession. Also, sometimes it's important to just know what you can do and what your options are. The moment to act may not be until much later - Chris Matts calls this the last responsible moment.You may ask why a blog on learning and social business has a post on risk management. I think it's a crucial competence when dealing with change and managing projects. Also, it's not as complicated as we'll often make it out be. I hope this short post helps you see my perspective on why I like to be pragmatic about risks and why I like to keep pushing forward with projects I am on. Not to say that I don't have things blowing up in my face - I've had an experience of that last week! That said, I would take that any day as long as I have the ability to respond quickly and to keep the pace of innovation high. I think that's a fair trade-off. What do you think?© Sumeet Moghe

It’s been nearly two weeks already since the last time I put together a blog post over here, on purpose, and, yet again, another round of business trips is now done and dealt with. Phew! What a rush! As I have mentioned back then, this last time I participated in the Social Business Strategy Summit in London and then off to present in Milan at the quite amazingly insightful Social Business Forum event. Yet, as a surprising fact, why am I mentioning that I didn’t blog on purpose this time around, you may be wondering, right? Specially, since time and time again I kept relating how I struggle constantly getting connected, finding the time and eventually write down a blur of entries while on the road. Well, basically, because I wanted to wait and see what digital customer service was going to be like. Once again, I was not disappointed. To summarise it all in a single word I could probably use this one: non-existent. Indeed, in my last article over here, under the heading "The Trials and Tribulations of a Mobile Knowledge Worker in a Social Business World", I mentioned how a bunch of businesses have been providing, consistently, quite an appalling set of digital (customer) services and how, two weeks later, I am still waiting for a response from Quadriga, Swisscom, NH Hotels and my all time favourite one: Movistar (Who coincidentally has just taken things into the next level of insultingly poor customer service when, upon my return back home they have downgraded my home office ADSL connection from the 10MB I am still paying to a mere 6MB download. And all of that without asking!!) #lesigh Things haven’t improved much, it seems, or have they? It looks like they haven’t and I guess at this point in time I’m on the brink of giving up altogether on getting some decent customer service through social digital channels, specially, for those rather expensive offerings one has got to endure in order to get work done. It looks like it’s just not happening and I guess from now onwards you would have to colour me skeptic with regards to the role of digital when providing good, solid, overall customer service. Again, so far, non-existent. And it is just way too funny, because as we are fully immersed in the world of the Social Web, in the new, exciting era of Social Businesses, yet, plenty of companies out there keep failing on delivering. Time and time again. Not even thinking about engaging through digital channels to keep their customers happy. Brand loyalty, anyone? No wonder we bump into research studies that confirm how poor customer loyalty has been in the last couple of years and counting. In fact, I would venture to state that, if anything, it’s deteriorated big time and from a very dangerous point of view: not just from customers to vendors, but, more worryingly, from vendors themselves to their customers. And that’s just what I would not have expected to experience till today, hoping that most businesses would wake up eventually to a new era of engagement or involvement with their customer base. Or is it? While at the Social Business Forum (#sbf12), held in Milan, Italy, a week ago exactly, there were plenty of incredibly insightful highlights that will come through over the course of time in several blog entries from yours truly, plus a nice new experiment I have been playing with that I am hoping folks out there would enjoy as well (More on that shortly…), but one of the most revealing and eye-opening ones was the absolutely stunning couple of presentations that my good friend Esteban Kolsky did on the topic of Social CRM (As in Social Customer Relationship Management) under the rather suggestive title "The way we will complain. How customer service is going to evolve over the next 10 years", which he also covered, some of the materials, that is, at the Social Business Strategy Summit as he documented well on this article.  As a starting point here are some great quotes from some of his initial, starting slides: "90 percent of transactions for customer service happen offline" or this other gem: "80 percent of organisations think their experiences are good (8% of customers agree)" or, finally, this other one that clearly blew me away when we got exposed to it: "66 percent have no defined processes for customer service over social channels". Yes, that’s right, you are reading it correctly: 66% of businesses out there have no defined processes to engage with their customers through social channels. Whoahhh! Still think we are living on a Social Business Era?  Ha! Absolutely!! We all are! It’s that we are just getting started! Remember, this whole thing about Social Business is not only a destination, the final frontier, but also quite an amazing journey, one where we are all embarking on it as we speak, and one where we can see how some businesses are more ready than others. But, we will all eventually get there as Esteban himself pointed out very clearly throughout the remaining of his presentations and the blog post he put together on the subject, which I would strongly encourage you all to take a look, including the slide decks!!, specially, the piece around the essence of social business which drives around three major, core concepts that I just couldn’t have agreed more with him when he explained them together in context:  "Channels (Social) Engagement (Connected) Collaboration (Collaborative)" Brilliant stuff altogether and clearly very thought provoking on laying down for all of us, what lies ahead, including the various different opportunities, but just as well the many challenges. Fascinating altogether, to say the least! So I guess I shouldn’t have held my hopes too high to get some decent customer service through digital / social channels for all of those businesses when they may not have even planned accordingly for them in the first place. Perhaps I should try out the next time the offline approach and see how that works. But then again, I would still want to muse further along about the whole subject behind customer / vendor loyalty. Because it is still there, isn’t it? Or have we lost it for good altogether? What do you think? While you, too, keep pondering about it further along, and would love to read your thoughts in the comments, please!, here’s something that I would want to throw out there on the table as well for all of us to consider… How about Reinventing Relationships with Social Business? That’s the interesting and rather intriguing title from a recent short video clip that IBMSocialBiz has put together and which, when going through it, I am sure it will help reframe these questions about managing, or better, facilitating customer relationships, vendor relationships or even just your employees, your partners, even your competitors. All part of a giant ecosystem where there is no way back, apparently. Now, you all know that I work for IBM, so I suppose the usual disclaimer applies in here, but must admit that the video clip itself even made me think about my own relationships as a customer, as a vendor, as an employee, as a partner, as a competitor, even as myself! to the point where it may well be rather accurate to start reinventing those business relationships into rather personal business ones where we try to apply lots of fresh thinking on how we engage with those around us, because by just thinking about reinventing those relationships we are probably considering what may be the critical success factor around them: how to make them better, that is, more beneficial for all parties involved?  Perhaps it’s all part of that behavioural change we should ALL aim at in order to become successful social business. Perhaps it’s all about building up new, more empowering and inspiring loyalties, or learn in a different way, or maybe develop altogether a new model of trust that would work both ways, mutual and beneficial for everyone, one where the whole focus would be on providing overall exceptional experiences. Wouldn’t that be quite something? Still a utopia? Or today’s reality, perhaps? Well, let’s make it happen then! Let’s go and Reinvent Relationships with Social Business. Together! It’s time. The right time.

There used to be a time when social business evangelists were perceived, mainly, as disruptors, to a certain degree, of any given status quo within the corporate environment out there at large. They were optimists, outrageous, somewhat heretic, true rebels at work, free radicals to some extent. Perhaps even a bit of hippie 2.0 in each and every one of them. They were, essentially, the change agents who were helping act as catalysts for that business transformation that was becoming a full socially integrated enterprise. What happened to them though? I mean, I believe that social business evangelists, in general, are still breathing those very same traits I just mentioned above, but where are they? Have they become a bit too complacent with their own beliefs, needs and wants, and several other aspirations to want to change the way business gets done today, now that the corporate world by and large is, finally, becoming more savvy around Social Business itself? Have they moved on to something else already? I am not sure what you folks would think about, but I’m starting to see that trend more and more and it worries me. It worries me a lot! More than anything else, because we are not done at all with our Intrapreneurship efforts, as my good friend David Armano would claim, and by far! but yet again it looks like we all may seem to be content with how things are going. Is it time to bounce back? It probably is, because, like I have mentioned above, there is still a lot of work to be done! Yet, I cannot get off my head that feeling of seeing how those social evangelists may have become a bit too complacent within their own role of becoming a disruptor and eventually fade away (into other things), because they feel their role is no longer needed. That was essentially one of the several perceptions I experienced, while attending the premier event on Social Business over here in Europe at the Social Business Forum event held in Milan, Italy. That’s why during Day One of the event itself I may have been perceived, in several conversations, as a bit too pessimistic about the state of things. Quite the opposite though. And for a good reason. We are not done, by and large; no matter what people may tell you, we are just getting started! In a superb blog post, my good friend Cecil Dijoux, highlighted plenty of the good work that still needs to be done. Go and have a look and read through that highlights article to get a glimpse of what he perceived from the overall event as well. It will be worth while your time, I can surely guarantee you that! And as a teaser, here’s a golden quote that he reproduced from the thought provoking keynote session from another good friend, the always inspiring, mind-blowing, John Hagel, which highlights pretty much where we are today: "Information is power. Institutions are designed to provide some people with information which is power. If knowledge flows, it is undermining the foundation of people power in organisations. How do we confront that power?" Then allow me to be a bit too provocative as well with this particular follow-up commentary. Remember when perhaps 3 to 4 years ago we used to go to all of these social networking for business events and suit and ties were just missing from the equation? You could hardly see one or two in a large room. They were the outcasts, to a certain degree, and perhaps frown upon for no good, nor apparent, reason. But if felt good. It felt disruptive, provocative, heretic, even a bit rebellious of what you have been experiencing all along. Well, fast forward to today and it looks like in a good number of social business related events the suits and ties are back! Have we become a bit too formal and given up on our outrageous, heretic ways? We are no longer seeing ourselves, social business evangelists as disruptors? Have we, finally, been assimilated by the corporate world, before our job is done and completed? What do you think? That’s essentially part of a reflection I went through with a good number of friends at the Social Business Forum event that then crystalized on this nearly 8 minute long conversation I had with the always knowledgeable Bjoern Negelman, which he then shared later on in YouTube:   In that short video interview we talked about the need to bounce back; to shake off our very own complacency with the fact that now that businesses are starting to live social our job may be done; to bring back those weird, fancy, crazy (t-)shirts we once wore vs. those lovely suits and ties we know well from all along; to essentially realise that now that we have got the right level of attention our role as social evangelists is more critical than ever not just to help early adopters make their move into getting the most out of social networking, but helping businesses understand how the whole paradigm of work is shifting into a much more open, trustworthy, collaborative, knowledge sharing prone, transparent and nimble workplace and therefore it would require a new mindset, a new set of behaviours to be lived and enjoyed by each and everyone of us. With perhaps no exceptions. That’s where the challenge still remains. We may have prepared rather well the way for those various different waves of (early) adopters, but our job is far from done! Remember? "90 percent of transactions for customer service happen offline", or "70% of social media complaints are ignored!", amongst several others… That’s why we need to bounce back. That’s why we need to shake off our very own comfort zone(s) and soon enough, before it’s just too late! The fight is still on! And this is, once again, one of those times when I am going to be rather grateful to serendipity itself, for having played its magic one more time incredibly well, by pointing me into this rather short video clip, that lasts for a bit over 90 seconds, under the suggestive title "The Branding of Culture" and which has got plenty of really interesting, insightful and relevant tag lines all over around social business. Yes, I know, I know, the usual disclaimer would apply here, once more, since it’s an IBM video clip, but you would see what I mean with what is, to me, the key message I got from the clip itself and which would be spot on for today’s reflection on the key, essential, critical role that Social Business Evangelists would still need to keep playing for many more moons to come:  "Practice what you preach" (Always!)   My dear fellow Social Business Evangelists, be honest, be authentic, be open, be transparent, in short, be yourself! We are now, more than ever, very much needed by the businesses who employed us in the first place to complete that shift into realising that full socially integrated enterprise. Your business. Our business. And everyone else’s for that matter.

