You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process. Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help thinking about them. And all thanks to the State of the Net 2012 conference event, hosted in Trieste, Italy, by late June. And all thanks to having watched, in much anticipation, two of my favourite mentors and thought leaders in the space of the Social Web, Knowledge Management, Collaboration, Narrative and Sensemaking: Euan Semple and Dave Snowden. This is the first part of two blog posts that I will be putting together to summarise some of the findings of what I learned from having watched both presentations over the last few days, starting with Euan’s "People Tweet" and then the second article on Dave’s "Tacit Knowledge", since I was originally putting together a single blog entry and it was just getting a bit too long, so I eventually decided to split it up in two to help digest it better, since there is just far too much good stuff in both of their keynotes that I wanted to touch base on as my key learnings. So here is Part One and stay tuned for Part Two coming up shortly already! In "People Tweet" Euan gets to talk for a little bit over 25 minutes on the state of Social Media in general and how, in a way, he misses the good old Social Web, where really good conversations were taking place, as opposed to today when it looks like broadcasting short bursts with your own messages along seems to be the rage of the so-called social tools, specially, those bursts that are no longer shared across by people, but by corporate drones or bots just wanting to get the message across, without an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue. Indeed, the good old known sense of belonging, of connectedness, that we seem to have lost at a rampant pace nowadays, apparently. Euan comes to state that part of the reason why we are heading that way and why we should question it eventually is how much we have ending up industrialising our lives to the point that for a society that tries to move on from the industrial revolution into the digital revolution, we seem to be going in the wrong direction, and perhaps even without not noticing. How we may have sold our souls in the name of security, of safety, of our own jobs, essentially, even though that’s no longer anything else than a myth. Job security, that is, specially, in today’s current financial econoclypse. He worryingly states how the vast majority of the Social efforts out there done by businesses are now down to outsourcing it to agencies, and put a check on Social, and move on, without realising their decision making / power almost disappears from the entire equation for something so important as collaboration amongst knowledge workers and their customers and business partners.  It’s been fascinating watching him talk about how much of the business world today is rather paternalistic, to the point that strong hierarchies are still in place making most of the decision making process as an outsourced activity, reminding me, big time, of the recent TEDx Talk from Isaac Getz on the issues and concerns of doing so. Truly loved his quote on how "we have sub-contracted storytelling to broadcasters" to the point where they are no longer our stories, but someone else’s, in most cases losing the context of what we wanted to transfer and share across in the first place! Goodness, not sure what you would think, but that, right there!, is a massive wake-up call for all businesses out there thinking they are living social this way thinking they will be all right. No, they won’t. Never will. Bound for failure sooner rather than later.  One of the things that Euan thinks we have gone ashtray with when talking about the huge potential of the Social Web and that we have started to miss big time on is having grown-up conversations, for us to start using these social tools for serious things, for things that matter. And how we keep failing about finding our voice because of how fearful we may well be about tasting the lovely waters of writing, of blogging, for instance. From there onwards he starts advocating for how we need to revert that worrisome trend and encourage knowledge workers to not be afraid about writing what we think, what we know, what we say in face to face interactions about things that matter, because there is a great chance that in doing so we will have a good opportunity to change things that may work relatively well, or not. And improve them for the better. But it needs to start somewhere. And Euan thinks that blogging may well be a great starting point and I must say, while putting together this article, that I couldn’t have agreed more with him, having followed that approach myself for over the last 9 years with thousands of blog posts shared both internally and externally and realising how much blogging has meant for yours truly not only on my own personal career, but on sharing across ideas with other folks who may be interested in and helping improve them engaging in those same conversations that Euan mentions on his pitch.  Ha! Who would have thought that blogging would be so powerful in the era of social tools, errr, I mean messaging board systems like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth? Not too bad, eh? Thus, where is your blog in all of this? Think about it as Euan pretty much nails with his commentary about how most of the corporate communications out there are nowadays de-personalised to the point where they are mimicking management speak, where they lack the passion and the emotion of the messages you would want to convey across…  From there onwards he comes to question everyone about when was the last time that we sat down to think about work, to seriously think about why do we do what we do, about the consequences of what we do, about the huge potential of introducing networks behind the firewall, exchanging ideas, sharing with one another, to help democratise how information and knowledge at the same time flow throughout the organisation altogether. What Euan, quoting David Weinberger, mentioned as "Writing ourselves into existence", which is definitely the perfect introduction to the next section of his presentation where he talked about the perfect blend of hierarchy (Which have now worryingly institutionalise far too much altogether!) and wirearchy in businesses where there would need to be a combination of both in order to get the best outcomes from both of them. Where managers need to shake off that flavour of command and control, suit-and-tie, within their organisations and instead realise you are just one node of the network, one of the leaders, who just basically needs to lead by example, lead with an attitude, not your title, or diploma altogether but through ephemeral meritocracies. Just brilliant! Long live all of those trojan mice!  Now, there are a few other things that Euan gets to talk about on that keynote speaker session that I will leave it down to you to watch and enjoy further. Perhaps, I would just want to leave things over here embedding the code of the video, so you can play it right away, and by including as well what’s my absolute favourite quote from his entire dissertation and which is just worth it on its own. Again quoting David Weinberger, and nicely captured as well by my good friend Samuel Driessen:  "Love is what makes the Internet hang together, the basis human desire to want connect to each other" Demonstrating, once again, how the Social Web, as we know it, is a whole lot more than just a bunch of social technologies and tools that we have got out there at our disposal for fun and play and whatever other trivial stuff we are just too used to. We need to be able to re-find our focus, our purpose and our meaning, without fear taking over our actions and interactions, and keep thriving on that journey to become a successful social organisation, whatever that may well be. Essentially, the one we have all envisioned from the very beginning, back in the day. And it looks like writing out loud our way there has never been more powerful to achieve that goal. Even today, more than never…  

This morning at LSConf, the our speaker is Erik Wahl of Art of Vision fame. The conference site describes him thus, "By breaking apart traditional thinking, Erik challenges and inspires his audiences to redefine commonly held assumptions and misconceptions about "creativity," "goals," "success," and "vision." Discover how you can sharpen your creative skills and identify a personal style for inspiring yourself and others to rethink vision and purpose." Very exciting, let's see what he has to say.I can't tell you how awesome this guy's start is. Check out this video to get an idea or maybe this video as a teaser. What a masterpiece this guy creates in just about 5-6 minutes! His hands are dirty, he is in the thick of work within a room of at least a 1000 people. I am in awe. Erik is saying that if we go to a school, and we ask "Who can draw?" everyone raises their hands and now when he asks that question in this room only a few hands go up. Every child is an artist - how do you remain an artist as you grow up? Erik talks about the most important meetings and he wants you to take those meeting notes using Crayola crayons - one of the most recognisable smells amongst adults. Apparently it reduces blood pressure. Drawing is a learned skill like anything else - math, science, design, what have you. He's seeking out the courageous, colourful ideas that are hidden amongst all of us. He's talking about breaking out of our comfort zone - business as usual or technology as usual. We move on to the show "Fear Factor". Erik picks a member of the audience by just throwing a ball and picking the guy who catches the ball. This guy is now going to lead or will delegate to someone else to lead with Erik. And of course, this guy puts his boss on the line! Erik is giving everyone an opportunity to pull out their iPhone because this will be great YouTube material. Surprise, surprise! The guy on stage wins the brilliant painting that Erik drew up live. Taking a risk got this guy a dividend he didn't expect. Fear kills performance - embracing risk creates unexpected results. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real.Do we have the ability to focus, to then commmit but most importantly to adapt? What is the ROI on creativity? What is the ROI to have a differentiation? What's a creative idea worth? In today's market the strongest currency isn't the Euro or the Dollar. The strongest currency is trust. The question to ask is that if we were to start from scratch today what would we paint on our blank canvas? How can we leverage the currency of trust and community to spread our ideas? Our greatest innovations in this world take place on the border of chaos and order. Our mind is a machine that never sleeps. We need to unlock the potential of that mind by combining left brain thinking and right brain thinking. We're getting conditioned to think in a one dimensional way that is about a single right answer. We were taught to be increasingly risk averse, increasingly operationally excellent. Too much focus on the left brain.Time = Money? If we allow money to equal time, we cheapen the value of life. We turn great interactions into transactions. Instead of thinking of ways to ignite our passion or work smarter, we're looking at how many dollars and how many checkmarks we got. Where will the vision for the future come from if we go logically, linearly with the equation of Time=Money? Today we're bombarded with ideas and stimulus in ways than never before. We try to generalise and predict what might arrive by using only a part of our brains to deal with this stimuli. Is there a way we can unlock the potential of our minds when we can look at this stimuli and build emotional connections that'll drive future thoughts?Erik wasn't always an artist. He was told he didn't do things right. And then 9/11 happened and his business collapsed. And by luck or accident he went to a local art store at that point when he touched the canvas, his perception of himself as an artist changed. And that changed his life. He stopped selling his artwork seven years work to raise money for charity. Creativity is now the corporate capital. He will now hide his Monroe painting and he'll drop clues on twitter for people to find it. This is his way of engaging differently! Can we think of ways to engage differently? Do we really need to think like everyone does? We need different ways to experience the world. Most people will see a challenge - can we look at the same challenge as an opportunity? As a finale, Erik does things differently. To the brilliant music in the background and to a standing ovation, Erik draws up Steve Jobs - upside down. Just take a look at the video above (hopefully it'll process by the time you see it). Great talk. It's tough to think of whether you have 10 things to take away from this talk. Was it inspirational to feel that everyone of us is creative at some level? Was it about questions than answers? Was it goose-bump-generating? Was it something that tells me that I can be different? Does it tell us all that we can break free? Hell yeah!To call Erik Wahl "another speaker" is the equivalent of calling the Mona Lisa "another painting." - from his website, but true. It's not often that I have to video sections of a talk to share the emotion it evoked for me - this is one of those talks. I had goose-bumps watching this guy draw to the music and his passion, for art and his brush strokes was palpable. There's an artist in all of us - we got educated, we grew up. We have the opportunity to paint a canvas for the future - free of constraints, free of inhibitions. We need to believe in the currency of trust, believe that the future will be what we'll make it to be regardless of who we are. And that future won't be wonderful and beautiful if we continue to think exactly the same way as we did yesterday. That future needs us to think in ways that we haven't thought before. Thank you Erik - I had to stay back and miss the next talk if only to shake your hand for this inspirational morning. The conference was worth it to just feel your energy.© Sumeet Moghe