If you're reading this article then I guess you have a keen interest in social business or are perhaps already running your own setup. If my guess is true, then you perhaps have some frustrations running your internal program. Now don't get me wrong, I am a big, die hard fan of social media in the workplace and frankly I wouldn't have it any other way. That being said, I am mindful that social business is still quite a new space with just about 5 years in the mainstream. While public social media has reached a really ubiquitous state in our personal lives, it's no secret that social media in the workplace is big jump in thinking for several knowledge workers. I think social business technology itself needs to grow several levels in maturity. In today's blogpost I want to talk about a few things that'll define the future of social business and perhaps its eventual ubiquitous position in the enterprise.Composite identities vs Corporate identitiesPeople are just people. They don't have a corporate identity and a separate personal identity. They are who they are; they blog externally and perhaps blog internally too. If they're passionate about what they do, perhaps what they blog externally is about the work they do for the company. They are on twitter and they're perhaps sharing interesting stuff. People's activity on public and private networks are two sides of a composite social identity. I think of it as Identity 2.0 - enterprise systems seem to present themselves as a new network in a vacuum. The assumption seems to be that the enterprise network exists by itself as a prima-donna platform. The truth is that it doesn't - until the activity stream of the enterprise social network can include elements from both sides of the individual's social contributions, it will continue to miss out on the prolific contributors from the public web.Simple extensibility vs Painful upgradesThink big, start small and iterate. It's a mantra that works for startups and I believe it should work for social business too. Whether we like it or not, we live in an age of consumerisation of IT. Regardless of how good our internal systems are, people have access to better stuff in the outside world. Things move so fast that it's tough to keep up. Heck, it was only recently that Google announced its intent to get into the social space in a big way and hey, we already have Google Plus doing the rounds. Think of how often Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and the others are adding features. It's quite tough to keep up as your people start taking these enhancements for granted and start expecting them in enterprise systems. The truth is that not many enterprise 2.0 platforms are built to evolve. Extensions are a mess, upgrades are a pain. Vendors need to understand that customers will need to move fast. Seamless upgrades, the ability to receive enhancements automatically, the power to develop extensions and an extensions API that stays backward compatible are all crucial requirements that vendors need to respond to.Frictionless participation vs Enterprise securityIT teams across the world may think otherwise, but most people actually do care for security. At the end of the day the least risk is that their personal data gets compromised and really no one is likely to be happy with that. Having said that, I guess there's no doubt that enterprise security can be more a deterrent than anything else. Take a step back - think about how you access Facebook. You perhaps have an icon on your smartphone, which when you tap, you go right into your news feed. It's the same for Twitter, Foursquare and whichever social app you like. As a contrast you perhaps have to go through a thick wall of two factor security before you break into your intranet! Now no one's saying we don't understand the rationale, but the fact is that thick security blankets are often a deterrent to contribution. We can be blind to this and say things are the way they are, or understand that the shape of the digital world is changing. People will continue to look at their enterprise social media experience as substandard to their 'regular' networks as long as we don't get creative about solving this problem. There's perhaps some middle ground - we just need to find it.Mobile first vs Mobile as an afterthoughtMobility is big for me. In fact for most ThoughtWorkers who are at client sites, mobile access is really big deal. Smartphones and tablets put together already have a much greater penetration than laptops and desktops. It's a no brainer - mobile access makes your social network ubiquitous. And yet, several enterprise 2.0 vendors have a mobile strategy only as an afterthought. Heck, Jive now has a decent mobile strategy, but until recently their iPhone app hadn't had an update for over a year! Guess what, there's a mobile app for every public social media platform. There's several consumption mechanisms on the mobile -Flipboard and Zite being notable examples. What's there for our enterprise systems?Change management support vs Cookie-cutter consultingLast but not the least, I want to throw in a few words about change management. For most organisations, moving to a social business platforms is a strategic yet tough journey. We all know it's not enough to build and hope they'll all participate. Most organisations have no clue of how to go forward with this stuff and make it thrive. Enterprise 2.0 vendors will pepper you with case studies and whitepapers in the sales journey and will have cookie cutter advice for you before you go live. What's notably absent in most offerings is post go-live change management support. Most problems don't surface before go live. They come up when the dust has settled. If vendors don't have this kind of support as part of their offering, then they're selling the enterprise short. Remember, it's about the technology, but it's more about the people and a new way of working.My post today has been a bit of a rant based on my own experiences. I love the way the world is taking to enterprise social software. I hope that if we can push organisations and vendors to think ahead and innovate around the themes I've mentioned, social business could cross the chasm between edgy technology and business as usual tools. The power of technology is when we can take it for granted - I'd love to hear what else you think could be steps for social business to mature and become a common theme in most organisations. Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section.© Sumeet Moghe

it’s been a long while since last time that I participated on a Blog Carnival, specially around the topic of Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing and Learning. In fact, I would think that there aren’t many out there anymore since most folks tend to spend the vast majority of their time in whatever the social networking site interacting with their network(s). So when I received an invitation a few days ago from my good friend Félix Escribano, over at adidas, where they are currently hosting one around those topics with a specific focus on Learning and how it’s helping redefine the workplace of the future, I just couldn’t help myself diving into it adding my two cents to the conversation. And if there is a topic dear to my heart around learning and education in general, specifically, in a corporate environment, that would have to be Informal / Social Learning. What else? That’s why today I thought I would share a couple of reflections that have been going on in my mind on something that I have noticed, for a while now, that’s happening around social learning and which showcases how we may not have learned much about how we did things in the past. Now, if yesterday I was musing about how Social Business and Social Evangelists are becoming more and more industrialized by the day, it looks like we are starting to witness how social learning is trying to get formalised just as well, thinking that we can control it in pretty much the same way that we did with formal learning. How unfortunate! How can you try to formalise what you just simply don’t know, can’t grasp, nor comprehend, or put any kind of physical or virtual barriers around it? It is just pretty much the same thing as trying to find the answer to that on-going debate of how can you manage knowledge when you just simply don’t know what you know till someone may prompt it to come out of you?  I am finding it all rather fascinating, to say the least!, because as we get to witness how social networking tools are helping accelerate how effective we are not only at getting work done, but also learning efficiently while on the job (Yes, we are finally coming to terms with the fact that Learning is work, work is learning!, -thanks to social technologies- About time!!), time and time again we seem to be very keen on putting borders around such learning activities thinking that we can streamlined them and industrialise them accordingly, because otherwise that learning never happened. And yet, we all know that we just can’t do that. We just can’t formalise what we don’t even know, i.e. how people learn while on the job. They just do.  Now, there are plenty of people out there who have been talking about this topic for a while, but there is in particular a group of very smart and talented folks that have been trying to set up the right landscape of how organizations should be embracing Informal, Social Learning. Of course, I am referring to the Internet Time Alliance folks (Jay Cross, Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Clark Quinn, Paul Simbeck-Hampson and Charles Jennings), all of whom I can strongly suggest and encourage you all to follow up on if you would be interested in the kind of work they do.  In particular, and for the purpose of this Blog Carnival Post on the topic of Social Learning at the Workplace, I would love to point you to a superb presentation Charles himself did a couple of years ago and that, still today, it is more relevant and descriptive than ever: 8 Reasons to Focus on Informal & Social Learning, where not only does he get to describe what social learning itself is all about, and, most importantly, what it is not!, but it also covers some of the most fundamental aspects as to why every single organisation out there would need to embrace it and for a rather simple reason: knowledge workers are already doing it! (Whether organisations like it or not…).  Indeed, in that rather thought provoking presentation Charles gets to detail two of the main key drivers behind informal learning: "We’re working in an always-on, beta world" and "Learning often isn’t what we think it is", as well as detail a good bunch of insights on why businesses won’t be getting the most out of it by trying to formalise what can’t be formalised and for that purpose he mentions 8 different reasons that I thought would be worth while mentioning over here as well to set the right context on why we need to look at Learning with new eyes, trying to understand the needs and wants from knowledge workers - learners in such a way that they can define for themselves how that embedded learning would be taking place eventually. To name:  "There are imperatives for continual learning Learning is a process, not a series of events Most learning occurs outside classrooms The vast majority of learning is social A lot of formal learning is ineffective People learn better when they are in charge There’s inherent inertia in formal approaches Information and social learning are cost-effective" No, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil the rest of the fun talking about the remaining insights that Charles gets to cover on that set of slides. Instead I would strongly encourage you all to have a look into them with the embedded code of the deck itself shared below, so that you can see what he is aiming at and that we should all be considering as we keep redefining the role of Learning in a now more than ever Connected / Social Enterprise environment:  8 Reasons to Focus on Informal & Social Learning View more presentations from Charles Jennings Some really good stuff, don’t you think? To me, the key messages, which are also pretty good sound advice on how to tackle informal learning in the corporate world, as social networking for business keeps taking us all by storm, it would be to instead of trying to formalise it, so that it would become much easier to measuring it, we should "focus instead on helping people do their jobs well and work smarter".  And let the learning be up to them, the knowledge workers themselves, because, amongst several other things, they probably know, much better than you do, what they need, and what they don’t need. And it would be through that autonomy, decision power shift and that lowering of the centre of gravity that their learning would accelerate to places you even didn’t think they could happen at any given point. Yet, there they are, getting work done, now much more effective than ever, and learning along the way. Still think that you need to justify it with formal processes and measurements? What else can you, or should you, expect from social learning?  Not much, I can tell you. That’s probably as good as it gets…

If you follow me on the web, then you perhaps know that I'm big on photography. I absolutely love taking pictures - my Flickr stream with about 13000+ pictures will tell you just that. I'm no pro, but something makes me feel I've gotten better with time. As I reflect on the last 10 years of having owned cameras, I think I've some interesting insights on how adults learn. In today's post I want to share some of those thoughts with you and I'd love to hear how you feel about what I'm writing. Learning is effective when it's autonomous and purposefulWhen I got my first digital camera I wasn't fussed about technique. I was just keen to take pictures. I think I had a 256 MB card for my camera and it was an absolute luxury for me. All I wanted to do was capture every moment of my life. You need to know something about me. I didn't grow up with many of the gadgets that kids my age in the west were exposed to. So I didn't have a computer or video games. I have some photographs of my life prior to getting a camera, but the frank truth is that we were always constrained by the 36 pictures on the film roll. The ability to take pictures and see them instantly was gratification enough for me. Gradually, I got interested in photography as an art and only over the last few years have I gotten over the desire to 'snapshot' my life. Instead, I want to capture vivid moments that tell stories of their own. I haven't yet been to a photography course. I haven't let anyone dictate how I should shoot. As my purpose and subjects have changed, I have learned and my approach has evolved. I think this tells me something. It has taken me 10 years to learn what I know about photography, which frankly is precious little. On the other hand, someone else with a completely different purpose may have learned much quicker. I don't feel that I'm stupid because I took 10 years - I didn't need to. I enjoy the autonomy with which I learned. My learning has served my purpose and that's all that matters. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.Our educational systems are built around the premise of promoting success and success alone. I don't think there's anything wrong with celebrating success, but we can't forget that failure is a stepping stone to success. I love shooting wildlife. Unlike many other subjects, filming wildlife is a very unforgiving experience. I can safely say I've had more failures than success filming wildlife and especially fast moving birds. A few days back I went to the lake near my house to try and follow the resident pied kingfishers. This is a curious bird and to watch it fish can provide hours of entertainment. It was no easy task filming these little geniuses given how skittish they can be. I failed at least four times before getting some satisfactory pictures on the fifth attempt. Failure was heartbreaking I must say, but the safety of knowing I have another chance gave me confidence. Each time I failed, I learned a little more. When I finally got the shot I wanted I was able to repeat my technique several times over. As you design learning experiences, how are you building in the safety to learn from failure? Constraints make for great learningWhen I bought my first camera, a simple point and shoot Yashica film device, I'd complained heavily about the lack of zoom. That complaint carried on as I graduated to better, more expensive cameras and super-zoomers. What I failed to appreciate was that every camera has a built in zoom - our two feet! Ever since, I've moved onto better equipment and longer lenses, but I must say my favourite lens today is a the 50mm prime that I own. It's a simple piece of equipment. It can't zoom, it has no image stabilization. That makes for great learning on how to get close to my subjects and how to keep my hand steady. In a similar manner I have learnt from the constraint of having to shoot vivid images through a single frame of a prosumer camera. Cameras don't see what our eyes see - there's way too much contrast to capture. This has led me to explore techniques such as high-dynamic-range (HDR photography) - the picture above is an example. I love placing meaningful constraints in the learning programs I design. For example at ThoughtWorks University I like to place the constraint of learning while on the job of delivering software to a client. It helps the new consultants to learn how to learn and gain useful experience on the side. There's no match to social media  and mobile platforms as learning toolsOne of the things I've learned from photography is that it's extremely gratifying to get feedback from your friends, skilled or not. I often put up my photographs on Flickr and sometimes on Facebook. When people favourite my images or comment favourably on them I know that I must be doing something right. It motivates me to do more. Social media has been a big influence on my learning journey too. Twitter, Google Reader, Facebook and Flickr put together have become an integral part of my photography learning journey. The byte sized pieces of inspiration I get every day are just the right size to help me learn on a daily basis. Add to that inspiring mobile apps like Life and Guardian Eyewitness  help me analyse great professional photography. As Brent Schlenker writes on his blog, mobile apps and new media are removing the middlemen from the learning experience. I learn from the best today by following their blogs. Trey Ratcliffe's blog is far more up-to-date than his book. That's an example of how powerful the social media learning experience can be. The era of having to go to school is past. School comes to me - every day and at my own pace.Learning is an iterative, experiential process. We however seemed to have based corporate learning around a dated model of education which lacked autonomy, had little social structure and discouraged failure. I can't say my experience with photography is representative of all kinds of learning. I do think that there is something for us to think about as we analyse experiences such as these. I'd love to hear how you feel about my musings today. I apologise my bad back has stopped me from being regular with my blog posts. As I grapple with this situation, I hope you continue to visit this blog as and when I post. I'll do my best to maintain a regular schedule as well. Hope you enjoyed today's post.© Sumeet Moghe

One of the many activities I keep enjoying quite a bit over the course of the years with regards to social networking is its innate ability to experiment and play with social technologies in order to figure out new use cases, proofs of concept, additional bursts of productivity, new business uses, etc. etc. You name it. All in all with the main premise behind all of that fun and play to figure out new methods to become more productive, effective and efficient at what I have been aiming all along: work smarter, not necessarily harder. And to that extent I think it is now a good time to help introduce a new experiment I have been playing with in the last few months and which I think may be of benefit to others as well, specially, if you are into finding out about highlights from the hundreds of conference events out there, mainly, in the Social Business space that we get to attend or not. This new experiment has got to do with two different activities we all get to carry out eventually, but that I myself have grown to become rather fond of over time, since I may have just hit that perfect use case for me to continue making use of it eventually: live tweeting and curating highlights from conference events I get to attend and participate in. Now, what do I mean with that exactly? Well, as you well know, there used to be a time where I had enough time in my hands to live blog conference events that I would be attending from all over the place. From there onwards, I moved on to putting together lengthy blog post to highlight some of the major key learnings I went through for each and everyone of those events. Things evolved further, availability of time got shorter and shorter and I moved into the next phase: live tweeting of events using the hash tag of the event itself in particular. That method worked really well, till Twitter itself decided to play funny and not allow you to get back to those tweets after a certain period of time making them disappear into thin ether, which was rather annoying, since you new your live tweets are out there, yet, you can’t access them anymore! Not very helpful! And very frustrating over time, I can guarantee you that! Grrr At the same time you get to notice how the vast majority of the live tweeting that goes on at conference events as of late is just a mere regurgitation of short phrases from the speakers trying to be compacted in less than 140 characters, so that other folks would be capable of retweeting the same thing over and over again. Yes, I know what you are thinking by now… That can certainly get very tiring over the course of time, as you get to bump into the same content live tweeted over and over! So what to do? I am not sure what strategies have you folks adopted in order to keep providing value when "reporting" those live tweets (I would love to find out more about them in the comments, if you would want to share those tips across), but a little while ago I decided to try out one myself that I am starting to like quite a bit! And that is not so much to share those tweets reporting on what the speaker(s) may be sharing across, but more trying to build further upon it with my own insights on what I may have learned, may agree with or may disagree with by sharing a thought or two to help build up my highlights of the event. Seeing how cumbersome it has become to then put together those various insights into meaningful blog posts I kept thinking what a pity that I would not be able to refer back to those tweets after a short period of time just because Twitter decided it was not helpful (to them!) keep those Twitter searches on hashtags going in the medium, long run. So I started to look out there, on the third party Twitter Apps ecosystem to see if there would be a good choice out there to help out address and solve this problem. And it looks like I may have found something worth while exploring and playing with. Have you played with Snapbirg.org? No? Well, maybe you should! I am loving it at the moment! Snapbird is a lovely Twitter App Web site service that allows you to query Twitter to display a number of tweets, based on a particular Twitter ID and any hash tag of your liking and the free service would be able to display the last 1,000 tweets, which for one’s own tweets at a conference event is more than enough, I can imagine. From there onwards the curation part of the experiment kicks in, because once you have captured all of your tweets, or those of the conference hash tag, depending on how many people live tweet eventually, you would be able to export them all as a very handy .PDF file (With Print as .PDF) and it is ready to share it across into much more sophisticated repositories. Not bad, eh? Indeed, not bad at all! So that is what I have been experimenting with lately and with some pretty good results, at least, good enough for me to gt a grasp of what I keep learning at any event I may attend, specially, while on the road, because once I have got those .PDF files with the live tweets captured after the event itself, I just go ahead and I upload them into Slideshare, as if they were a presentation and right there I can share them with everyone else who may be interested in them. And voilá! Ready to go! In order to show what it would look like I have put together already a couple of .PDF files from five different face to face events that I have participated in the recent past. To name: The Melcrum Digital Summit (In London), the brilliant Enterprise 2.0 Summit (In Paris), Congreso de Empresa 2.0 y Social Business (In Seville), the Social Business Strategy Summit (in London) and, of course, my favourite event so far this year: the Social Business Forum (In Milan). And since I have uploaded them to Slideshare already, here you have got the embedded codes for each and everyone of them, with an opportunity as well to download the along, as you may see fit: Live Tweeting Highlights from #melcrumDCS Event, London, March 2012   Live Tweeting Highlights from #E20s Event, Paris, February 2012   Live Tweeting Highlights from #e20biz Event, Seville, May 2012   Live Tweeting Highlights from #sbss12 Event, London, May 2012   Live Tweeting Highlights from #sbf12 Event, Milan, June 2012 View more documents from Luis Suarez Hopefully, from here onwards it would become a regular habit from yours truly; as a I keep getting to attend various other different events, I will continue to share them along over here for other folks out there, who may be interested in these topics, to benefit, as appropriate. And perhaps perfect timing, too!, since I am about to prepare for my next business trip, this time happening over the weekend, when I make my way to the always fascinating and insightful Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston and where I will be for the entire week, so if you fancy getting together for a drink or a meal, probably the best way to reach me would be through Twitter, at @elsua, or through my mobile number (If you have it…). Hope you enjoy this experiment, and hope it does prove useful to you as well, just as much as it has been for myself in the last few months. I would also love to know what you think about it in the comments, please Is it worth while pursuing it further? Are you getting any additional benefits of that live tweeting I have been doing all long, now that I can finally curate it properly and share it across with all of you? Let me know what you think. Really looking forward now to putting it into a massive test at the event of events on Enterprise 2.0 in just a few hours from now! Boston, here we come! Ready?

It concerns me how a lot of the social learning conversation seems to veer around the tools in the space. Tools are arriving thick and fast and yeah, it's easy to get caught up with all the bling. And this is not to say that I'm never excited by tools - nothing could be far from the truth. This said, social learning is less about the technology and more about the human interaction. I often seem to get the sense that a large part of the learning community believes that the use of social media in learning is social learning. So sharing your courseware on a Facebook group then becomes social learning as does organising a lrchat-esque chat with pre-defined questions on a microblogging platform. To me this is perhaps Elearning 2.0 where you incorporate a higher degree of user interaction into your courseware, but it's still not social learning. I want to explain my views in a little more detail on this blogpost and I hope you can humour me. And feel free to tell me I'm wrong. We can't set a low bar for 'social'If the mere use of a social media platform makes a learning experience social then we've been social all along. I do a lot of classroom training as well. My classroom training is never about being a sage on stage. It's full of real world activities, interpersonal interaction and experience sharing. I do a lot of socratic facilitation in the classroom - I use my questions to draw out experiences, perspectives and lessons for the group. This said, I decide on what questions I want to ask, the agenda and the topic for discussion. If you think of lrnchat, it's quite the same thing. There are a set of pre-defined questions and a pre-defined topic for discussion. The only thing that's different from doing this with a facilitator in a classroom is that now we've distributed the discussion and there are several more participants than there could possibly be in the old world. So yeah, it's a far more scalable approach, I don't believe it's any more social. Now this isn't a criticism of lrnchat - I love being part of the discussion. All I'm saying that this is no different from formal interactions we've practiced earlier. My bar for 'social' is quite high Image credit: Jon Husband I believe that true social learning has a few important characteristics. And this is where the 'new' social learning is different from the old. Here's what I think are non-negotiable criteria to dub any learning as social: Democratic: To me the classic example of social interaction is gossip at a watercooler. Gossip emerges from the ground up. It doesn't need someone to lead, though a regular gossip fellow can facilitate the conversation and lubricate it. The key ingredient with social interactions at work or otherwise however, is that the crowd decides the agenda, the crowd decides the conversation. When a minority decides the agenda for a large group, then the interaction can still be social, but not enough to be any different from older models. Learning is truly social when individuals can decide what they want to learn and how they wish to collaborate on it. Autonomous: The key factor with social interaction in real life is that it moves by itself and is not controlled by a facilitator. I look at my social network on Facebook and on Twitter and even my enterprise social network to behave this way. We aren't talking about a specific platform, it's about a pattern of interaction. Now a facilitator can help make the flow of the interaction smoother, but in no way does the facilitator become responsible for the direction of these interactions. We can term something as social learning when it gathers a pace of its own without intervention from a trainer, facilitator, manager or leader of any kind. Embedded: One of the key aspects of social interaction in real life is that it's about life in general. It's not a separate exercise. I share stuff that I'm passionate about, I talk about things happening in my life. I blog about issues on my mind at a given point in time. Learning is truly social when it's embedded into the context of work. Think about this - I face a problem at work I know nothing about. I post a question about it to a company social network. Soon I receive a response from another colleague in a different team. That's the kind of interaction I'm speaking of - 'just in time' learning. Emergent: Social interactions have no predefined structure. The structure emerges from the natural interactions of a participating group. A big problem with enterprise social learning is the desire to structure before you start. Predefined structure has its uses - I don't doubt that. The uses however are limited to finite amounts of information - such a sitemap for a website. The nature of social communication is that it's frequent and high volume. You can try second guessing the structure for this endless stream of communication and you can also guarantee failure for every such attempt. As I've mentioned earlier, everyone's structure is different. Andrew Mcafee has written quite eloquently about the concept of emergent structure. "These are all activities that help patterns and structure appear, and that let the cream of the content rise to the top for all platform members, no matter how they define what the cream is. Without these mechanisms, online content becomes less useful -  less easy to navigate, consume, and analyze — as it accumulates. With these mechanisms in place, just the opposite happens; the platform exhibits increasing returns to scale, and becomes more valuable as it grows." You should read the complete article here. This is my view and I'm happy for you to tell me I'm wrong - only when learning exhibits all of these characteristics can you call it truly social. This may or may not involve the use of social software, though I suspect it'll be quite tough to foster these characteristics without social media. What I'm saying though is that social media is a crucial tool for the success of a social learning initiative, but the use of social media doesn't necessarily mean that a learning experience is any more social than that in a classroom. My aim is not to stir a hornet's nest with my statements in this post. In fact I've been wanting to write this post for a while but was wary that I'll upset some of my friends by terming what they do as 'not' social learning. Frankly if you don't agree with what I've said, feel free to post in the comments section and shout at me. I'm no theorist, but from experience I've built a bit of an opinion. If it resonates with you, I guess I'm thinking right. If it doesn't, I guess I'll learn from you. Look forward to hearing what you have to share. Until next week, bye!© Sumeet Moghe