(This is Part Two of the series … Part One can be found over here) And on that spirit of what the real impact of Social Computing is, we are going to move onwards on to the second keynote speaker session that I would want to share with you all and talk for a bit about it. Again it took place at the State of the Net 2012 event, the same one where Euan was also one of the keynote speakers. This time around though by one of my favourite thought leaders and KM / Complexity mentors, the always insightful and incredibly knowledgeable Dave Snowden, whose blog, along with Euan’s, are two of my most essential, critical reads of the day, every day. Couple of the main online resources on KM, the Social Web, Collaboration, Narrative and Complexity that keep feeding my brain into the bursts that you folks get to read over here and in other social networking sites over the course of time.  Thus when I bumped into Dave’s recording of his keynote "Tacit Knowledge" I just couldn’t help finding some time and watch through it. It lasts for a little bit over 35 minutes, but it’s one of those essential recordings of the year you just can’t miss out on and I am not too sure I’m going to be doing proper justice to it by sharing along some of the golden gems and insightful glimpses that Dave himself shared throughout all of that time. However, I’m going to try it, encouraging you all though to not miss out on the video clip itself, because it’s one of the most essential resources on The Social Web, KM, Narrative and Storytelling, Complexity, Collaboration, etc. etc. that you would find out there. Yes, indeed, that inspirational altogether and here’s why. As a starting point, Dave gets to talk about tacit knowledge, about the differences between knowing and knowledge and where we should be focusing on. Knowledge is basically collective in nature. And as groups who get to share and exchange that knowledge he brings up a superb point of encouraging, within organizations, the setup of crews (In the military sense) to replace teams, as the latter have got to go through a process of formation and knowing the capability of other people, whereas crews themselves can immediately perform since they are ready to go, trained on role and their role expectations well defined. Brilliant point as well to focus on exaptation, not adaption citing Apple as being the prime example. Truly enjoyed his definition of such concept as well as that other notion that we all live in a state of messy-coherence, although I won’t be saying much more on it, other than encouraging those folks in favour of management, and managing things and people, in general, to go and have a watch. It will help change, or snape, your prospecting on managing things and people. However, the main starting point from Dave’s keynote, and which I got as a key takeaway is how organizations, as we know them today, need to switch from robustness, i.e. organizations preventing failure, to resilience, that is, organizations no longer risk averse, but very capable of learning, adapting, in an agile manner, and recovering quickly from those failures. And how if we would want to make our businesses successful we need to starting thinking about architecting on the assumption of failure and not on the assumption of success, and we would all be much much better off! Truly fascinating!   "Best practice is a bad idea. Full stop" Dave’s words, not mine, not much to do with the flow of this article, I know, but I just loved it when he mentioned it, because, as plenty of folks out there who know me would tell you, for a long while "best practices" still remains as one of my pet peeves, specially, when dealing with knowledge work. They just don’t exist and I am surely glad Dave was so categorically when stating that quote! Loved it! Ok, moving on …  One of the interesting things that you may not know about Dave, but that I have learned from him over the course of the years that I have known him is how when you talk to him, or watch him speak on a keynote, he gets to talk about a whole bunch of different things that initially don’t probably make much sense together, but when you look into it as a whole and you muse about those conversations or presentations you would see how it just makes perfect sense. That’s the full impression you will get as well from this keynote and it’s all probably down to his perception of how we are all Irrational creatures, pattern based intelligences, and not information processing devices. And the best part of that is that we make lots of decisions along the way under these circumstances! Wait till you see his short dissertation on sensemaking and how he describes it as see, attend and act model, three completely different processes altogether.  He also talked about singularity, how and why it’s not going to happen any time soon, not just from a cognitive perspective alone, but drawn from plenty of research around the implications of our physical bodies in constant contact with the world and how we make decisions and choices based on the combination of both of them. Mind-blowing, is the only word that I can think of to describe his insights in this space.  He also discussed how human knowledge requires mediation. We don’t trust something just because it’s published, we trust it because we link through a human network of some type. He ditches the whole concept, notion of Web 3.0, and instead advocates, big time, about how the Web is turning itself into a distributed App environment, where we would get to use multiple specific Apps which embody human knowledge and facilitate us to create composite, allowing to create massively coherent systems. And funny enough if I look into my own Social Web consumption and production of content, he’s absolutely spot on!  From here onwards Dave moved on to what I thought was the best bits in his inspiring repertoire, because he talked about how we need to humanise the Web, how we need to actually recognise that we are humans and we live in a human system. How we have had three decades of a so-called techno fetichism where we needed to adapt to the tools and that implied that we didn’t do much of a good job at it, and how if we pick up a tool it will need fit our hands, and that way we no longer need to re-engineer them, i.e. our hands, to fit the tools, but adapt technology and tools to our hands themselves, which is what we have been doing for thousands of years already. Ha! Taking the whole concept of mobile and HCI into a new level altogether!  "Extrinsic rewards destroy intrinsic motivation". Another one of those priceless quotes that I just have to jot down somewhere on this blog post to remind me every time that someone brings up either intrinsic or extrinsic rewards to motivate your employee workforce. Perhaps one of the biggest issues within the corporate world at the moment, don’t you think?  Incredibly inspiring his words as well on being proactive, on not focusing on measuring networks or the use they make of the social tools at their disposal, but instead stimulate the formation of networks around purposes. Distributed cognition, as we he calls it, giving them freedom within constraints to make decisions. Apparently, the key here is to have those constraints. That’s how we seem to operate better, as human beings. Goodness, who would have thought about that, eh?   Fascinating commentary as well when he describes how we are really homo narrans, vs. homo sapiens. How we are the storytelling apes. Even to take things one step further how the primary mechanism for human knowledge transfer and meaning is through stories. Stories determine our culture. We live in a narrative flow which constrains and directs the way we think, clearly reminding us all the power of storytelling, even for business purposes, like I have recently blogged over here as well.  His final words during his keynote were very motivational and moving altogether, because he kept encouraging us all to, once and for all, leave behind that techno fetichism that has been with us for decades, even on the Web, and how we need to embrace the fact that we have a need for constraints and human interaction. How, used properly, technology can augment human memory and experience. How, used improperly, it can destroy human capability. His final words: "We live in a time of choice between those two alternatives"… And it’s our choice to go for the right one. And somehow I think we all know, deep inside our heads and our hearts, which one we would need to go and aim for, don’t you think?   Whoahh! What an adrenaline rush! Head spinning wildly, eh? Well, that and so much more is what you will be getting yourself exposed to if you just hit play, on the embedded YouTube video link shared above, but I would just want to leave you now with what is my favourite quote not just from his keynote session, but perhaps from the last few years that I have been involved with Social Computing myself. It’s just so close to some of the recent stuff that I have been blogging about, that’s just perhaps a bit too scary, if not hopeful, that we are on track on to greater, better, bigger, more meaningful things. If not, judge yourself from this quote: "98% of our genetic history is as clearly seen as hunting gatherers; our brains and social processes evolve for small, family clan-type groups and tribes. A model of an organisation all for that matter and economic model of society which is based on personal self-interest is fundamentally inauthentic to the nature of human evolution. We evolve as social entities, able to act and know things socially, not individually, and you can start seeing that happening on the Web". Colour me excited and rather privileged for having the great pleasure of thanking both Euan and Dave for their truly inspiring keynote sessions that surely have helped me overcome, big time, those moments of weakness that we all know we face every now and then. Whenever I would have the next one, I will just start reading that quote from Dave and remember both these two articles and their presentations. And I know I’ll be just fine. And I’ll know things will be all right eventually, too!, getting back in business with all of that excitement and joy of continuing to make a difference. Our difference. Yours and mine.

This woman is a star and while not everything was new for me, she's an inspiration to see how much ground you can cover in 60 minutes.Here's just a compilation of the tweets I put out just during here session. And just so we don't lose this in a year's time, here's a list of the tweets from the talk:Do you want to see some amazing showcases of #html5 - check this out http://www.apple.com/html5/ @jkunrein attests this resource #LSConOne more type server for you to use with you #html5 content (not free) via @jkunrein at #lscon https://typekit.com/Adobe captivate #html5 encoder. They are really getting behind the new web. Via @jkunrein at #lscon http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/captivate_html5/Tumult Hype - @nickfloro mentioned it, I love it and now @jkunrein is telling us about it too! #html5 animation #lscon http://tumultco.com/hype/Another SWF converter that allows you to port over your animation to #HTML5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://www.sothink.com/We've used this encoding tool + player before - Brightcove via @jkunrein at her #html5 session at #lscon http://www.brightcove.com/en/And one more free player you can use with your web video content #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://www.jplayer.org/Another video player you can use for web video #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://videojs.com/A free #html5 video player you can use - Sublime #lscon via @jkunrein http://sublimevideo.net/Another video encoder for #html5 compatibility via @jkunrein #lscon http://zencoder.com/Studio style (pricey) video encoding for the web #lscon via @jkunrein http://www.telestream.net/Miro-A super simple way to convert almost any video to #html5 compatible formats #lscon via @jkunrein http://www.mirovideoconverter.com/Raphaël is a JavaScript library that'll simplify your work with vector graphics on the web #html5 via @jkunrein #lscon http://raphaeljs.com/Optimise your PNG files #html5 via @jkunrein at #lscon http://imageoptim.com/Surfacing this site since @jkunrein mentioned this in her talk today #html5 learning #lscon http://www.html5rocks.com/en/Use browser sniffing to figure out what browsers access your content so you can do different things for different platforms #lscon @jkunreinParallax scrolling is an interesting content delivery mechanism I'm seeing on websites and magazines. @jkunrein is showing it #LSConBtw, for really enriching articles by @jkunrein keep checking out stuff she writes for #lsmag http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/authors/304/judy-unrein #LSConCheck out the #html5 starling murmuration and dynamic video here http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/ #lscon via @jkunreinFor some reason I wasnt following @jkunrein. You should see her blog http://onehundredfortywords.com/ #LSCon"@CUtrain: Loved the quote by @jkunrein Create interactive courses, "stop the navigation rage." @bschlenker what I learned yesterday #LSCON"© Sumeet Moghe

In a rather insightful blog post ("Fear of Freedom") my good friend Euan Semple quotes: "Our old worlds of corporate stability are crumbling - the job for life, status and authority from a fixed place in the hierarchy, individual certainty at the price of loss of soul. Many feel at sea and unsure of how to proceed. The old world is broken but we can’t see the shores of a new one yet" as perhaps one of the biggest challenges that corporate knowledge workers keep facing in today’s business world. Then, in another couple of short articles ("Feel the fear" and "Changing the world one word at a time") he comes to confirm the power of the word in the Era of Social Computing as the key trait to overcome such fear and start becoming that agent of change, for the better, through openness and transparency. And, while reading through all three of those articles, which I can strongly recommend reading along, I just couldn’t help thinking about another key element in that equation that not only should we be inspiring employees to thrive in and excel on, but, over time, it’s going to become quite a quintessential key trait of how we share our knowledge and collaborate successfully: critical thinking. The thing though is if you look into the corporate world at large, we have been immersed in a rather long and tedious path of not voicing out our opinions, our thoughts, ideas, concerns and whatever else inside the firewall, and probably outside just as much, in fear of losing our jobs, our prestige, our reputation with our colleagues and bosses, our quiet hard work over the course of the years, you name it. it actually takes us a whole lot of effort and energy to stand out, and when you do there is this tendency that rather the business itself, your boss, or even your own colleagues will remind you that if you become far too vocal they will succeed in quieting your down, eventually. So much so that, over time, what we have thought was, originally, good for us, that is, keep a low profile, it turns out to be rather the opposite, because there is a time where continuing that way we stagnate without looking out for another opportunity to continue to grow, both in our own personal career and as businesses. And I guess that if you look into how tough things are becoming in certain parts of the world with the financial turmoil we are starting to pay the toll for it. And sadly, big time.  But there may well be a way. In fact, there is a way. Back again to critical thinking and, specially, doing plenty of it in an open and constructive manner. That’s the reason why today I’d want to point you to one of those incredibly inspiring, and mind-boggling TED Talks that you may be watching this year. It’s a rather short one, but a brilliant one altogether, because I feel that it has got a major key learning that we need to start embracing, becoming more comfortable with it, and practicing it quite a bit to get the best results of what we excel at: daring to disagree. Indeed, under "Dare to Disagree" Margaret Heffernan does a superb job at convincing everyone, and in a very smart and elegant manner, that "Openness alone cannot drive change". How, instead, we need to inspire and provoke the creation of conflict around theories; basically, she encourages all knowledge workers out there to come forward and through that act of daring to disagree keep challenging the status quo of how things have been running in the corporate world over the last couple of decades. Never mind the assumptions already pre-established from the past, where that kind of constructive dissent, if anything, allows for a much purer, inspirational, trustworthy and resourceful collaboration environment where partners are not just part of their own echo chambers, but, instead, keep driving change through that same constructive dialogue.  She encourages us all to find people who are very different from ourselves. To actually seek out people with different backgrounds, disciplines, experiences and try, really hard, to find ways to engage with them. I guess that’s leaving your comfort zone at its best, specially, when you may not know much about those people. It will certainly require lots of patience and energy, but, here’s the kicker, It’s all a signal of love, as she states, because you care about that act of critical thinking and dissent with your work partners, because you are starting to realise that you are both after the same common goal: do your jobs better. Become smarter, in a way.  The interesting thing from her dissertation is that when we extrapolate that act of daring to disagree in organisations she comes to question "how do organizations think?". Well, according to her, and for the most part, they don’t. And it is not because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. People inside them are too afraid of conflict. Afraid to raise issues, constructive feedback, to be embroiled in arguments they couldn’t manage. It’s just like we all want to be seen as rather nice to our colleagues and become just perfect workmates.  The trouble is, just because of that, organisations can’t think together, therefore we can’t get the best out of them. And what Margaret tries to encourage us all to do is to develop the skills we need to apply plenty of that critical thinking. We need to think and then become very good at it. Goodness! Talking about rather controversial and polemic statements. Right there, that one would be as good as it gets, because I can imagine how time and time again you may have refrained yourself from saying something out loud in fear of what may be said about it, or acted upon, or just simply in fear of hurting other people’s feelings. Just think of it, when was the last time that you had a heated, but constructive, conversation inside your company about a particular topic? My last one was earlier on today and somehow I seem to have developed that habit of having, at least, 3 to 5 of those discussions on a weekly basis, internally, that is. And the best part is that it certainly does take time to adjust to that new raging dialogue, but, once you go through the first iterations, you actually get to acknowledge how powerful they are in allowing you not just to learn plenty of new things while on the job, but at the same time it gives you plenty of opportunities to fix what may be broken in the first place.   Margaret says, and I couldn’t agree more with her, that you need to find your allies and come together, gather around a table (Or a virtual space for that matter), be creative, and change things. She calls those folks whistle blowers, more than anything else, because they are passionately devoted to the organisation and the higher purpose it’s bound to. They do dare to speak most of the time, rather than keep silent and it’s rather fascinating how those very same folks turn out to be the strongest brand advocates of your own brand, just by giving them an opportunity to challenge that status quo of things and see how they could improve the overall business performance of a company. Goodness! Talking about raising a new generation of leaders… A generation of leaders that’s more than ready, and well better prepared than anyone else in a corporate environment, to stand up to authority and engage in meaningful debate. She encourages that not only knowledge workers should be encouraged to have these skills, but she also mentions how they should be taught to young kids at school as well, as part of that essential curriculum of soft skills that are just as critical as anything else to engage at work, collaborate and share your knowledge with a purpose. Just brilliant! And I couldn’t have agreed more with her… Information should not be secret, nor hidden, but available freely out there; that’s why we need to dare to break that silence, or when we dare to see, that’s when we create enough conflict to enable ourselves, and people around us, do our best thinking in addressing and fixing whatever problems. Apaprently, we, human beings, have been made to dissent, to fight constraints through meaningful dialogue, and be critical thinkers about the day to day stuff that we embark on, knowing that we are always aiming at improving things, because that’s part of our nature as well.  Finally, Margaret comes to my favourite piece from her dissertation where she mentions how open information and open networks are wonderful and rather critical to the business; but, at the same time, we need to ensure that we have got a chance to build those critical thinking skills, talent, habits and the courage to use them in a wisely manner. Contrary to what most people think, and I had a big ah-ha moment myself, because I never thought of it in such way, openness is not the end, it’s the beginning. And critical thinking will be the major driver of our interactions and, in a work environment, it will be how we would get work done eventually.    It’d just be a matter of time for us to want to come to terms with the fact of whether we would want to shake off that fear of being rejected, or frowned upon, or told off by our bosses, our colleagues, or even ourselves, and start standing out a bit more, daring to disagree with an argument, if we feel we can drive that change for the better. It’s going to require a lot of effort, hard work, and energy, but if there is something very clear that I got from watching Margaret’s stunning presentation is the fact that it’s up to each and everyone of us to take a stand and decide for ourselves whether we would want to be open enough to allow dissent around us, to find those allies to encourage that discourse, to build further up on that constructive feedback and try to solve of all of those business problems that have been with us for far too long! I’m all up for that… and you? Ready to take open, transparent critical thinking into the next level through our use of social technologies? Willing to dare to disagree and get away with it? If not, what can we do to shake off that fear to make it happen? I hope anonymity is not the answer. Because if it is, I guess that would be a worrying sign that you, or me, or whoever else, is working at the wrong place. And it would be a good time now to move on …  Once again, our choice to make.

This afternoon in the closing session we have the very accomplished Sheena Iyengar - author of The Art of Choosing. I haven't read her book but I hear she's pretty awesome. I'll believe it - I'm all ears.  Sheena has been studying choice for several years and her book explores several questions. Why do we choose? What affects our choices? How can we improve our choosing experience and outcomes? Sheena asks the audience if they're having a good time - loud resounding clap! Sheena takes us into a story about the Draeger's Grocery Store. They had 75 different kinds of olive oils from all sorts of places. Awesome eh? Sheena went there several times but bought nothing! She asked the manager if the choice was actually working for them as a business. They didn't know. So they set up 24 Jams in one place and then another place with 6 Jams. Which place would people buy more jam? While 60% stopped at the 24 Jam store, 40% stopped at the 6 Jam store. However, 30% bought from the latter while 3% from the former. This - if you do the math is a 6 time increase in sales. The paradox of choice documents this phenomenon. Turns out that more choice usually ends up confusing people enough to postpone the decision.Today you have more choice than ever before. You are confronted by 3 trillion bits of information in the air! 15 million possibilities for a soulmate on match.com - brilliant eh? Not so much. This is choice overload. There are three main consequences of too much choices:People usually stick with the status quo - people choose not to choose. No one wants to commit to one choice. Let's look at 401k plans in the US - more fund choices seemed lead to less people participating and hence less savings. It reduces decision quality. Medicare - it's the same story; people are unhappy with the choices they make and a lot of people want to buy directly from Medicare and would love fewer choices. I have the same problem with the new age of social media platforms. The market is so saturated with choices that it's making life worse and fragmented.We're less satisfied with our choices. Think of how much TV programming that's available. You watch a program and then you're unhappy with what you missed. So what's going on here? George Miller (psychologist) came up with the notion of a magic number 7 (+/-) 2. The paraphrasing of the law is that the average person can usually hold 7 (+/-) 2 objects in working memory. So more choice than that is usually a detriment to decision making and choosing. Think about it - when you start a game of chess, you have more choice available (as combinations) than stars in the galaxy. If you have expertise then you can chunk this information and break it down into specific lines of attack. So do you have enough information available to you to make a decision? For example the car you want to buy? SUV, cruise control, automatic transmission, etc - will narrow down your choices and make life easier. Unfortunately you're not an expert and the market is designed for experts.So here are four choosing techniques that help:Cut: Remove the choices. When P&G reduced the number of their shampoo choices, they increased their profits and this is the case with several product lines. Think of Apple - the only choice you have is the iPhone! Don't boggle the mind with extraneous choices. Sheena tells us about leadership perceptions. When a manager gives no choice, the engineer group surveyed rates them badly. When the manager gives them two choices they rate them highly. When the same engineers get 6 choices they again rate the manager badly. You want to give people choices but you don't want to overwhelm them. If you only had one option what would it be? If you can't justify the options then don't put it in there. Concretise: How can you make the consequences of your decision explicit? Why is my credit card always maxed out? Potentially because it doesn't feel as real as spending real money from the bank. To make decisions what you need is not only information but also a feeling of the consequences. It's like in Indecent Proposal when Robert Redford offers a million dollars in return for a night with Demi Moore and it's a hypothesis the reaction is different from when the money becomes actually real. Good example, eh? I came up with that all by myself.Categorisation: Experts are able to categorise information. That being said, a choice provider can be the expert and categorise for the consumer or decision maker. After all, it's perhaps in your interest to help people make a choice. Think of a magazine rack. If 400 magazines were laid out in front of you in 25 different categories you'd be more likely to make a choice. As it turns out our brains are also more equipped to handle categories than choices. So you're more likely to make choices from 25 categories than say five.For example look at the wine categorisation technique that specific cellars use to categorise the hundreds of wines that are available to us.Condition: If we can approach things in a methodical fashion, we're more likely to arrive at a choice than by just the accident of finding 'the right furniture' in Joe's used furniture store. Sheena gives us the example of a German car manufacturer that allow users to custom make their car by breaking down various choices available ranging from certain decisions that have low choice (4) to high (56). Now people that advance from high choice to low make less purchases than those that advance from low to high. Also satisfaction is higher for those that move from low to high choice. People's excitement for choice usually increases with each step and the fact that you build up the condition makes them more excited about the product itself. Start shallow and get deeper. Why does Apple do so well (something I wrote earlier)? Small choice vs heavy choice and people understand their choices much better.Wow, this was a great session on design though not so apparent on the surface. I think there's a lot of meat in there for community managers, leaders, marketeers, sales-people, designers and anyone offering an experience to take a lot out of this session. This lady is brilliant. Sheena maybe blind, but she is helping us see. If you need to use the learnings from this session in practice then check out GLEAM - Global Leadership Matrix (coming soon). This will include several tools with video clips alongside - this'll help you learn about yourself and design solutions that actually make sense. Also, everyone who comes to the website, you'll be able to participate in Sheena's research. Be choosy about choosing. Follow Sheena on twitter and check out her website! © Sumeet Moghe