Last night something terrible happened. Toffee, my neighbourhood stray lost her puppy Sheena to some crazed driver who decide to knock the kid dead. Road kills happen all the time in India but for someone to be driving fast enough to kill a living being in a residential colony is brutal and inhuman. When I found Toffee this morning, she was mourning by the side of Sheena's corpse. She called me and almost implored me to check what was wrong. She kept squealing, crying and licking the limp body. We think of animals being a lesser life than us. That is untrue. Toffee kept crying by Sheena's body until my wife and I came back to the scene and comforted her for a good length of time. We had to coax her into finding her other pup, Skittish. The way she called to Skittish and the kind of nervousness the surviving pup showed, was an example of how deep emotions run in the animal family. One careless driver has disrupted a happy family - we wouldn't do this to a human being. We wouldn't hit and run a human baby and leave it in a pool of blood. Why do it to an animal? This world belongs to them as much as it does to us. They feel pain too. I feel Toffee's pain - it's how I felt when Tequila died, perhaps a lot more.© Sumeet Moghe

A very good friend of mine once told me that life is all about treasuring, cultivating, nurturing and enjoying the various moments of happiness we get exposed to over the course of our lifetimes. You know how it goes, they are very brief moments, rather fulfilling, sharp, intense, transient and hardly noticeable, unless you pay rather close, good attention to them by always staying alert!, since, before you realise about it, they are just gone. For good! Pretty much like when they came your way. They keep saying that it is those moments of true happiness that make everything worth while, even going through the most painful of experiences; those ones we are supposedly learning the most from time and time again. The ones that shape us into becoming who we are eventually, the ones that help us provoke those moments of happiness themselves over the course of time, making us realise why they are so much worth while anticipating and waiting for all along and why that wait is always worth it. Even if it takes 92 years. Well, I think I may have just experienced one of those true moments of happiness for which it’s going to become rather tough to wake up from. Not that I would ever want to do that, but I know, at some point, I will have to. We will all have to. As most folks out there would know by now, this blog post doesn’t have much to do with the usual topics I get to cover over here, but yesterday evening the Spanish national football (= soccer) team did it again! Once again, and it’s something that we are becoming too much used to, and perhaps we shouldn’t!, they won the title from a major competition, that one of the Euro Cup 2012 and entered the books of history, managing to win three major titles over the last 4 years (Euro Cup in 2008, World Cup in 2010 and Euro Cup in 2012, once more!), that no other national team has ever matched anywhere! How can’t you not enjoy such a moment of true happiness and pure bliss, right?!?! It’s exhilarating altogether on its own to no end! A once in a lifetime experience! Literally!! Yes, I know and I do fully realise that Spain, my home country, is not going through one of its best moments as a nation, with the well known mantra "Made in Spain", and part of the European Union, due, perhaps, in part, to the rampant unemployment rate, a rather weakened economy by ruthless, unpunished financial speculators (Amongst others), plenty of natural catastrophes that have happened lately and to be governed, politically and economically, throughout the last few years, by corruption, fraud, greed and power struggles. Yes, the usual thing that a bunch of other European, and worldwide, countries are going through at the moment as well, but perhaps with a much more dramatic flavour added to it altogether.  The thing is though that we are still standing. 4 years have gone by and we are still standing. Perhaps that’s one of the last few things that will always be with us, that we can fall down, break a bone or two in the process, but stand up again. And again, and again. It’s what shapes nations over the course of centuries. It’s what makes them, and their people, tougher. You know how it goes, what doesn’t kill you, it will make you stronger. And that cannot be more real in today’s financial turmoil and econoclypse. But then again, just like Spain has done with its national football team, there has got to be a time when that has got to stop, when power, greed and money no longer rule, where we can ponder about what things were wrong, how we could address them and try to fix each and everyone of them. More than anything else, because the alternative continues to be just too ugly to face and, also, because deep inside our hearts, we know where the main issues are and how we could tackle them eventually.  I mean, taking further on the analogy from football, I remember the days, the decades, actually, when the national Spanish football team was rather mediocre, not having the right mentality, the right team spirit, the ability and eagerness to improve things, the sacrifice of one self for the others helping them become better at what they normally do, the innate talent willing to be shared across without asking much in return to achieve a common purpose, that little bit of luck you always need to achieve your goals, etc. etc., and eventually, with a touch of bad luck to add further up, we kept getting kicked out of major tournament after major tournament making it all almost far too embarrassing to notice. Too painful to watch and experience. Even too frustrating to bear. But then again, we stood up. You could probably say that Spaniards, in general, are rather stubborn and resilient on their ways. But back in the day, by the late 80s, there was this brilliant, committed, modest, truly gifted generation of young players who gathered together thanks to the efforts from a superb initiative on working things out right from the base, starting when they were all young, and grow that over the course of time through lots of hard work, effort, energy, sacrifice, talent, education, team spirit, modesty, and a strong sense of achievement never seen before, along with a very well defined style, i.e. the tiqui taka, which has proved to be unbeatable over the last few years, and which confirms, once again, the power of groups & networks in helping achieve a common goal. The goal. And there you have it, after a couple of decades gone by already, collecting the harvest of all of that hard work, good education and training, and true team spirit has paid off, once again. And it all started with small steps, right when that bunch of very talented players were really young. That’s perhaps the secret of the success for a national soccer team, but may be also for an entire country to start looking for ways of abandoning that catastrophic state of making ends meet barely through the econoclypse just because we have been looking at the wrong end of the equation from day one. It’s through that education, hard work, motivation and inspiration that young modest players have kept turning an entire country upside down over the last 4 years providing us all with that huge rush of delightful happy moments of pride of what one can achieve if it is given the right values on what really matters. The small things. As usual.  Yes, I do realise that this new achievement from our Spanish national football team is going to last probably too little, specially, looking back into today’s financial turmoil and appalling government policies (From past and present), but if there is anything that should help us all remember, and treasure, quite a bit!, is the fact that those moments of happiness we enjoyed last night, and probably today, are now ours. Forever. For good. They just can’t take them away from us. It’s part of our common psyche, as a nation, and if we have been able to raise over and over again over the course of decades from bad results after bad results, yesterday evening’s victory should remind us all, as we treasure and seize the moment, where the key of success really is: go out and seek desperately, work your b*tt off like you have never seen nor done before, provoke that moment of happiness and don’t let anyone take it away from you. Enjoy it! They have continued to make us feel proud for what they keep achieving time and time again. They have shown us the way of what’s possible, of the potential we all have when we want to strike for those happy moments, so whenever someone reminds you of where you are today, as a nation, kindly educate them on what we know, and have been educated, best over the course of decades: stand up and fight for your happiness, because no-one else will. Now, it’s up to you, me, and everyone else, to up the game and show how well we are all playing this football match called "life". So far, those young, talented boys, have shown us the way. They have shown us how the impossible does no longer exist. How if you would want to achieve it, because that’s what you would want to do, there is a great chance that you will, so you better be prepared to act accordingly. That’s what moments of happiness are all about and, again, remember, that no-one can take those away from you. They are all your own to be nurtured and treasured right from the beginning! For as long as you would want to! My dear national Spanish football team, thanks ever so much for allowing us to experience one of the most unforgettable evenings *ever* that will surely occupy a dear place in each and everyone of our hearts for many years to come. Thank you sincerely for showing an entire nation, and probably the rest of the world, how, with a good dose of talent, hard work, effort, motivation, team spirit, and unselfish collaborative effort, the impossible is our new reality . What we live and strive for. Our motivation to move forward. Our way to show everyone that power and greed are never the way. They never have. That sustainable growth, as a group with a core mission, will probably pay off much better eventually. At least, the teams will be happy, content, with what they have delivered. I bet that’s how you are feeling right now, watching us from the short distance, and that’s exactly how we are sensing it from the other side. Admiration does not even come close to describe how we feel. So thanks much for that!  We will never forget!

A lot of my friends in the learning community have been intrigued by the fact that we run Pecha Kucha nights every week at ThoughtWorks University. I often get asked how I run these and what value I see. In my experience Pecha Kucha nights are a great way to achieve a few things: the speakers find a platform to share their thoughts around something they're passionate about; the team gets an opportunity learn something new in a serendipitous fashion; everyone gets to know a different side of their team members; and even if the presentation has nothing to do with work, it often is a good laugh In addition, Pecha Kucha is a great format to practice presentations. The constraint of 20 slides for 20 seconds each is a great way to force some positive presenter behaviours. Firstly the 20 second limit forces you to prepare well. If you don't prepare well, your slides are likely to overtake you. 20 seconds also forces you to be minimalist with your slide design. If you add too much clutter, you're likely to have no time to go through everything. The 20 slide limit forces you to prepare a crisp, yet impactful story. After all, when your time's over, you need to leave the stage. There's quite a bit more you learn - but I'll leave you to figure out the rest. One of the main roles on a Pecha Kucha night is that of a Pecha Kucha host. The host runs the presentations that each speaker submits and also ensures that the talks keep moving on smoothly. Think of the host as an emcee for the night. I've been a Pecha Kucha host on several occasions and over the months there are a few things I've learned. In today's blog post I want to share a few tips for hosting these events. Take a quick look. Before the eventRemember the presentation is not all about the slides. We don't want speakers to feel obliged to do a presentation. They should look at it as a platform to share their thoughts about something they really care about. Here are a few things I like to do a few days before the Pecha Kucha night: Contact the speakers individually and ask them if about their topics - if they have selected a throw away topic, urge them to find something they have a passion for. Ask the speakers if they need any help to create effective slides. Often you'll notice the very anti-patterns that we try to avoid and it's quite easy to fix these by giving them some Presentation Zen tips. Remember, we want the speakers to look good during the presentation and potentially set them up for success. They shouldn't dread presenting by the end of the exercise. I like them to get addicted to the applause and mature as effective presenters. On the day of the eventThe day of the event is crucial. It's not easy to produce a Pecha Kucha event, even if it is only for your little team. Make sure that you've invited more people than just your immediate team though - the larger the audience, the bigger the challenge and potentially the bigger the applause! Try to get the presentations by 10AM on the morning of the event. This helps you ensure that all the slides play properly and that the speakers are happy with how they look on your computer. Get the speakers together and give them a bit of pep talk. Try to soothe their nerves - a lot of them are presenting for the first time. Call out some instructions and tips for the speakers: Don't look back at the slides - show them the presenter view on your laptop and mention they can use this as a confidence monitor. Ask them to make eye contact with the audience and to stand closer to the audience. Interacting with the group is likely to make their presentation effective. Most importantly, let them know that they've done what they could have to prepare. From now on, they need to go out there and enjoy their experience. Let the speakers know in advance the order they'll speak in. It helps to calm their nerves and doesn't surprise them when they're called on stage. Remind the speakers to stay back on stage for questions and let them know that they should encourage questions - it's a sign that they engaged people in their talk. Often neglected - order food if you can. Most people feel hungry if they have to be in the office until 7PM. We order pizzas, pastas, Indian food, burgers, salads and the like - there's no rule for this one. During the eventThis is what everyone's been waiting for and you are the master of ceremonies. Remember, one of your key roles is to keep the event true to its spirit. If you notice anyone going over time - cut them off. You need to be consistent with this; otherwise, what's the point? Make sure you have a whiteboard with a list of the speakers and the speaking order. Don't forget to get a volunteer to record the talks - these are often great artifacts to share within the company. Who knows what people may learn? Think of this as a mini-conference. How would you open the night? How would you welcome the audience? Where's your radio announcer voice? Call out the rules of engagement. For example 6min 40s presentation, 2 mins for questions. Remind the audience that several of the presenters may be speaking in public for the first time. As you call out each speaker, encourage the audience to applaud the speaker and ensure that they give a loud round of applause even when the speaker finishes. Hold the speaker back for questions and encourage the audience to ask questions. Close the event with a flourish. Food is a great ending, but don't forget to thank the speakers for putting in the effort. Be sure to announce when the next event is and perhaps tell the non-team members of the audience why they should return! After the eventJust like the buzz behind a conference doesn't end the day it's over, the buzz behind your Pecha Kucha night should stay alive too. Here are a few things to try doing. Get a hold of the videos and upload them on YouTube or a platform that you want to share them on. Tag them appropriately so you can easily find them later. If you can, upload the slides to slideshare and tag them appropriately too. Share these links with the speakers so they can look at their videos and look for areas of improvement and so they can also look back at presentations they liked for inspiration. In general, think of the night as a show. There are performers who are in it for the first time. How can you still make this a grand success and a memorable evening? I hope you find this blogpost useful and I hope you can use this to host several awesome Pecha Kucha nights. Cheers!© Sumeet Moghe

To get things going with the series of blog posts with highlights from the recent Enterprise 2.0 event held in Boston, MA, a couple of weeks back, late last week I had the privilege of posting the first of those articles over at CMSWire under the heading "Social Task Management - When Social Business Got Down to Work". You could go and have a look into it over there (Including the excellent commentary shared along already by a few folks), or, instead, you can check it out below reading further along into it, having taken the liberty myself of adding as well to the original piece the links to the presentations highlighted throughout the article itself, in order to make it easy to digest what I still think were the best speaker sessions I have attended at this year’s edition by far from everything else. There will be other entries that I will be putting together over the course of the next few days sharing along what else I learned throughout the event, but for now, let’s get things started with this one: Social Task Management - When Social Business Got Down to Work. [Cross-post from CMSWire …] Social Business (at long last!) is getting down to some serious work, allowing knowledge workers to become more effective and productive at what they already do, that is, excel at their jobs. This insight came after attending the the recent Enterprise 2.0 conference event that took place last week in Boston. A lot has been written in the last few days about some of the major highlights from the event (along with some phenomenal live blogging on the event itself courtesy of rather smart and talented folks like Mary Abraham and Bill Ives), that, if anything, confirmed this growing trend that most of us who have been involved with Social Business for a while now were happy to see finally becoming a reality. Social Business is Maturing From my own perspective, there are plenty of different highlights that I can point out to people out there who may be interested in learning more about what happened during those four days the conference event lasted. For instance, the absolutely wonderful workshop on online community building that both the folks from The Community Roundtable and the Community BackChannel put together that were a culmination of another growing trend from the last couple of years with regards to social networking: communities still *are* one of the major drivers of social software adoption (whether internal or external) and as such, cultivating the art of building and sustaining online communities is becoming a key digital competency skill that knowledge workers can no longer ignore, nor neglect, but fully embrace. Pair that with the absolutely stunning breakout speaker session done by Catherine Shinners on "Building an Online Community from Strategy, Planning and Launch to Effective Engagement and Adoption" and right there you have got an entire worthwhile adopting methodology on how to nurture your online communities with a business purpose. Worth a look on its own altogether. Building an Online Community: Strategy, Launch, Engagement, Growth View more presentations from CatherinePaloAlto It’s Time for the Next Step However, my absolute favorite key major highlight from this year’s Enterprise 2.0 conference event were the two different breakout speaker sessions that  Alan Lepofsky, along with Yvette Cameron (both VP and Principal Analysts, from Constellation Research), did on leveling up the game for social software. It’s time for social software to begin to discover the path of how it can embed itself into our day to day workflows with much more effectiveness and efficiency, by focusing on those common tasks and activities we keep repeating on a daily basis, but that, in some cases, generate a bunch of business pain points for which social networking tools could be that aspirin to get rid of the headache. Or perhaps that vitamin to help augment an already existing good user experience. Social networking with a clearer than ever business purpose: that is, empower employees to become smarter at what they already do at work, with perhaps a lot less effort involved altogether! At the same time Alan gave another brilliant dissertation on how in the world of over-sharing with the Social Web out there becoming more and more relevant by the day, there is going to be a time where we may all reach the so-called Social Fatigue, if not already! Apart from highlighting a-potentially-worth-while-looking-into growing pain, with how we make extensive use of these social technologies to make sense of their overall business purpose, Alan also shared a bunch of hints and tips on how to fight that social fatigue that will surely become rather helpful and insightful to those folks who may be thinking or sensing that they are reaching that point of social exhaustion. Truly fascinating and rather inspiring altogether! The New Challenge for Social Business But that’s not all of it, because if there is something that I would consider worthwhile highlighting from Alan’s presentation, and that was my major takeaway, is that realization that things are going to start getting a bit tougher for Social Business. Now that we have proved the intrinsic business value of those various social technologies to help cultivate and nurture those personal business relationships, it’s time for the business world to be more demanding and request from Enterprise 2.0 to become a bit more resourceful on how it can help businesses grow more effective at what they already do: delight their customers with an even more enhanced exceptional experience.  In this particular scenario Alan coined a new concept under the suggestive heading Social Task Management which will bring us back to what some of us have been saying for a little while already: that Social Business will become a corporate reality as soon as it starts understanding, and fully embracing, how it needs to mix and mingle with our day to day workload, i.e. tasks and activities. We need to start realizing how social networking for business has now, finally, managed to help converge three key aspects of how we get work done: People (self-organize more and more through networks and communities, versus just the traditional hierarchical structure(s)), Processes (helping them become much more open, public, transparent and agile) and Technology (where new, much improved!, experiences, including mobile, are helping knowledge workers get a better grasp of how social software is finally becoming more of an enabler than an obstacle). Therefore this combination being pushed up on a massive scale, from the already existing structured business processes (Sales, Marketing, Engineering, Learning, Human Resources, Supply Chain, Customer Support / Service) and those other unstructured processes, like status updates, sharing, Q&A, exception handling (where email has been shining for perhaps far too long!), along with expertise location, provides us with a unique landscape of convergence difficult to ignore, if not embrace altogether. This is where Social Task Management kicks in to help us achieve our business goals much easier, whether those social technologies are standalone, integrated or native.  In a memorable exercise where the conversation has, finally, shifted away from the rather rich Enterprise 2.0 vendor landscape, here we are at the crossroads for Social Business where the foundation of its core mission, i.e. helping knowledge workers work smarter, not necessarily harder, is taking a new level of engagement. For the first time in a long while, employees, customers, business partners, along with their competitors and industry analysts, need to realize that while participating and engaging in social networking tools has been very helpful and valuable at helping businesses generate more revenue and profitable growth, we are only now reaching that tipping point where Social Business needs to really prove what it is made off. Not just from the perspective of getting work done, but from realizing that, all along, it’s had the unique opportunity to help reshape the workplace of the future by resurfacing all of those tasks and activities, making them much more open and transparent, evaluating those business pain points we have been suffering for far too long and address and fix each and everyone of them. One step at a time, for sure, but eventually nailing down the work, which is what matters to both employees AND businesses alike in the long run. Plenty of people have been asking for a couple of years for Social Business to find a purpose, its business purpose. I strongly feel that after attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference last week in Boston and being inspired by both Alan and Yvette, amongst plenty of other thought leaders in the space, we may have, at long last, discovered that purpose. Social Business is rolling up its sleeves and getting dirty, because, whether we like it or not, it is here to stay. For a good while altogether! Social Task Management: A New Level of Engagement So, what is out there left to say that we haven’t said already, right? Welcome to Social Task Management, I guess! Where the good fun starts! That unique business purpose behind social networking we have been waiting for all this time and that we are glad it finally arrived. It’s been far too long and we just can’t wait to continue leveling up the game. It’s time to demonstrate to businesses out there what Social Business is truly capable of: open up the conversations, become more transparent at what we do through observable work, work smarter, not necessarily harder, and all of that with a clear business goal in mind. That goal of delighting our customers with unique exceptional user experiences. Easier said than done, I bet, but that’s essentially the fascinating and exciting journey we have been embarking on throughout the years. Time for us to come forward now, up the game for everyone and continue to execute accordingly! We have just got us all a new mission … Bringing Social Business to the masses! Ready? Yes, I know, me, too! Let’s do it! Task Centric (Social) Computing, here we come! Oh, one last thing… In order to make things easier, like I have mentioned at the beginning of this blogpost, I have decided as well to go ahead and share the embedded code over here from the presentations from Alan and Yvette, so that you folks can have a look right away and play them along. So here we go:  Taking the Training Wheels Off Social Software View more presentations from Alan Lepofsky  Surviving Social Software Fatigue View more presentations from Alan Lepofsky