Over the course of the last couple of years I have developed that habit of watching the recordings of the presentations that I give myself at public speaking events. Not because of having such a huge ego that I would want to see what I looked like or whatever else, but more than anything else, because, apparently, it’s a tremendously powerful learning tool to improve your own body language when you are delivering your next dissertation. And although, I must admit, at the beginning, it was quite a bit tough to watch oneself, once you shake off that awkward feeling of seeing yourself in front of an audience making  some weird moves, it’s a rather reassuring experience of how you could improve your public speaking skills for that next time.  Another interesting way though of improving your own public speaking skills is to, every now and then, hunt down articles, blog posts, hints and tips, and whatever other tricks from other folks (One of my favourites at the moment is this article on "Storytelling tips from the experts at Pixar" which, through an infographic, describes, quite nicely, how to get the most out of sharing stories and / or telling good stories. Of course, it’s Pixar, right? ) who are very well versed on the topic of public speaking and learn from the masters. So much so that when you go through such learning curve you just can’t stop jumping from one ah-ha! moment to another thinking "Ohh, nice one! I could use that one next time around!" or something of the sort. So I thought I would drop by over here today and share with you, folks, two of my favourite resources that I have bumped into just recently as being fully packed with good practices, lessons learned, and plenty of know-how on what it is like being a successful public speaker. Plus a bonus tip… The first one is coming from Ned Potter, who, a couple of weeks earlier, put together this absolutely stunning presentation under the suggestive heading of "Good Presentations Matter", packed up with plenty of incredibly helpful hints and tips, tricks and lots of good practices on how to fine tune your upcoming presentation and where he includes plenty of insights on how to get visuals right! Something that for someone, like myself, who has now become rather PowerPoint averse, I have found them very relevant and resourceful to the point that perhaps on my upcoming public speaking events in September and October I may be using some of them eventually. Ned shared the materials over at Slideshare, so I thought I would share the embedded code over here, so that you would have an opportunity to hit Play and go through them. I can certainly recommend having a look. Specially, the super-advanced MEGA tips:  Good presentations matter from Ned Potter Another really helpful resource on public speaking tips is that one that Tara Hunt (a.k.a. @missrogue) shared as well over at Slideshare not long ago and which seems to have been making the rounds, lately, quite a bit and rather understandably, since it’s just a brilliant source on the practicalities of working your way around the stage and how to overcome all of those potential fears we all have experienced at some point, along with plenty of tips on what to focus on when putting together your presentation and your speech. Another worth while looking into resource, for sure:  How to Rock an Audience: from stage fright to stage presence from Tara Hunt And, finally, to complete this round of, hopefully, relevant resources that have helped me tremendously in improving my public speaking skills, I thought I would finish off this blog entry with the bonus tip, with the one and only, Ze Frank, author of the stunning and always witty A Show, who a couple of days ago put together this 5 minute video clip that’s just pure genius. So packed up with helpful tips that you would probably have to watch it twice, or thrice!, just to be capable of absorbing it all. Yes, I know, that good. And if not, judge for yourselves:  So, there you have it. People keep saying that public speaking is an art, an art that takes years and lots and lots of iterations to get it right and master. It’s a continuous learning experience that helps you grow intellectually as well as emotionally, but one thing for sure is that we can all help accelerate those years by sharing across and learning from those who have already mastered those skills and who have, gracefully, shared their best hints and tips, tricks, know-how and extensive experience without asking much in return. Something to always be rather grateful for, don’t you think?  Thanks ever much, Ned, Tara and Ze for showing and demonstrating how good presentations to rock an audience with a touch of humor and wit do matter after all. Time to get ready for the next one … 

I'm not a tiger expert like Valmik Thapar. I'm not an activist on the field like Vidya Athreya or Dharmendra Khandal either. I am not pretentious enough to consider myself an armchair tiger crusader either - unlike Diya Banerjee. I'm just another Indian who loves the natural history of this country to bits, especially the tiger. I've said this earlier, I'll say this again - there's nothing quite like seeing a tiger in the wild. To photograph it with a stable hand is something else. I have seen the lazy elegance of the lion. I've seen the feline grace of the leopard. There's something about the tiger though that sets it apart from its peninsular cousins. Is it the swagger of the beast - a gait that's quite contrary to its acquired fear of humans? Is it the tiger's beauty? Is it about how elusive it can be in the wild? I can't tell, though I know that to see tigers the wild has been amongst the best experiences of my life till date. I've rarely done anything cooler. "A tiger is a large-hearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated - as exterminated he will be unless public opinion rallies to his support - India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna." - Jim Corbett As I write this post, the Supreme Court of India is hearing a petition by Prayatna - a Bhopal based NGO led by prominent activist Ajay Dubey. The petition, amongst other things seeks to ban tiger tourism in the country as it exists today. The alternative they suggest is for tourism (read safaris) to happen in the fringes of the park, making the core zones of our tiger reserves 'inviolate'. The rationale behind this is that if traditional forest dwellers have left their ancestral land to give the tigers solitude and peace, how can tourists still have access to these woods? There are theories which state that the tiger cannot breed in the constant presence of humans and therefore tourists should stay out. After all the Sariska tigers have not bred successfully since their reintroduction in 2005 - a reason for this (probably) being the presence of villages in the forest. Tourism doesn't also bring too many benefits to local communities. Krithi Karanth's 2011 study titled 'Conservation Letters' revealed some startling statistics - local residents get less than 0.5% of the revenues from wildlife tourism. Even more startling is the revelation is that the park itself gets less than 5% of the revenues and close to 95% goes into private hands.There's anecdotal evidence to say that the presence of tourists does disturb the tiger's life. I shot this tigress at Jim Corbett National Park - named after the legendary hunter turned conservationist. She's a beautiful female just separated from her mother, learning to live the solitary life of a tiger. Look at the picture carefully. Do you see how her tummy's gone well inside? Well, we were responsible for that. Let me explain. A day before I shot this picture, we'd gotten news of her presence in the Dhikala grasslands. We turned our vehicle around from where we were and headed there for a view. The news was right - she was there, stalking wild boar for a morning meal. We waited patiently for her to move across the grassland and grab her quarry, but alas that was not to be. Within minutes, tourist elephants ferrying tourists who wanted a 'closer view' invaded the grassland. The hunt was all over - the tigress stood no chance of making a kill in that commotion. When I saw her the next day (at the time of this photograph), she looked frail and hungry and a part of me regretted what had happened the previous day, though I wasn't directly responsible. So then, shouldn't we ban tourism? It seems to bring no benefits to the local community and it disturbs the tiger. If anything it seems to encroach on the tiger's last strongholds. As it turns out, my view is quite the opposite. The tiger is India's national animal. As Steve Winter would put it, the tiger is 'our bald eagle'. The beauty of tiger tourism in this country is in the fact that anyone with ₹500 ($9.17) can share a vehicle with other people and stand a chance to see the charismatic beast. People can't feel the desire to protect what they can't see or experience. If seeing a tiger in the wild becomes the privilege of just a handful of experts, it will probably mean an end to the love and passion several Indians feel for the beast and its protection. Last I checked, spreading the word was amongst the top few things one could do to save the tiger. When no one can see the tiger anymore, what word do you spread? That there's a mythical beast in the woods which incidentally we don't have access to anymore? "Nobody will be interested in protecting something that they are not allowed to see or experience. Banning tourism in National Parks and sanctuaries will be disastrous for the tiger in particular, and an open invitation to poachers and the timber mafia." Belinda Wright A few days back watchful tourists reported the presence of two suspicious youths in the core area of Tadoba Tiger Reserve. My friend Chirdeep wrote this rather sorrowful story of Maasti - the tiger with an amputated leg. The truth is that Maasti perhaps wouldn't even be alive today had it not been for a watchful wildlife enthusiast on safari. Tourism gives tiger conservation the third eye it woefully needs. In the current situation where patrolling is so ineffective that tigers get killed despite a red alert in the state, tourists end up being free watchdogs for the forest department. This is a service that we can't snub. We can't wish away the issue of disturbance to tigers from tourists. That being said, we have to look at Tadoba and Ranthambhore - two of our most visited tiger reserves. Over the last year the tiger population at Tadoba has gone from 53 to 69. Ranthambhore has a baby boom despite the drones of tourists that visit the park. There's circumstantial evidence in Kanha, Pench, Bandhavgarh and almost every other park that tigers are multiplying in the core zones despite tourism. Yes tourism needs regulation. Illegal constructions on the banks of the Kosi river need to stop. We need unhindered tiger corridors and if there are resorts that block this area, we need to bring them down. We need a strict clampdown on boorish behaviour in parks. Guides, mahouts and drivers need education to keep the interests of the animals first. We need to pay them well, so their livelihood isn't just dependent on the tips they collect in the seven months that the parks are open. As tourists we need to draw our own line of ethics. Do we want to do all it takes for that tiger sighting or are we willing to let go every now and then?There's no point in slamming the elephant assisted tiger sightings of Central India - they are perhaps the most organised and well behaved viewing opportunities for tourists. Under the supervision of park rangers, the elephants ferry tourists four at a time for a five minute, regulated view of the tiger. The tiger is free to move into the woods and if it moves in too deep, the elephants don't pursue. The mahouts keep the tourists in check. The tourist safaris are a different kettle of fish though. The guides and drivers are too scared of losing their tip to admonish ill-mannered guests. While that is the reality of today's situation, every tourist in the wild has a responsibility to self regulate.Last but certainly not the least the forest department needs to relieve the pressure of tourism by creating alternate opportunities for visitors. The buffer zone safari at Tadoba, the promotion of Magadhi and Khitauli in Bandhavgarh, responsible fringe tourism by resorts like Camp Forktail Creek are all steps in the right direction. The tourism industry also needs a fair bit of transparency. The opaque, fax based booking system at Dhikala and Corbett's forest rest houses needs to go. The nexus of the Kosi lodges and the forest booking clerks (read this report) needs to break and make way for responsible tourism. The agent dominated safari booking system at Ranthambhore needs to go - it needs transparency in booking zones and vehicles. The whimsical allotment of prime routes to the tourism mafia needs to stop. The more we can weed out corruption from the wildlife tourism infrastructure in this country, the more accessible we make it to the common man. And after all, we can't save the tiger if the common man doesn't care about it. "Wildlife tourists carry cameras, not axes. They do not poach, do not submerge forests with dams... They are being unjustifiably blamed for killing tigers." Vishal Singh - TOFT I sincerely hope that the Supreme Court acts wisely in its decision on the Prayatna case. Tourism when well regulated can be a great tool for conservation. I can't express in words how it has opened my mind and enriched my life. I hope this doesn't remain a privilege I speak of in the past tense. The next generation of Indians deserves to still enjoy our wilderness just as I have in the past few years. © Sumeet Moghe