Image credit Christopher Schoenbohm First things first, I'm sorry I couldn't post anything on the blog in the last few days. I've been in China and the great firewall is simply impregnable. I've somehow broken into Blogger and can now post. Thanks for your patience. So, let's come to what I want to write about today. Serendipity - it's a beautiful thing. Imagine walking down a street and seeing an interesting restaurant that you'd never heard of. You walk in, and order a great meal and have a great story to tell at the end of it all. I'm guessing I'm not the only person this has happened to. It's a wonderful way to learn about things around you and I argue that the human race would have learnt very little had it not been for the serendipity we've been privilege to, ever since our existence. Serendipity, or accidental discovery is also at the center of most social business strategy. Technology aside though, I believe this phenomenon has a big place in the physical design of workplaces. After all we didn't invent serendipity after social media. In today's blogpost, I want to share some thoughts about the design of workplaces and how they may affect the social fabric of your organisation. Being Social begins in the Real WorldFor social media to make an impact to your workplace, the physical orientation of the workplace should ideally mirror all the behaviours you're trying to mirror online. Think of these of the top of your head, you'll perhaps come up with sharing, openness, visibility, connectedness, storytelling and the like. Why then, are workplaces designed for the exact opposite? Corner offices, cubicles, closed doors - all of these are counterintuitive to the idea of serendipity. Now, I'm not saying that we don't need closed doors conversations. Businesses are sensitive and certain conversations need a closed environment. That being said, designing your workplace around that as the default is perhaps a bad idea. This leads to the concept that I'm calling spatial serendipity. Here are a few questions to ask yourself. How connected is your team?My team at work is starting to get bigger. Dinesh heads our knowledge strategy and enterprise 2.0 offering, Nikhil owns our social business platform, Sahana community manages, Kavita is our instructional designer, Siddharth handles industry research and Rajiv takes care of branding and events. Add to this the several people at ThoughtWorks University and we've got a fairly diverse team. It may seem like a good idea for each person to have their cubicle and work by themselves. In fact the commute in Bangalore is so bad that I sometimes feel like working in my silo at home. All this said, some of the most productive days for me are when I can work onsite with my entire team in one place. Merely listening in to my team-mates' work life creates a huge difference and each day I learn something new. If you notice from the picture above from our Xian office - teams in my company sit across one big table with no barriers. This is really cool because people can listen into conversations happening across the table and problems get instant solutions from the chatter around the team. Cubicles may be the way to go for predictable transactional work, but for knowledge work, a barrier free team environment is the way to go. How visible is your work?Agile promotes the notion of big visible charts to depict your work. This is how you'll see creative companies like IDEO or Duarte work as well. There's something magical about making mental models explicit on a big, visible chart and to depict the state of work on a visible information radiator. Now my company also sells Mingle which is quite an awesome collaborative project tracking and collaboration platform. That being said, visualising your work only on a software system such as Mingle turns it into what my colleague Mark Needham calls an information refrigerator. There's a lot of value in having a representation of your work status that not just your team members but everyone in the office can see. Often, people walking by will notice something unusual and give you an interesting tip. Often people will learn from your representations. For example, I learnt an interesting way to represent a customer journey by looking at the above design wall for one of our teams in China. How connected is your workplace?It's not just the team that needs connection and serendipity, but potentially your entire office. We talk of silo-busting in the virtual world, but what about the physical silos? Why do different teams need to have different rooms and work areas? Why can't we have large contiguous spaces where each team is visible to the other? Take a look at the design of our Xian office above. The entire office is one single space and the head of the office sits in the same place as the rest, as do people in HR, recruiting, admin, finance and the like. Everyone knows everyone - most people are aware of each other's work and that level of connectedness leads to solutions to common problems from the collective. It's not that tough, we just need to get over the default mindsets behind office design.In my view workplace design needs to be an integral part of any social business consulting that you seek out. Serendipity just happens, but the fact is that you can prepare yourself for serendipity by creating an environment that encourages it. Workplace design can't just be the realm of architects and interior designers - it's a social engineering activity. By now there's a lot of examples out there, including Google, ThoughtWorks itself, Stanford. Inspiration's out there - it's time for us to learn from it.© Sumeet Moghe

If you have been following this blog for a long while now, you would know how, over the course of time, there has been one of those so-called pet peeves of yours truly that keeps re-surfacing every so often, time and time again, specially, when I am on the road, away from my home office. Indeed, I am talking about Internet connectivity, or, rather, the lack of. Over the course of the last few months I have been doing a rather interesting mental exercise of taming myself, with plenty of education, patience and understanding, to confront all of that rage and irate opinions that keep coming up whenever I just can’t keep up with my knowledge Web work, just because the connectivity is very poor, if non existent altogether, while on the road. Thinking that it is ok to be disconnected every now and then. It’s good for the body, it’s good for the mind. It allows you to do plenty of good critical thinking on things around you. You know, there will always be a time, when you head back home, for you to catch up with everything in your social streams. Your ADSL home connection will do the trick and show you how you are still ok, despite that long period of disconnectedness when traveling around. Well, what happens when back at home that, once trusted, reliable, scalable, relatively speedy, consistent, reasonably priced Internet connection ceases to exist? How does a remote knowledge Web worker keep up then? Not too well, apparently. In fact, struggling would probably be a much better word describing the growing pain mobile home workers are going to continue experiencing with their home connectivity over the course of time.  At least, that’s what has just happened to myself, upon my return from my recent business trip to Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 event, when I found out that my local ADSL Internet provider, my good old friend Movistar, downgraded my Internet speeds for download and upload without further notice, without even a confirmation of the deterioration of the Internet connection itself.  It just happened and I have got to get used to it, whether I like it or not, because that’s what monopolies are all about. Or are they?  Plenty of people out there keep raving about how interconnected, and glued, to the Internet we have all become in recent times. The level of broadband penetration is at highest levels ever possible to the point where hardly anyone would claim they still don’t have a decent Internet connection. Even on mobile devices, whatever those may well be. It’s just not happening any more. But the reality is that things are different, much different, specially, if you live in a country where the entire network bandwidth is governed and managed by a single provider which consistently uses their monopolistic tactics to keep degrading end-users’ Internet experiences while raising the prices. That’s essentially what Movistar has been doing using as an excuse that they cannot longer keep up with the demand because their infrastructure is just not ready. Really? I mean, when fiber optic is providing speeds of 50 mbps to 100 mbps download? Really? Here is a crude example of what I mean: I used to have a half decent 10 mbps download - 0.69 kbps upload with Movistar as my home ADSL connection. Not my 3G or USB modem, but my regular home Internet connection. About 2 weeks ago that changed drastically and deteriorated to a rather unbearable level: 5 mbps download and 0.58 kbps upload. While price is still pretty much the same. Around 70€ per month. Now, under normal circumstances, it would not have bothered me that much, that is, for personal, private use is probably good enough. Although expensive. However, as a remote knowledge Web worker, and I think there are two key important aspects to this, i.e. remoteness at the home office and Web work, it’s proved to be not very convenient, nor helpful. In fact, I’m starting to struggle with it all.  Not because of trying to keep up with the Social Web, whether internal or external, although it’s been a bit of a painful experience so far, but mostly because when trying to do a good number of different things, interactions I cannot longer feel that sense of being productive, nor effective. Specially, when handling rich media. In my role as a social computing evangelist focusing on enabling, facilitating, helping and coaching fellow colleagues on living social, I rely quite heavily on conducting remote workshops through emeetings, for instance, where both screen sharing and video conferencing are involved. And so far I have forced myself to rather reschedule the education sessions or cancel them altogether, because we haven’t been capable of making it work without the usual hiccups, temporary glitches coming from a rather poor connection. And here I am, musing on the irony of things and witnessing how Movistar takes a toll on my own productivity as a social knowledge Web worker not allowing me any longer to do my job properly. And getting away with it big time, since apparently there isn’t much more than I can do about it.  Yes, I know what you are all probably thinking at this stage, as I write this blog entry, the easiest solution would be for me to move, i.e. take my things and move to a new place, closer to the switches where my regular Internet connection could be reestablished and problem solved. Unfortunately, it’s not an option at the moment. In fact, I don’t think it would be fair for my private, personal environment to sacrifice what I have now just because of a monopolistic ISP can’t cope with the demand on what they offer, because of how poorly they have implemented their current infrastructure. Switching to another provider would not be very helpful either, since they all have to go through the same wired network, their own!, so even if I would change ISPs I would still have the same speeds as I have got now. Not good enough! So it really hit me when I bumped into one very powerful tweet shared by my good friend Alan Lepofsky on the real impact of Social Business for that new kind of remote knowledge Web workforce that seems to become more of the norm, than an exception nowadays:    I’ve been quite bandwidth restricted this week and it’s reminded me how important offline/local access to data can be. Cloud can be cloudy. — Alan Lepofsky (@alanlepo) June 30, 2012 Goodness! That’s just so spot on, from Alan! I mean, we surely keep taking the Social Web and our connectivity for granted, yet, as soon as that Internet connection gets interrupted, or deteriorated, there goes our Social Web experience suffering just as much as a result of it, with the end-goal of us, knowledge workers, no longer being capable of working effectively. Thus how much of a dependency would we have on our social technologies providing offline / local access, so that we could do our work, even if connectivity would be poor to then replicate or sync back to the server(s) with our data. It’s an old concept, I know, coming from groupware, (Lotus Notes anyone?) but do we feel that social networking tools would also need to be available offline for us to be productive? I am not sure what you would think, but I am starting to think that we would better prepare for it, because something tells me ISPs would try to cling to their power position and try to make business off that new remote workforce by providing poor service for big bucks till you eventually give in!  Being a remote knowledge Web worker as I am, and on the road on a regular basis, I have learned to tame myself and keep calm when connectivity is not there, thinking that when getting back home I can do proper catch-ups, and get up to speed relatively fast, so I can go ahead and do other things, but now the challenge that comes up is that if when coming back to my home office I can’t be productive enough because of the poor performance of the ADSL connection, it bears to question whether we, knowledge workers, should start pushing for offline access to our social networking tools for business. Or not. Somehow, and experiencing how tough it’s become to carry out certain social tasks with the downgrade I have experienced for a few days already, I am starting to ponder whether Social Business would be ready to face Internet traffic jams, because somehow it doesn’t look like it would be able to. And at what costs then for businesses out there?  How fragile is the business world at the moment, now that it is becoming more social and Web dependent than ever and how more and more third party agents are diminishing our ability to carry out business effectively? Is that something that the corporate world could afford? Seeing how their remote knowledge workers cannot keep up with the pace from their fellow colleagues while at an office location? Somehow, I am starting to find it rather worrying. And although we do have a good number of social networking platforms that embrace and support offline interactions there aren’t too many though. At least, not yet. In fact, most of the major social software vendors do not provide local access to social networking tools.  Thus what could we do about it? How can we keep justifying our lack of productivity while working remotely, if foreign circumstances keep getting on the way, like ISPs capping, or crippling, whatever your preferred term may well be, your network connectivity because they just can’t cope with it anymore? Yet the prices remain the same, if not higher. I am not sure what you would think, but I’m starting to sense that if we would want to address this issue with local governments, or, even better, in our case over here in Europe, with the European Union, we would need to have, at least, a proposal for a decent Internet connection that would allow us to do our knowledge work effectively by guaranteeing certain speeds that would allow us to remain productive. That, or social networking tools need to start supporting offline access. To be honest, I doubt the first scenario would be taking place any time soon, although I would think it would be the desired outcome from this growing pain to be dealt and done with, so I’m hoping that those Enterprise Social Software vendors start paying attention to the growing needs and demands from remote workers with poor connectivity to stay connected and start accommodating to those needs, or very very soon the corporate world as we know it will keep hitting huge losses of individual, network and group productivity that I doubt we would be capable of recovering from.  So, what do you think? Do you feel that Social Business is ready today to face Internet traffic jams? Do you feel that offline / local access, like Alan mentioned on that tweet, is something needed for us, remote workers, to keep getting work done effectively? Or would we eventually need to migrate to large, crowded cities to remain connected just because we just can’t fight ISPs monopolies strongly enough to shift their ill-behaviours of abuse, left and right, of our Internet rights. What would the European Union, because I guess local governments won’t be able to do much about it, nor that they would want to, need to do in order to change this growing, and rather worrying, trend where knowledge Web workers keep getting crippled right there where it hurts us all the most: our Social Web experience? Is there anything that we can do to get things back on track? I am surely hoping so, but right now I run out of ideas, alternatives, or good enough solutions. And that is a very sad thing for a remote knowledge Web worker, don’t you think? A pity, even. 