I have been in the IT industry for well over 15 years now and for a good number of them I have been relying on multiple different systems. One of them being Windows. Fast forward to today, and as most folks out there would know, if you have been following me on any of the various social networking sites, I have been using Apple products (Macs, iPhone and iPad) for nearly 6 years now and, just recently, I have finally come to terms with the main reason why I made the switch back then and have never walked back. My levels of productivity and effectiveness have never been the same anymore. And it’s just too funny that it’s all due to having watched a recent video clip in Wired from a never-aired Apple commercial in 1983! Yes, 29 years ago some folks over at Apple truly understood and fully embraced the Power of Social. Who would have thought, eh? I am sure you are all wondering what I am talking about, which video is that one that I am referencing above, what difference does it make that I have moved to the Mac nearly 6 years ago on how I view my own involvement with social networking for business and how I’m more and more convinced they may have provided us all with that tipping point of why there is hope that the Social Enterprise concept will stick around for a long while, if we pay attention to how plenty of large enterprises and businesses are looking closely into the potential impact of Apple devices inside of the workplace (Despite some horrifying experiences that we have bumped into just recently as well).  Well, I am referring to this piece in Wired, under the title "Former Apple Engineer Posts Unseen Mac TV Ad From 1983", which references this Google Plus post by Andy Hertzfeld where he quotes an Apple commercial for the original Macintosh that they did in the fall of 1983, but which, apparently, never aired and I think I can see why! Although it is not the main sentiment that Andy mentions on the Plus post. Here it is the embedded code, so that you can play it. It lasts for a little bit over a minute:    Noticed something different in that advertisement? No? Really? Don’t worry, I’m not talking about the discourse of how the Macintosh came together in the first place, but about something a whole lot more subtle that has escaped most people’s perceptions on the repercussions of such bold statements. Specially, my favourite one. The one from Mike Murray, the Director of Marketing of the Macintosh division back then, who just basically stated the following:  "And I think what you are going to see is that the balance of power is going to shift. The balance of power from companies running people to, hopefully, people running companies" [Emphasis mine] Does that ring a bell? Specially, in the context of Living Social in the workplace? You bet it does! And this is where I came to realise what making use of Apple products has meant for me over the course of the last few years, as I got more and more heavily involved with technology and social networking tools, for that matter, to get my work done. That’s the fact that technology is no longer a hurdle for yours truly. There are no more headaches, no more screams, nor yelling, at the screen b*tching about why a certain action didn’t take place when I did everything correctly. No more demotivated and frustrated things don’t turn around on the screen just right, as you would have expected. Finally, it all eventually falls into place. It all just works! And beautifully. And that’s certainly the beauty behind that powerful quote from Mike, because, if anything, it allows us to do something that would be very much needed at this point, which is forget about technology, use it as a tool, as a means to achieve a goal and focus on the behaviours, on the mindset, on changing people’s habits, on helping them understand you, too, can have a wonderful experience, i..e. eventually, becoming more effective and efficient at what you already do, without having to suffer from the odd technology hiccup, just like that, allowing you to focus on what we would always need to focus on: the conversations. The conversations with people regardless of where you and they are, regardless of the device you are using, whether mobile or not, and regardless of the nature of the interaction. Just converse. Who would have thought that, 29 years ago, the vision was already there! Who would have thought that those folks portrayed on the video clip were on a bigger mission: helping shift corporate dynamics from a rather heavy technology focus / fetishism, where people were just resources, towards that much more liberating, creative, inspiring, collaborative and knowledge sharing prone environment where people were, still are!, people, interacting with the tools to get something out of those interactions, because tools will always be tools. Yes, some times it would be hard to explain. But then again, that’s where play kicks in. We do need more play at work. Specially, for all of that stuff that we find difficult to justify and explain, but that it’s essential to every single business. Something that people, human beings, have been excelling at for many millennia. And for plenty more to come along! Yes, I almost became an instant #fanboi. Almost. but what a powerful one-liner, don’t you think? One that can certainly change the world. For the better. Our little corporate world and the larger one for that matter, too!

10:30 AM, 21st February, 2012. Time to get off a rickety rickshaw, and get going for a bumpy and dusty ride to Kaziranga National Park. This was leg 2 of our 9 days in paradise (remember Nameri?). When I say bumpy and dusty, you've got to take me seriously. Now, how bad can a 65 km drive be? Well, the answer is, "It depends...". Depends on what - you may ask. Well, it depends on how good your driver is and whether or not you can pull up your windows, turn on the AC and be immune to the dust around. We didn't expect it to be too hot in February, so we'd gone for a non-AC vehicle. I'll leave the rest to your imagination. Let it suffice to say that when eventually we washed our faces at Wild Grass Resort in Kaziranga - the basin was full of brown water!That incidentally was the story of our entire stay at Kaziranga. February is right at the end of the dry season in Kaziranga and the forest is a proverbial dust bowl. The fine dust is pretty similar to what we'd seen on the banks of the Jia Bhorali back at Nameri, so this wasn't a new experience. That being said, it wasn't exactly how we'd pictured it. Speaking of pictures though, Kaziranga has to be amongst the best places in the country to photograph big mammals. A savannah more African than Indian, Kaziranga's landscape is dominated by tall elephant grass. And through their blades emerge some of the largest mammals you'll see in India. The Asiatic wild buffalo, swamp deer, the Asiatic elephant, the Royal Bengal Tiger, the Asiatic leopard and the mascot of the park  - the one horned rhinoceros, all take turns to throw visitors into a photo frenzy as they suddenly materialise.But beyond megafauna, the grassland habitat, marshland, and moist tropical forests play home to over 500 species of birdlife. Add to that smaller mammals such as otters, mongoose, jackals, foxes, cats and pangolins - Kaziranga is an absolute jewel of India's wilderness. Try not to get killedLet's count our odds. Kaziranga is home to 80 odd tigers, some 140 leopards, about 2000 elephants, a similar number of rhinos and more than 1600 wild buffalos. Dangerous enough? To protect these animals, the guards have very strict rules - no one walks around the park on foot. If you do, there are no questions asked - you first get shot. If you stay in your vehicle, you're likely to stay alive. As a measure of the risk you've got to know that about seven guards lost their lives to wild animals last year, despite being armed.I of course like to learn my lessons the hard way. As a lot of you will know, I love birds - and photographing them. Nameri hadn't given me much joy on the photography front, so I decided to exercise my shutter finger a bit extra in Kaziranga. So in search of birds we finally found a beautiful brown fish owl. Right on the side of the road. As it happens when you have four people with long lenses in a vehicle, we were indecisive about what the best angle for photographs would be. A little to the front and little to the back - the bird lost patience and flew to a less flattering perch. I was undeterred. That day we had a forest guard with us - I took his permission and decided to try and photograph the bird on foot.Picture this. I get off the vehicle and walk about a 100 metres back to where the bird was. The forest feels unusually calm. As I get to the bird I pull up my camera and take a few record shots first. Then I decide to try a few different compositions. Even as I make up my mind on how to make the most of tricky lighting and a bad perch, my friends wave frantically to get my attention. "Is there something even more exciting to see?", I think to myself. And then, I see the guard leap down from the vehicle and pull out his gun. "Come back, come back.", he says as he runs towards me. "This can't be a photography subject...", I say to myself as I run back towards the vehicle, sensing some urgency. As I begin my leisurely jog, I see what everyone is worried about. Hardly 50m from where I am, a two-tonne male rhino is waiting to cross the road. Phew! That's a close one! I have to say, I didn't feel scared at the moment, but in hindsight I realise how close I was to dying - quite painfully. Rhinos of course have very poor eyesight and that's what worked quite well for me - it smelt me and so was tentative about whether to cross. At the end of the day, I've got to count the big guy as a really gentle being - one that preferred to wait and avoid conflict. That day taught me an important lesson - regardless of how calm things may seem, never take things for granted in a forest. Rhinos like cows?"We'll see so many rhinos, that you'll equate them with cows.", that's what Raji had said to me when we started out in Kaziranga. Ok to be fair, her friend said that to her and she repeated the statement back to me. I'm sure several others may have had exactly that experience, but I can't say I was tripping over rhinos. We saw our fair share and we definitely got some really good photographs. That being said, how many rhinos you get to see depends purely on your luck and the ranges you choose to visit. Kaziranga National Park has four ranges - Kohora (central range), Bagori (western range), Agoratoli(eastern), Burapahar and the Panbari reserve forest. The eastern range is a birder's paradise - not surprisingly we spotted more than a 150 bird species during our stay, most of them in that range. The western range is a great place to spend your evenings with large mammals. The central range is a best of both worlds. Tall trees make for great raptor perches and the proximity of grazing landscapes makes for great encounters with the bigger animals. No one wants to go to the Burapahar range and the Panbari forest which needs special permission was closed when we went to Kaziranga. Our decision to split our time across the remaining three ranges paid off - I think we got a good sampling of what Kaziranga has to offer; though I must say I'll have to go back and spend some more time there to get to know the forest better. And who knows what mysteries this forest hides that I haven't yet experienced? How many tigers?I usually have pretty good luck with big cats. I will say this though - don't go to Kaziranga if you want to spot a tiger or a leopard. The grass is so tall that sometimes you have to struggle to spot an elephant. Secretive, solitary hunters like tigers are difficult to photograph unless of course you're Steve Winter and can set up camera traps all over the place. Go to Kaziranga for the birds and the large herbivores. If a tiger's what's on your mind, pick another park. We came tantalisingly close to spotting a tiger - but it gave us the slip. All fair and well though, since we didn't miss the big cats at all! Travel TipsIf you're planning your trip to Kaziranga here are a few tips that'll come in handy.The best time to visit Kaziranga is between December and February. This is a relatively dry season, there's good light; the forest department also burns the grass during this time which makes for relatively unhindered wildlife viewing. Plus, it's absolutely brilliant weather for the most part.Kaziranga is quite close to Jorhat airport. As compared to Guwahati which is about 230km away, Jorhat is just 80km from the park. If I had to go only to Kaziranga, I'd perhaps choose a flight into Jorhat.We stayed at the Wild Grass Resort. Mr Manju Barua (+91-3776-262085), the owner is a very knowledgeable man and extremely hospitable towards wildlife lovers. The manager, Dilip Gogoi is a bit of dead-fish by appearance, but don't get fooled by that facade. He quietly makes sure that he caters to all your needs.We got a pretty good deal from Wild Grass. All four of us stayed in one huge room at just ₹1300 per night with breakfast included. Our meals were an additional ₹750 per person per night.There are several other accommodation options too. The Assam tourism lodges are perhaps the most inexpensive, though I'm not sure of the service. There's lodges like the Dhansari eco camp and luxury resorts like Iora that complete the picture. From the number of homestays and small hotels I saw on the road, I can't imagine that it'll be too difficult to backpack into Kaziranga either.Wild Grass will arrange your safaris too. We got a rate of ₹3200 for two game drives a day from them which is about ₹400 less than that of the gypsy association at Kohora. That said, the side facing vehicles at Wild Grass didn't feel very photography friendly for a group of four. I can imagine they'll be fine for two people, but for four of us with telephoto lenses, we got front facing vehicles from Kohora.Wild Grass has some amazing guides. Kunwar, Palash and Naqeeb are perhaps their most talked of guides on the blogosphere, but I'm pretty sure that their other two guides are also pretty good. I'd recommend Wild Grass most highly just for how knowledgeable their guides are.If you'd like to go on an elephant safari, you should plan your morning drive at Kohora. The elephants set out for an hour at 0530 in the morning and the ride costs ₹325 per person. While you don't always have the best photography angles, the elephants give you a good chance of getting very close to the rhinos and swamp deer. Your best bet of seeing a tiger is also from atop an elephant. We of course, almost fell off the elephant in the excitement of seeing a Siberian Rubythroat.Wild Grass arranged our pick up from Nameri for ₹2500 - I suggest asking for an AC vehicle if you're coming in from there so you can beat the dusty roads. The drop back to Guwahati was ₹4000 - this seemed like a reasonable rate.The Hoolock Gibbon Sanctuary is just a stone's throw from Kaziranga - home to the Hoolock Gibbon; India's only ape. I strongly recommend a visit - more about that in another post.Most importantly - if you want to photograph, be mindful of the dust. My friend Chirdeep's 100-400mm lens stopped functioning mid-way through the trip. Of course, he'd been through similar hell in Kanha and Bandhavgarh in 2011, so it may not have been entirely because of Kaziranga.© Sumeet Moghe