One of my friends in the wildlife photography circle is very strict about the copyright notices on his images. A lot of his images have descriptions such as, "Copyrighted by ... and may not be used, downloaded in any form, or Print Media website without written permission of the Photographer." While I don't wish to make a judgement about his choice of restrictive copyright, I personally dislike this approach. I consider it against the very fabric of the sharing culture that makes us human. I take it as granted that writing, photography and music are art forms. No doubt about that. I also take it that artists need to make money. But sharing and making money don't have to be exclusive of each other. My biggest example is Trey Ratcliffe - he's one of the best known travel photographers in the world. Trey travels the world and makes his best photography freely available on the web. His work is acclaimed the world over - he's even on the wall of the Smithsonian. I'm pretty sure Trey makes a lot of money too, and that's because of the word of mouth his photography gets - 175,000 views a day! There's obviously a business model to making money through openness - The Power of Open is a great testimony to that model. In today's blogpost I want to share some notes about openness - photographers, elearning developers, artists, writers are all likely to have a view on this. Feel free to rouse a debate if you wish. Most of us are not looking for moneyThe fact is that most content creators don't necessarily want to make money out of the stuff we put out. The internet has given us a medium to share our work which we never had before. When all we had was 35mm film and 36 shots on the film, we'd create the pictures and share the albums with our friends and family - but only those that we met face to face. Today, even our aquaintances and distant friends and relatives can see our work and share their reactions. So yeah, the internet gives us wings we never thought we had. The internet however, is prone to it's ills. People can plagiarise our work, mistakenly or deliberately not point to us as creators. It's a risk - I agree. I am of the belief though, that if someone's a jerk and doesn't understand the effort an artist puts into their work then I'm not going to change him. In fact, if someone does plagiarise my work then I really don't have the means to take that person to court. So I'm not going to lose any sleep over that. What I can do, is make my licensing approach transparent, simple and low barrier so the majority of the (nice) people out there can use my work if they want. So if they want to use it in an article they're writing, sure they can. They want to use it in a presentation - why not? They want to create a derivative work - I'm ok with that too. All I really need is attribution - the fact that my work can get used in several places means that I'm more likely to build a name with that, than I ever will via restrictive copyright. Now I'm not famous and I don't do much to build a followership with my work. I do know though that if I did want that fame - attribution would still be the only thing I'd need. Openness helps people around usI love wildlife photography. Actually I like all forms of photography, but wildlife photography is the only thing I'm half good at. Now the beauty of this beast is that it can be a great educational tool for anyone who views my photographs. Since my photographs are under a non-restrictive license, you can add them to Wikipedia and help build a great body of knowledge about the flora and fauna around us. People can use them for their dissertations and studies. Those who want to make a great presentation but have no money to buy stock photography can use my pictures too. By keeping my work open, I believe I'm more likely to help people and leave a bigger dent in the universe. The fact with photography is that I've created neither the moments nor the objects. All I do is to capture them through my own representation. To restrict people from being able to use that representation is perhaps being a bit full of myself. Now this is my approach and I don't say everyone needs to do this - but the only thing I restrict against is the use of my work for commercial purposes. I don't do this because I want a share of the profits or anything - though that would be nice. I take a lot of photographs with people in them. Now I am concerned if a brand decided to use the photo of the tribal woman I shot without giving her some money. Or if they used a photograph of my pretty friend without her explicit permission. Oh yeah, and I also have one more retriction. If you create a derivative of my work and share it with others, you're welcome to do so as long as you share under the same license that I shared the original work with. I don't want my open work to become closed as people create derivatives. How to add the right copyright noticesLicensing is a matter of choice; however I strongly recommend the Creative Commons licenses for anyone producing artwork. My personal favourite is the Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license (CC-BY-NC-SA). It allows people to create derivative works and share with others as long as they preserve the license and allows only non-commercial use. There's other less or more restrictive licenses. There are several ways to apply the licenses to your work. If you blog, add the license embed code to the sidebar of your blog (example here). You can use a similar strategy when distributing music. If you take photographs and have a newer Canon DSLR, you can add license information to the EXIF data of your photographs.If you are sharing photographs online on Flickr, then the application allows you to select from a list of Creative Commons licenses.If you're writing an e-book, you can add the license icons and deed to the the document itself.If you're distributing an elearning course, then you can either add the license inside the course or provide a separate license document in the package.If you have documents that support XMP, then you can add license metadata to them. The key is to make the licensing transparent so that people know what the limitations are and how low the barrier to sharing is. Most people don't mind giving you credit for your work. There are some outlying idiots who we can either lose sleep over or just ignore. I choose to do the latter. If you still don't want to open up your work, at a bare minimum don't watermark your work with ugly patterns just because you're afraid of the crazy bootleggers. Share with confidence - not in fear! You may think I'm taking the moral high ground here because no one really cares about my work. You could be right if you think that way - I'm no famous artist. That being said, TED, Jonathan Worth, DJ Vadim, Trey Ratcliffe, Curt Smith, Kalyan Varma and others are famous, aren't they? Something works for them because they make their work open. While my advice is only a guideline, their work is an inspiration. I strongly urge all of you to make as much of your work as open as you possibly can. Let's remember that we would have learnt nothing as a human race if anyone who discovered or created anything decided to close down their work under restrictive licenses. I'm more than happy to be part of a debate on this one - I have strong views as you may have noticed. So yeah, if you have a view - let me know. © Sumeet Moghe

One of my favourite activities within the Social Web realm has always been that ability to keep up that playful spirit of finding opportunities time and time again to fine tune my overall user experience using social networking tools, whether internal or external, in order to find new use cases, or productivity tips, that would help boost my performance in allowing me to get work done in a smarter way, not necessarily working harder. And since lately I keep traveling quite a bit and spend more time on the road than at my home office, I thought it would be a good time exploring how I can improve my overall knowledge Web worker experience using various social networking / productivity tools while on the road. And, after plenty of experimentation I think I may have hit a magic formula that I have grown to become rather fond of in the last few weeks and that I think I am now ready to share it across with all of you folks who may be interested in finding out what’s all the fuss I have been making about it all along: TweetBot + Pocket + Evernote = Mobile Productivity Heaven! As you may have noticed, over the course of the last few months, I have been blogging a couple of times on how increasingly tough it’s getting for yours truly to keep up with a reliable Internet connection, while on the road, or at home, so I have learned to treasure AND maximise the time that I remain connected to the Social Web to grab all of the information that I need and eventually continue working offline trying to find new methods of improving that offline productivity. And, like I have just mentioned above, I think I may have found that brilliant combination that will certainly help me along quite nicely.  So, I thought, why not share it across over here in this blog, for other folks to perhaps learn a new trick or two, or maybe expose that method across and see if other folks have got other, improved, methods of maximising that online exposure to continue working offline. And here I am! Thus, let’s go for it! Let’s see where it takes us … As you may well remember, at the beginning of the year I mentioned how I was planning to stop spreading thinner out there on the Social Web and focus on what I then called The Big Three, that is, the three major social networking tools that I would be focusing on to get my work done: IBM Connections (Mostly for work related stuff), Twitter and Google Plus.  Well, while I am eagerly awaiting for Google Plus to finally land with its own native iPad App, which I think is coming up pretty soon, perhaps even to mark its first anniversary, who knows!, and while I have been enjoying tremendously the latest version of the IBM Connections App on iOS devices (More on that one shortly, too!), I guess it was time for me to fine tune my Twitter experience, while on the move. And, boy, have I found a superb option right there?!?! Earlier on in the year, I blogged about how Janetter is my all time favourite Twitter desktop client  on the Mac (By the way, it works in Windows, too!) and how I kept looking for a counterpart for my iOS devices, specially, for when I was travelling not bringing along the MacBook Air with me. And I found it. And I bought it. And I enjoyed it. And I started loving Twitter again while on the move! That absolutely essential Twitter App for mobile devices is called Tweetbot and I can tell you that after having tried several dozens of Twitter mobile Apps it’s just as good as it gets. For real! Perhaps at some point in time I will create another blog post along the same lines of the one on Janetter and share Top 10 reasons why I heart Tweetbot big time as my default mobile Twitter client. But for now, I’ll go ahead and share across the main reason why I love that App: having the opportunity of going through an extended catchup of my timeline. You know, when I am on the road I am usually stuck on queues waiting for things to happen. Waiting for public transport, at airports waiting to check-in, or while boarding, waiting for meetings, at conference events, workshops, seminars, summits, etc. etc. you name it. So I keep finding myself with plenty of time to go back in time on my timeline and catch up with my favourite source of news, insights and information on what’s happening around me, work related or not. And I try to make extensive use of it to keep up to date with what’s happening. In most cases I won’t be the kind of person who would be tweeting a lot, unless I’m live tweeting at a conference event, of course, but just reading through the tweets, diving into the Social Flow(s), trying to maximise the time I remain connected to see what’s happening and what I may need to pay attention to. And Tweetbot allows me to do that beautifully. If you haven’t tried it out I can certainly recommend it.  Then, once I bump into those golden gems that I would want to dive into, but that I didn’t just have time to explore further there is a second feature that I truly love from Tweetbot which is just fantastic. Oh, by the way, Janetter also has it, in case you are wondering. And that is a super user friendly integration with another one of my favourite productivity tools that I have been using for a while now: Pocket (Formerly known as Read It Later). Pocket is pretty much like Instapaper, except that it is free. It’s a service that allows you to save links to Web sites to view at a later time while offline! And I must admit that I don’t know why but the overall user experience, and, specially, the flow is far more attractive than that one from Instapaper. So I stuck around with it and I am glad now that I have, because I am enjoying it big time! Pocket has got a bookmarklet, too, that I can use from my favourite desktop browsers, so I can still continue making use of it while using the Mac, but it also has got a fantastic iOS App that provides a superb user experience of fully interacting with the app while reading all of that offline content. It allows you to both search for it, as well as tag interesting items, you can star (mark as favourites) articles, mark them as read and a whole bunch of other nifty capabilities. Like I said, highly recommended! Essentially, the way I use it in combination with Tweetbot though, while on the road, is that I have the latter configured to save items to Pocket with just a single tap, tap, of my fingers and off it goes, so within a matter of minutes I end up with several dozens of articles to read offline for when I am no longer connected. And off I go! Just brilliant!  Then when I am offline, which seems to be happening far too often nowadays with all of that business travelling, I fire up my third favourite productivity tool at the moment, which has become, essentially an extension of my physical memory for everything that I do and that I would want to annotate further, should I want to refer to it at a later time. Got a new idea that I have just come up with and want to write it down, there it goes. Have I got an interesting news article, blog post, Web clipping, thought, insight I would want to bring forward on to an upcoming blog post of mine, there it goes again. Have I got a quick thought I would want to jot down through audio, not a problem, there it goes one more time. Like I said, I truly meant those words that this particular productivity tool has become an extension of my memory. Of course, I am talking about Evernote.  There are plenty of great use cases that I have developed for Evernote, as a personal productivity tool, over the course of time and I will perhaps detail some of the most compelling ones on another upcoming blog post, but one of my favourite ones, at the moment, when combined with Tweetbot and Pocket is that ability of creating a note where I just draft blog posts from stuff I have bumped into through Tweetbot or that I may have saved into Pocket. Then, when I am back on to a steady Internet connection, I just sync those updates into the Evernote servers, get to my MacBook Air, launch both Evernote itself and MarsEdit (My default offline blogging client that I have been using for years now!), copy and paste from one to the other, fine tune the post, proof read it, add links accordingly and voilá! Blog post will then be published! On to the next one! Yay!! And there you have it! All set on to new productivity levels as a mobile social knowledge Web worker. It’s just too funny though, because, just the other day I was talking to one of my good friends at another event, who is also a heavy twitterer himself, and he was surprised how this year I keep taking extended breaks from Twitter and he kept wondering whether I was having enough of it all and decided to give up on it altogether or not. No, not at all. Far from that. What’s happening is that since I keep struggling with staying connected while on the move, I have made the decision to shift towards offline working, where I possibly can, and I sense I have now found that magic formula that would still allow me to remain productive, while catching up with things and then share across what I have learned, which is essentially what folks would be able to find out with these blog posts that I keep sharing across over here every so often.  And it is thanks to that magic formula of Tweetbot + Pocket + Evernote that I have finally been capable of taming that growing pain and frustration of struggling to get work done while I am on the road, but there is still something else out there that has allowed me to improve those offline productivity bursts even more and into levels I never thought possible. This time around though nothing to do much with software, but with hardware accessories. But that would be the time for another blog post coming up next!  Ready? It’s coming … But before we dive into it can you have a guess about what it may well be? Folks who may have seen me face to face in the last couple of weeks may have noticed already what I am referring to, since they, too, loved both of those accessories, but what do you think? Any ideas what they may well be? Stay tuned! Coming up!