A few days back, my good friend, Bertrand Duperrin, put together a rather interesting and intriguing blog post under the suggestive heading "Employees don’t have time to waste narrating their work" where he shared some very thoughtful insights on the potential burdens behind the whole concept of narrate your work, working out loud or observable work (a.k.a. #owork) that have always been highlighted as perhaps some of the major key benefits from using social networking tools for business in a corporate environment. But it looks like, apparently, there are some potential risks along the way: mainly, knowledge workers not wanting to participate (through blogging or microblogging, as primary examples) due to lack of time, since their day to day workflow seems to be interrupted abruptly due to that lack of integration of social technologies into where the real work happens. Bertrand brings up some really good and excellent points that I can certainly agree with to a great extent, specially, this particular quote: "And don’t forger that separating the tools where problems are from those where solutions can be found is not the best way to improve the performance of your organization". That’s just such an absolutely spot on assessment of perhaps some of the main issues we are currently seeing on why not enough knowledge workers start making use of social technologies to help them improve their productivity and effectiveness. But if we take a look closer, then we are going to find out that perhaps the tools where problems are, and therefore where knowledge workers get work done, may not be the right tools in the first place. And that’s, on its own, another big issue that needs sorting out.  Indeed, if you get a bunch of knowledge workers out there and you ask them openly where they spend the vast majority of their "working time" they would tell you that, right now, it would be down to two different spaces: e-mail and meetings. To the point where from a typical 8 hour work day, and we all know those have ceased to exist many years ago, despite current research indicating how beneficial 40 hour work weeks are, a large chunk of that workflow is dedicated to rather processing email or hop around from meeting to meeting (Even virtual ones!) to no end. Or even both!, accounting in most cases for 7 to 9 hours per day, every day, just doing that: processing e-mail and attending meetings.  The mind-blowing thing is that we all know how pernicious and damaging it can well be to one’s productivity spending too much time just handling your email, recent research quoting how we spend up to one quarter of our day just doing that, making a fine total of 650 hours per year on it. And yet we don’t seem to complain, or would want to complain!, much about it! Talking about the unbeatable status quo of e-mail in the corporate world as just something that everyone takes for granted, including wasting everyone’s time on it. Well, except for "A World Without eMail", of course, which is one of the reasons why I got things started with it over 4 years ago. Ohhh, and I think it’s probably a good time now that I start working on another massive progress report to show and demonstrate where we are in challenging that status quo of corporate email. Thus stay tuned for plenty more to come along! The thing is that meetings are not doing much better either! Plenty of people keep stating that meetings are essential, if not, critical, for every business, yet, we keep bumping into a good number of resources, cites, quotes, articles, blog posts, research, etc. etc. that state how ugly meetings are nowadays due to how good they are at killing our very own daily productivity, despite the several good attempts we have seen recently on sharing good practices, hints and tips, techniques, and best know-how of hosting effective meetings. Yet, it hasn’t happened. We keep taking them for granted, yet we do seem to want to do very little to challenge their own status quo, even though in most cases those meetings are now being seen as a useless power struggle, an informal gathering where nothing happens, a bullying tactic to dominate the workplace, a pastime, in short, a complete waste of time. Perhaps, what we need is #lwwm - Life Without Worthless Meetings. Or maybe not. Maybe what we would need to do is take back our own productivity and effectiveness, as knowledge workers, and stop using those time wasters from our day to day work, so that we can continue getting the job done effectively. Essentially, what we would need to do is to start, if you haven’t done so already!, challenging the status quo of those business pain points that we all seem to know what they are and how they are affecting our productivity, but that we reluctantly won’t do much about it. Well, now we have the perfect use case for addressing those pain points: using social technologies to keep narrating our work. Basically, social networking tools like blogging, or microblogging, that Bertrand mentioned above as examples, to open up our interactions, to free ourselves from the email and meetings yokes, to become more transparent on what we do, because as he mentioned on that article he put together, the more open and transparent we become in the workplace working out loud the much easier it would be for everyone else to help you when you would need it. This is, exactly, what I have been advocating for myself for a long while, along the lines of this quote: "How can I help you, if I don’t know what you are doing? How can I help you, if I don’t know you, your work, and what you are trying to achieve? Help me please to understand your work, so that I can do my fair bit and help out where I can".  The rather interesting thing from making that switch into becoming much more open, public, transparent on how you work is that, contrary to what most people seem to think, it’s everything, but a waste of time. By shifting gears, and changing mindsets into a new set of habits one finally realises that you no longer have to fight the corporation, you no longer have to justify your work (since it is out there readily available to everyone!), you no longer have to keep distrusting your colleagues and bosses since they don’t know what you are doing and you don’t know what they are doing, you no longer have to put up with all of those frictions in meetings trying to make your point across, so that you have something to say. And the list goes on and on and on. Now, by making the shift to social technologies all of that extra baggage on having to justify both yourself and every bit of your work is now gone. Imagine the time savings! Imagine if all of a sudden you get to save 3 to 4 hours per day of not doing emails but instead using microblogging or activity streams, for instance, where networks and communities continue getting work done without worrying too much about all of that stuff we know we can do without from the traditional hierarchical, overstructured, much process / technology driven corporate world. Imagine if all of a sudden you stop attending meetings you are not supposed to, or reject those other ones where they are asking for your information and contribution when all of that data is readily available out there. Yes, social networking tools for business will take some of your time, but if you look into your current business pain points and how social technologies could help you address those, I bet that you would be saving a whole lot more time by living social than by having to reply to, yet again, another chain of emails or prepare yourself mentally for that meetings galore to happen throughout the whole day.  Frankly, I prefer to live social, thank you very much. I prefer to receive 15 emails per week, as part of "A Work Without Email" that I have been doing for over 4 years now, and attend about 10 meetings per week on a good week, which is the average I am doing at the moment, as part of that effort of "Life Without Worthless Meetings". In short, I rather prefer to take back my productivity, having finally succeeded in addressing my business pain points and, instead, get out there, mix and mingle with my networks and my communities, learn from them, share my knowledge with them out in the open, participate in the conversations, become better at what I already do excel at and, eventually, get my work done openly, networked and interconnected, which is what matters at the end of the day, really, but with one key difference: I am now in control of my own productivity through social technologies. Something that I couldn’t have said before when I was relying far too much on both email and meetings. And you? Still think that social networking tools for business are a waste of time, even if they are not integrated into your day to day workload just yet, pretty much just like email or meetings have been over the years? You may need to think about it again and start questioning whether you could become even more effective and efficient at what you do with your productivity, because I am certain that social networking tools would, indeed, help you save, and reinvest much better all of that precious time to work then on far much more fascinating work. Isn’t that what we would all want to achieve at some point … ? 

One of the things I remember reading about, early on in my enterprise 2.0/ social business journey was Andrew Mcafee's definition of what makes social software tick. He spoke of three characteristics - emergent, freeform and frictionless. Those definitions still ring true in my head. As I look at how enterprise social software matures it seems to be moving away from those characteristics quite a bit. To the extent, that enterprise social software loses the edge it promised to provide. Do one thing and keep it simpleOne of the features of consumer social software which in turn encourages enterprise use cases is the fact that most of these tools do one thing and they do it well. Take for example Twitter - 140 character status updates. Or Pinterest - create a digital pinboard. Or for that matter delicious - create a list of online, shareable bookmarks. Let's look at Path - share updates with your close friends. Each of these platforms keep things quite simple. One metaphor, really simple usage - so much so, that despite the fact that Twitter keeps its help hidden under an obscure menu, you don't miss the lack of instruction. Enterprise social bloatware?Compare this to a lot of the enterprise social software you see. Let's take cyn.in for example - I have nothing against the platform; it's great. I just need a scapegoat. Cyn.in is a wiki, a blogging platform, a file repository, a discussion forum, a social bookmarking platform - all at the same time. And more! So, do I create a document or a discussion or a blogpost? If Sheena Iyengar taught me anything - more choice is not always a good thing. People like to stick with the status quo and not choose anything. Is that really what we want as a consequence of enterprise social software? Let's be realFor a lot of us social media enthusiasts, life's a nice happy bubble. We hang out with other social media geeks, we network with them online, they sing its praises as we do and it seems the world has changed. Yes the world has changed, but only so much. For a large number of people and granted they may not be a majority, social media still isn't their bread and butter for communication. Complex social platforms that combine several features and numerous bells and whistles only scare them away. Think about it - if you're not social media savvy and you have to make a choice between a wiki, a status update, a blogpost and a discussion - what would you do? And what if you had to break through the most complex security system to access this platform when you can easily get to email on your Blackberry? (note I say Blackberry, not iPhone) Let's appreciate that there's a non-trivial audience size that fits this description and the only way social software wins is by being undisputedly easier and better. Back to the basicsWe need to rethink our strategy with social business platforms. We need simplicity - one metaphor, simple usage patterns. The more sophisticated we make the platforms, the more difficult the change, the more resistance the poorer the uptake. This is when people question change - if something isn't 10x better than the status quo, we naturally choose the status quo. Cisco seems to have thought this through with Cisco Webex Social by taking away superficial choices from content creation. Yammer's always been very good at this - they're a Twitter clone for the enterprise. I say that with great respect. Socialcast seems to be doing this right too. I can't say this however for the majority of the social business landscape. Let's remember the frictionless bit of McAfee's definition. I believe the future is bright, but not blingy. I fear that the focus for some social software giants is turning out to be bling, though. Please, for the sake of all we stand for - get back to the basics!© Sumeet Moghe

Back in 2003, Bill French coined the now rather popular quote "eMail is where knowledge goes to die" that’s been making the rounds all along and which over 4 years ago I decided to adopt myself (Or kindly steal, errr, I mean, reuse, if you would want to call it that way), as part of that new mantra of mine on Living "A World Without eMail". Well, nearly 10 years later, and only 6 after its birth, I think I’m now ready to declare something that I never thought I would be claiming, at least, not this soon, but I am afraid we have reached that point: Twitter is where conversations go to die. Sadly.  It took email over 30 odd years to reach that status where more and more people started to question its long-standing status quo within the corporate world and it looks like Twitter has accelerated that same perception to just a few years within the Social Web, without even entering the corporate world altogether!, but, based on what I have been seeing over the last few months I’m starting to think that we maybe well be a bit too late into the game and we may not be able to get back out it. Twitter has now become, once again, another messaging board system, like a good bunch of them out there of the once so-called social networking sites. Not anymore. And here is why…  I have been using Twitter for over 5 years now (I think I can track it back to around March 2007 when I created my main Twitter ID @elsua) and all in all I have been having one of those rather heated love and hate relationships with it, with its ups and downs, with its wonderful experiences, but also with its rather painful ones, with moments of pure brilliance and genius, combined with others that I am afraid I just can’t explain myself. The thing is that, almost right from the beginning, I knew that if I wanted to make Twitter work its magic for me to even become part of My Big Three social networking tools I needed to focus rather heavily on the connections, the relationships, the knowledge sharing activities, the collaborative interactions, the innovative and creative side of those wonderful conversations, the immersive, constant and rampant learning experience one kept engaging with time and time again spending, after all, countless hours just to keep up. WOW, boy, did we have a good blast?!? For sure! And a real one! I knew that I was not going to focus much on the social networking tool per se, more than anything else, because the experience, all along and throughout those 5 years, has been quite a horrifying one on its own, an appalling attempt to keep grabbing your attention, as if you didn’t have anything else to do!, with a rather poor performance, lacking scalability big time, with silly limitations with its API, capped, or better said, rather crippled searching capabilities, incredibly dull, boring and unappealing front end Web site, with huge amounts of spam making it rather difficult to even enjoy the tool any more and perhaps too many pretensions to try to reach a certain status that has never managed to achieve: indispensable. And this is the time we are now, where the user experience of the Web site, along with both its desktop client TweetDeck, or its iOS client(s), are still horrendous, and rather depressing, but where it looks like Twitter, the beast, the Kraken, has finally awoken from that ideal world we all thought we were living in, that one of being so powerful enough to change the world any which way, that it has, finally,  decided to kill the very main reason as to why it’s reached the success it has at the moment and over the course of the years: its entire unique ecosystem of developers AND end-users as ONE entity. How about that? I am sure by now you may have been reading the extensive amount of buzz that a recent announcement by Twitter itself has generated out there, on Twitterland, as well as blog posts, articles, news sites, etc. etc. Twitter has decided to start killing itself slowly, but steadily, by dictating a good number of rules of how that ecosystem should behave in order to make full good use of the capabilities available. And failure to do so would mean a cease and desist notice. Yes, it’s going to be a rather slow and painful death, because if there is a well known universal law out there in the Social Web is that if you would want to become a success in an already rather crowded Social Web space you need to count on that magic combo of both end-users AND developers, because if you don’t have such balance you are going to struggle and quite a bit. And Twitter is just about to experience that soon enough for us all to be reminded that social technologies are just that, tools, enablers, and that, as such, they come and go. Well, Twitter has just started its exit interview and it’s going to be rather nasty, as Martin Varsavsky brilliantly highlighted on this one single tweet a couple of days back:  What Twitter did, to use companies like Seesmic to grow and now killing them with their new API rules, is evil. — Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars) August 18, 2012   But, regardless of the implications of Twitter’s attempt to control its own environment and ecosystem, so that those who invested in it can be proved there is an opportunity to make big money by bastardising your core beliefs and founding principles, and become, all of a sudden, another publishing / media company on the Web, not even a social networking tool anymore!, there is something more worrying, extremely worrying, actually, that’s going to help accelerate its own demise and big time. And that’s us. Yes, only us. No-one else. We, the end-users, were the ones who made Twitter a smash hit back in the day and we are the ones who are going to help bury it and attend its funeral in very short time.  When was the last time that you had a bl**dy good conversation in Twitter? I mean, a real one. Yes, you know, a conversation of more than, say, 3 to 5 tweets on a single thread with one or more participants? When was the last time you were trying to catch up on a conversation from those wonderful people you decided to start following, because you felt they would manage to rock your world, if you would give them a chance (And, yes!, back in the day they surely did!)? When was the last time you were blown away by a short exchange of exhilarating blurbs of less than 140 characters that left you wowing like you have never seen before? I bet that’s been a while, perhaps far too long ago… The thing is that Twitter was never designed to keep up with conversations, it was never envisioned as an open, public social networking dialogue between passionate advocates for whatever the topic with an inner urge difficult to surpass to connect, collaborate, share your knowledge across or innovate on some really cool initiatives. Yet, we, end-users, with the superb help and support from one of the richest ecosystems of amazingly talented developers managed to tweak Twitter, to hack it around in ways never imagined possible, and build brilliance out of it. Remember @s (Mentions) when they weren’t Mentions, but Replies? Remember hash tags? Remember any of the hundreds, if not thousands of Twitter related Apps that allowed us to tap into those conversations with prime examples like Janetter or Tweetbot as of late? Ahhh, those were the times, indeed!  And I missed them, and big time! Because over the course of the last few months I have started to notice something that I never thought I would find possible, at least, not this soon. Nobody reads Twitter anymore. Better said, let me rephrase that in another way: nobody reads your tweets anymore! There used to be a time when we did though. When we took care of perhaps not reading the entire timeline to dig out all of those wonderful golden gems that made it totally worth it hanging out in Twitter, but a large chunk of them to make sense of what was happening around us. The good old Ambient Intimacy (coined by Leisa Reichelt, a.k.a. @leisa, back in the day) or Declarative Living (coined by James Governor, a.k.a. @monkchips). Fast forward to 2012 and we are just now far too busy with ourselves with our key, important messages, that we would want to blast out to our networks thinking we know better than them what they need, even if we haven’t asked them first about it!, because we all feel conversations are just that: sharing your messages never mind everyone else’s. Why bother, right? I mean, you don’t have time for that. You need to move on! You are just far too busy with things, right? See? This is what traditional marketing has been doing all along, i.e. finding new channels to keep doing the same good? old stuff without much care in between, and disappointingly enough traditional marketing is winning, because we are being used ourselves (by ourselves!) to behave in exactly the same way! "Twitter is where conversations go to die". Gosh, it really hurts when I write that down. It hurts even more when I come to think about it, specially, how we are the very same ones misusing, and abusing, even, this unique and wonderful opportunity to reach a global sense of connectedness. Of co-ownership. Of co-shared responsibility for one another, to help each other, to connect, collaborate and innovate together. And, instead, we have just made the switch and started blasting out our messages thinking, and believing!, that Twitter is just another messaging board system where attention is no longer required, because conversations are no longer taking place, so why bother, if I have shared the blurbs I wanted to share and can now move into the next thing. Ever look again into Trending Topics? When was the last time that you didn’t find anything related to watching something on TV, or a movie, or a sports event or a celebrity passing away (According to Twitter, at least!) or, you name it. You do know what I am getting at. In a way, Twitter has gone mainstream, but of the worst kind. Twitter has become industrialised. Once again, another social networking site biting the dust and become absorbed by that frenzy of becoming the new media. And annoyingly enough we seem to be pretty ok with it, because we are not doing much to revert it, in fact, we keep feeding the beast, and more and more by the day with all of those tweets we all know no-one reads anymore, but, you know, you have to be out there, because if you are not on Twitter you just don’t exist. People need to see you are actively engaging? with those 50 to 60 to 70, or more!, tweets shared across on a daily basis; you need to show people how your whole social networking strategy (Gosh, what a bunch of ugly words!) is based solely on Twitter, because that’s where everyone is, so you need to make the most out of it. Period. You still think it’s the platform that allows you to get the biggest gains with the lowest friction possible. I mean, everyone can tweet 140 characters or less, right?  Well, no! I refuse to make use of Twitter in that way! I want to fight back!! Please do allow me to fight it! I want the conversations back in Twitter. I miss them. And dearly! One of the reasons why over the course of the last 2 or 3 years I have performed monthly acts of Twitter hygiene by not following far too many folks, but enough to feel comfortable with, is because I read their tweets. Perhaps not 100% of them, depending on the day, and whether daily work, or business travelling, gets in the way, but I can certainly share with you all that I read the vast majority of them and every single chance I have to see the spark of a conversation I go for it! Why not? I want to bring back the user experience of what made Twitter a great social networking tool par to none.  Yet, folks are just far too busy with their own broadcasting of short messages, their own messaging board system, confirming the conversation is now long dead. Twitter is the new e-Mail, apparently. We are now spending very little time on Twitter, just processing our to-dos, as fast as we can, so that we can then move on to the next thing, whatever that may well be. Well, no! While I can understand, and fully respect, how plenty of people would want to do that, let’s not forget that’s the same road that is going to take us where e-Mail is today. Twitter used to be fun. It used to be that really cool hangout place where we all tried to learn something new every day, where we tried to help each other become better at what we already do: plenty of pretty awesome and mind-blowings things!, where conversations sparked thanks to a golden nugget shared or a brilliant blog post or just something provocative enough to ensure a healthy reaction towards opening an interesting dialogue. Never mind though how we have automated and industrialized our use of Twitter with silly famous quotes or funny tweets, smart phrases we just don’t know where they are coming from anymore, retweets from our followers telling us all how cool and how great and how knowledgeable we all are (I mean, remember? That’s why I am following you in the first place! No need for you to remind of that 3 to 5 times per day!), or how desperate we all keep begging and soliciting your friendly vote(s) for that upcoming panel for that über-cool conference event so you can hang out with the cool kids while you keep ignoring us after you made it. Or perhaps how we are now scheduling our tweets in the future, just like we do with our emails and follow-ups, ensuring we are no longer there to respond back to a potential conversation in a timely manner. Or how you have also automated your blog posts and whatever other feeds into your Twitter stream so that folks would know where to head to read your writing of more than 140 characters. See? These are just some examples. Examples that, from my own experience, are killing the conversations in Twitter big time today, right now, right as we speak! I am sure there are plenty more out there and I would love to challenge you to share your favourite misuses of Twitter from your dear following networks in the comments, even just to see whether the conversations have died for you, too, or not… Perhaps I should put together another blog post including them all, along with a good number of other ones that I can think of at the moment by reading diving into my Twitter stream, once again. Yes, I know that you may be thinking that there is an easy solution out there to fix this problem; i.e. unfollow everyone and start from scratch again. And perhaps that may well be the case, but I have been thinking about it for a while now and I don’t think it would solve the problem, because the people who I am really interested in following are not going to change their habits of how they use Twitter to kill the conversation, just because I have unfollowed them. They simply won’t know. I feel I need to find another way. Perhaps I may need some new friends, as a good friend of mine suggested after a rather interesting and fascinating conversation we had offline just recently on this very same topic, and maybe that’s the reason why I am loving Google Plus at the moment so much, mainly, because it’s providing me with an opportunity to remember, dearly, what Twitter used to be like not long: my favourite social networking tool, capable of allowing me to host some bl**dy good conversations on those topics I am truly passionate about, just like my network(s), without having to worry about that constant, and rampant self-promotion of one’s own marketing messages, so that your customers can keep coming back to buy your product: You! But the other main reason why Google Plus has now moved into my Top #2 preferred social networking tool, at the moment, is because, apart from being able to enjoy the conversations again on topics that matter to us all on whatever the common interest (For instance, Social Business and the Social Enterprise, along with Knowledge Management, Online Communities, Learning and Collaboration, for yours truly) I get to experience special moments that surely remind you how mind-blowing, über-cool, inspirational, incredibly humbling, truthful and humane technology can be to make this a better world. Our shared, networked and interconnected world:    When was the last time that Twitter made you feel exactly like you are feeling now, after having watched that short video clip with John Butterill? Just think of it, pause for a minute, when was it, exactly?  "Sharing a view… That’s a plus".  Indeed, it surely is! But I miss Twitter. I miss the conversation. I miss you, my network(s). Here’s hoping you will stick around bringing it all back to what it used to be back in the good old days of what once made Twitter such a huge success: Us. The networks engaging with one another in more meaningful ways than whatever we thought we could, or would. Ever. 