My friend's daughter got accused of being ADHD a few weeks back. My colleague Dinesh is keen to take his son Aravind out of school. My friend Sandeep is trying to build software that recognises every child to be a unique individual with their own little achievements. I see a growing sentiment in my friends circle about the current state of education and it's impact on young minds. I don't have a kid, but I can only dread being a kid in this climate. It's a hostile environment that teaches kids to master a curriculum but not to learn. It makes kids competitive but teaches them very little about collaborating, about being better citizens, better people. I have a few thoughts about education and I want to share them with you - it's a real scam. What is this model based on? "If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to. " - Salman Khan We've predicated our model of education on a system that presupposes that kids need to go to school to gain knowledge. It is based on the assumption that knowledge is scarce and you need an expert to dole it out. Except the person who your kid learns from is not really an expert. That person is a middleman. Knowledge is not scarce anymore. You could learn the guitar from a really successful, best selling artist. Using your computer. Not in school. Actually, you couldn't learn from the best selling artist in school. School is really a bit of a deterrent when it comes to learning from an expert. Yet, school is still all about that old model which isn't true anymore. Kids can learn sitting at home, using a service like Khan Academy. School doesn't teach people what our ancestors learnt - applying knowledge to the real world. School instead is preparing people only to clear the next exam. Life skills? Not a chance? Success is in the doing. And failures are celebrated and analyzed. Problems become puzzles and obstacles disappear. - Gever Tulley My nephew is 12 years old. He ranks first in class each year. Awesome eh? More information - he is overweight, he plays no sports, he can't have a real world conversation beyond his textbooks and couldn't survive if his parents were away for even a couple of days. Is that what education is supposed to mean? What about experiencing life and learning real life skills? Where are the tinkering schools of the world? Why isn't every school helping children learn like Diana Laufenberg does? We learn to succeed despite education Children quickly learn to navigate and go in and find things which interest them. And when you've got interest, then you have education. - Arthur C. Clarke I work in a job that I never received any formal education for. I'm quite happy about that frankly. Let me give you an example so you understand why. In school I was deeply interested in plants, animals and birds. But to tell you the truth, the biological names and academic knowledge behind them was of little interest to me. I could spend hours at Alipore zoo admiring the animals in my backyard but to remember a tiger as Panthera Tigris was beyond me. Unfortunately to have an education in nature, I needed to cut up frogs, fish and cockroaches in the lab which I avoided like the plague. I quit biology studies in 11th grade because I just couldn't take it anymore. Why couldn't I just learn about natural history as I do today? I've learnt more about birds and animals as an adult than I did with formal education in school. To me, my self-supervised hours in the field mean a lot more than the supervised hours I had in school. I got educated out of my interests in school and it's no wonder that I'm my current job is miles from what I actually studied to be. Children are wonderful - they have the natural ability to learn if left to their own interests, the internet and the resources they'll need to support their passion. Sugata Mitra's hole in the wall project proves it.Current schools depress me. There's great thinking in various circles about the future of education, but we're not there yet. And it troubles me that my nephews and nieces, my friends' children and kids I care for may have to go through a generation of poor education. I wonder how this'll change - I'm very cynical about this whole scam we call education. I wonder what you think. Especially if you're in India, I'd love to hear your thoughts.© Sumeet Moghe

As I have mentioned on my last blog post, here’s a follow-up entry for today where I’m going to pick things up from where I left them around some additional Productivity Tips for the Mobile (Social) Knowledge Web Worker. This time around not so much on software per se, but on hardware and, more specifically, for two different types of devices: iPhones and iPads. Over the course of the last couple of years I seem to have developed a bit of an addiction with regards to accessories for both of these types of devices, but things seem to have calmed lately now that I feel I may have found just what I wanted: Mophie, Gum Max and Logitech. Indeed, as a mobile knowledge Web worker, always on the move, one learns to appreciate quite a bit those small pleasures of staying connected to a power outlet whenever, or wherever!, you may be working, just to keep up with your productive day work. Yet, time and time again, we keep failing bumping into those pocket sockets, whether at airports, at bars, restaurants, coffee shops, at customer sites, conference venues, etc. etc. You name it. Yet we know that we need to keep things going, because we have to. It’s our job as mobile workers. So how do we do it? How do we keep our productivity levels up while on the road?  Well, in my own case, and after having acquired a whole bunch of accessories, that didn’t quite make the mark, by the way!, t think I may have landed on the Top 3 that have certainly boosted my effectiveness and efficiency, while I am travelling, to levels I probably thought in the past were not possible. Two of them are battery accessories (For my iPhone and iPad, respectively) and the last one is a keyboard / case for my iPad.  You would remember how one of the main key issues we all get to experience, and suffer from!, with our mobile devices, whether smartphones or tablets, is the poor performance of the battery life from each and everyone of them. To the point where we all take for granted that while the battery would be, and should be, better, here we are, in 2012, and the innovation happening around that space is not as rampant, and fruitful as in other areas. So while we keep awaiting for that magic bullet that would revolutionalise the entire market in this area, we continue looking for workarounds that would be good enough to make us move forward.  And after such a long search I think I may have bumped into the perfect combination that has worked really well, for myself, in the last few weeks. And therefore the reason why I thought it would be a good thing to put together this blog post over here to share the experiences of what’s been like finding new tricks to battery life, as well as one of my biggest productivity boosts when using an iPad: an ultrathin keyboard cover.  That’s right, on my last couple of business trips that I have done over the course of the last few weeks I never leave home without my fully charged Mophie Juice Pack Plus, my Just Mobile Gum Max and my Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover for the iPad. They have pretty much become indispensable for yours truly and I wouldn’t know what things would be like without them, as a mobile knowledge worker, because all of that stress trying to find and locate a power socket or all of that frenzy typing with your bare fingers on the touch screen are now things of the past! And very happy to report they are and haven’t walked back ever since!  The Mophie Juice Pack Plus is that super nifty gadget for the iPhone 4 or 4S that acts as a rock solid battery case that allows you to protect your iPhone from damage, i.e. if it falls down or whatever else, at the same time that it gives you a full one and a half time charge of your smartphone regular battery life, which is just tremendously powerful when you are on the road for an extensive period of time and you don’t have a power socket nearby. Not a problem anymore! That Mophie Juice Pack Plus gadget will solve it once and for all. Now, instead of charging my iPhone every single day I only have got to do it every other day, and, if I am lucky, perhaps even 2 or 3 times per week! Again, priceless, if you don’t have access to AV current right away while travelling.  But it gets better, because even if I run out of battery life both on my iPhone 4S and my Mophie Juice Pack Plus I still have got another little gadget that has transformed the way I interact with both my iPhone and my iPad: of course, I am talking about Just Mobile’s Gum Max external battery, which, although originally designed for the iPad, also allows you to charge your iPhone’s battery, should you need to. But then again Gum Max was designed to help you amplify and augment the battery life of your iPad, even the New iPad. And it rocks, just as much! Giving you "a colossal 10,400 mAh capacity, and 2.1A current", it allows you to charge the iPhone battery up to 6 times, and about one and a half the iPad, at tremendous speeds altogether, so you wouldn’t have to wait much before getting back into action. Even more so, you can continue working while charging the devices. So, as you can imagine, long gone are the times where I have to wait for that power outlet to be freed up, or to hunt down that power socket while at a conference venue, right before running out of juice. Now, it’s all back to keep things going, knowing that battery life is no longer a problem for yours truly. Both Mophie and Just Mobile’s smart and elegant solutions have helped me address and fix that growing pain of running out of battery life far too soon, at the most inconvenient of times. And if I’m traveling across the pond, it’s always refreshing to know that I will be over 20 hours in transit without noticing a single glitch of a failing battery life and instead just keep working along!  Yes, I would probably agree with you that both of those gadgets are certainly not very cheap, but I can tell you that if you spend more time on the road than what you do at your home / remote office, it’s definitely one of the best investments that you could ever make as a remote knowledge worker. Highly recommended both of them! And talking about best investments how about if we move on with what I feel has been one of the best purchases that I have done in a long while with regards to anything tech based. At least, for my mobile devices. Like I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, over the course of the last couple of years I seem to have developed an addiction towards accessories, specially, for the iPad, mainly iPad Cases and external Keyboards. I think at this stage I may have tried out about a dozen of them of all sorts, shapes, product specs, capabilities, that you can imagine. And it is something that I haven’t grown tired of just yet. It keeps building up! Although, I no longer feel the same urge as I did before… And all of that thanks to the absolutely delightful, and incredibly powerful altogether!, Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover.  I first read about it on Twitter, of course, where folks were raving around how powerful, yet smart it was; then I saw my good friend Dennis Howlett putting together a lovely blog post where he talked about how good it was, where he also included a short video clip on it. And that was it! I knew it right there that I wanted to have it. No further convincing needed. So while I was in Boston, for the Enterprise 2.0 conference event, I escaped for a few minutes to the nearest Best Buy shop and got myself one. And, boy, did it make a difference on how I do productive work on my iPad ever since! Tremendous! Indeed, over the last couple of weeks I have been using my iPad quite extensively, even while at home!!, definitely much more than with other keyboard / cases I have tried out so far, just because of the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover, because it allows me to do extensive typing away on an instant access device I can take anywhere! So now I actually get to draft entire blog posts, work much more often than ever with Evernote, or whatever other note taking App, with my photos, with file sharing Apps, mindmapping along quite happily, Twitter and other Social Networking Sites Apps, with work related Apps, too! etc. etc. Goodness, it’s transformed the way I interact with the iPad in ways I never thought I would. It’s like combining the best of both worlds: a laptop computer, and a tablet, which for reduced spaces it’s just perfect! Even when inside the plane! It just works without having to self-inflict yourself painful postures! So there you have it. As I continue to keep reshaping my mobile (social) knowledge Web worker user experience in order to get the most out of my productivity, while on the road, I’m finding out it’s a combination of both software and hardware the bits and pieces, here and there, that are helping me reach new levels of effectiveness and efficiency that I never thought I would be able to on mobile devices like my iPhone 4S or my new iPad. Thus, perhaps, it’s also a really good time to resume  that rather interesting initiative I kept going for a good while, but that I left go dormant for perhaps far too long, because I didn’t think it would prove too useful over the course of time. Well, I think I was wrong. And it’s probably a good time to confirm that, don’t you think? It’s about time that I resume again bringing up to live #elsuapps, specially, since I already tried it out, once more, in Google Plus and maybe now I have got a much better chance of sustaining it in the medium / long term, as I keep spending more and more time on the road using all of those super nifty iOS Apps, with the perfect hardware companion to make it relatively easy to roll things up again, I guess! Thus stay tuned for plenty more coolness and usefulness to come along! I am sure you will all enjoy it just as much as I am doing it myself with all of these hardware accessories. It’s like being at a candy store, except perhaps that I have already got my sweets…