I recently spoke at ThoughtWorks XConf - an internal conference that we run in several parts of the world now. I stayed clear of topics related to work and spoke about my six week big cat trail instead and the conservation challenges that these wonderful animals face. Here's a video of the talk.On a personal note, if Tequila was alive today, she'd be 3 years and 6 months old. You may think I'd be over that tragedy, but I've never been. I miss her every day of my life and for some reason, I miss her a lot today. People who have dogs will empathise with the pain and the regret I have behind that loss. I might go to her resting place tomorrow and say hi. Enough of the personal bit, thanks for reading.© Sumeet Moghe

At a time of a tremendous amount of incredible positives and incredible negatives, mixed all along with a huge sense of urgent uncertainty as to what’s going to happen next, one cannot, but truly appreciate how the world of the Social Web is changing us as a society, never mind the corporate world altogether, making us all reflect deeply on what really matters after all. Time and time again we keep getting exposed to those wonderful gestures of our human kind that clearly highlight  where we are today, but at the same time we also get strong reminders of what’s stopping us altogether from making a better world, for everyone, which could perhaps be very well explained with this single quote: "it’s like a despair, destroying this world … people who have no hopes are easy to control" [- G'mork].  I love the Internet. I truly love the Social Web. I don’t even know what I would be doing without it, if there comes a time where it does no longer exist or I don’t get exposed often enough to it. I hope that never happens. I think those of us who have been lucky enough to live through it over the last 10 years have experienced, and never better said, such a fundamental change and shift on who we are as human beings that’s almost impossible to remain indifferent. No matter what. And the most exciting thing about it is that our younger generations have been born living through it all and will eventually complete our already started work of making this world a better place for us, for them, for everyone.  I heart social networking. I always have. Ever since I first got exposed to it back in 2001 I always felt it was going to help manage get the best out of all of us, human beings, so that we could go and create and do better things for those around us, and for the world at large. And I think I may have just witnessed one of the most inspiring confirmations of that inner urge that technology, when used right, could help us become better at what we already excel at: getting the good out of all of us and put it into practice. Good practice. Earlier on today, and through one of my network(s), I bumped into this absolutely stunning, witty, smart, incredibly inspirational, thought provoking and rather moving dissertation by Dr. Pamela Gay at the recent TAM 2012 event (The Amazing Meeting 2012) under this delightful title: "Make the World Better (Ask If Anyone Minds Later)". It’s a presentation that lasts for a little bit over 36 minutes, but I can certainly guarantee you that it’s worth while every single minute of it. It’s fully packed with lots of rather thought provoking messages and plenty of calls to action on how the world of social media, and science, for that matter, are changing and shifting certain things that we have learned to take for granted as part of a rather sickening status quo that perhaps, almost certainly, has got its days numbered, because it no longer represents how our world works or should work to become a better place for everyone! Some sort of a call to action into what I would quote as "The Awakening (2.0)" (Sorry, I know, I couldn’t help using the 2.0 moniker), which I already hinted a little while ago on this blog entry as well. Today’s blog post is going to be a short one. I would rather prefer you spend the time going through Pamela’s presentation to see what I mean with no longer being capable of remaining indifferent with everything that happens around you. Even more so that I originally had another idea and trend of thought for today’s blog post, but after watching her speech I though it was just too good to let it go by just like that. Why? Well, basically, for plenty of different reasons that I am sure you would be agreeing with as well if you have been reading this blog for a while, but mainly because of this particular quote from her:  "Imagine a world in which all the time, all the energy, all the bandwidth that currently goes into cyberbulling and trolling, instead goes into building good things; goes into doing science, goes into education […] Find what you are passionate about and build that thing" [Emphasis mine] Or maybe, because of these other rather inspiring quotes that Pamela herself brilliantly used throughout her presentation that have certainly made me think about the inner power we all have and that it’s probably a good time now that it, finally, comes out. To quote her: "We can be the better example", "We do need to fight to build a better world", "Be the change you want to see in the world… well, damn it, be the change by doing something!" Well, with all of that said, and without much further ado, here’s the embedded code of the YouTube video, so you can hit Play, watch and listen to Pamela and be prepared to learn how you, too, no matter what, no matter how, no matter when, can change the world. Our world:    Starting today!

One of the things that we talk quite a bit in corporate education is consistency. I've spoken about it quite a bit earlier as well. It seems this is something that every training manager out there is thinking about. After all, if you want to train hundreds of people, then you need a consistent process and a consistent output. There's a small problem though, people aren't consistent. And the last I checked, if you place an inconsistent set of inputs into an extremely consistent process, you still get very inconsistent results. One size fits all, fits no one. In today's blogpost, I want to outline the problems with consistency and the alternatives that corporate education and education at large needs. Is the obsession with scale and consitency a monoculture of the mind?A few days back, my colleagues Rohit and Sriram spoke about monocultures of the mind. In particular they attacked the monocultured notion that "If it can't scale it's no good." For my benefit and for my argument I want to repeat what I understood of Rohit's argument. First - what is scale?Scale is any undertaking where more than a few people come together and organise themselves for a purpose determined by a small set of people at the top.The benefits of scale are things we've talked about several times, but there's one big problem with scale. While a majority complies and bears the brunt of scaling, only a minority reaps its benefit. And of course, as you increase scale and there are more people involved, you create so many levels of abstraction in your process, that you also increase the level of dysfunction. The problems with scaleRohit and Sriram talked about the further problems with scale. Let me list them out:When you separate planning and execution to scale, you effectively lose local solutions that individuals earlier had, albeit over a period of time. Take the example of the green revolution in India. It introduced fertilisers and pesticides to increase agricultural yield, but 40 years hence, we've lost the local solutions that farmers then had, so they could deal with the problem.The separation of planning and execution create way too many levels of abstraction. This leads to hidden incompetence and learned helplessness because people working at the service end of the process have lost connection with the reason why they do things in a certain way. You lose autonomy and ownership at the individual level, because at the end, everyone is just 'doing a job'.Scale leads to standardisation. For example, everyone in corporate India speaks English. In fact that's what I've spoken as a first language for all my life. This means though, that we're losing our diversity - I can't speak Bengali or Hindi or Marathi fluently though these are family languages!The most disturbing effect however is the apathy that the division of responsibilities causes. When I went to Bharatpur, I shared a lunch with my guide Mr Bhim Singh Rana. Rana farms for a living, but he doesn't eat the grains he farms. Instead he has a smaller plot of land where he grows his own food, devoid of pesticides and fertilisers. He's aware that this reduces his yield, but he'd rather have the non-toxic food. Isn't this a problem? The buyers of his grain are separated by so many layers of anonymity that he doesn't really care about poisoning them. His concern for me and the quality of food I had with him was a stark contrast to this apathy.Try to relate these same problems to top down, large scale, consistent educational programs and you'll know why I have little faith in our education system. People are different, so why does learning have to be consistent?"It's I believe we have a system of education which is modelled on the interest of industrialism...Schools are still pretty much organised on factory lines...We still educate (children) by batches...If you are interested in the model of learning you don't start from this production line mentality...It's about standardisation...I believe we've got go in the exact opposite direction...That's what I mean about changing the paradigm." - Ken RobinsonIf Sir Ken Robinson says something like this you've got to sit up and take notice. Learning is a very personal exercise. People learn differently. They prefer a different combination of modalities given the context, they have different talents, motivations. You cannot make curriculum the confinement of human experience. So what does education need instead?"We deal right now in the educational landscape with an infatuation with the culture of one right answer that can be properly bubbled on the average multiple choice test. I am here to share with you, it is not learning." - Diana LaufenbergIn my view what educators (corporate or not) need is a way to empower themselves. The old model of education where we needed scale, was based on an assumption. An assumption that knowledge is scarce. And since that assumption was true, you could make sense of the 'sage-on-a-stage', 'butts-in-seats', 'everyone-does-the-same-thing' model. As it turns out, knowledge is not scarce today, so educators need to let go of that part of their roles give way to democratised means of gathering knowledge. Share the context, and set them free. We have examples of great knowledge sources all around us. Starting from Wikipedia, all the way to Khan Academy, going right upto iTunesU. Corporates have a unique opportunity to use modern web media to create similar, yet contextualised knowledge sources for their organisations. I believe that we need to drive these knowledge sources using social, collaborative technology with new media at the center. Democracy is at the centre of content creation on the consumer web. Why can't it be in the enterprise?So what is the educator's role then, if it isn't to disseminate theory? I believe the educator's role in today's world focusses on skills instead of knowledge. Face to face interaction is a wonderful thing - this is an opportunity to solve complex challenges in a collaborative setting. Educators have a wonderful chance today, to participate as coaches, as facilitators of this collaborative experience. In that, you have a repeatable process, but one that is daringly inconsistent and individualised. Those learning have the choice to pick their own learning path to the challenge. Once in the challenge, they have the opportunity to decide how much they wish to stretch themselves. As they stretch their own selves, they challenge educators to support them through this journey. We now have the opportunity to create educational contexts where mistakes are the norm, we view failure as a stepping stone to learning and eventual success and there's no one-right-answer.The obsession with consistency and scale isn't new. It's something I've seen since the last decade and perhaps even earlier. In a way, the recession was a good thing for the industry. Several companies took some time to focus on learning without having to bother about massive scale given their reduced hiring targets. I'd be concerned though, if the attitude changes when the market does. I'd hope that Ken Robinson, Salman Khan, Diana Laufenberg, Sugata Roy and others have taught us enough about autonomy and individualisation for us to bury the notion of consistency once and for all.© Sumeet Moghe

As you may have noticed from my social networking activities from last week, I decided to take a few days off, with the summer holidays, and head over to mainland Spain, to visit my family in León, where I was born and raised many moons ago. Although I’m from a small town nearby, this time around I decided to stay during that week in the capital, León, to do what every good tourist would do: enjoy the city. And I surely did, as you can see from the bunch of pictures I have already shared on my Google Plus profile. This time around something really interesting happened though that I wasn’t expecting, but that it had plenty to do with Social Business and Customer Service. Yes, you know, that number #1 use case for social networking for business, basically, delighting your customers to no end with a far superiour customer experience. Regardless. In fact, while that scenario was taking place I just couldn’t help thinking about the good number of highly enlightening and educational conversations that I have been having with my good friend Esteban Kolsky on this topic, which pretty much comes to a single, rather powerful conclusion: great products, and great customer experiences, do not need customer service, nor customer support. Indeed, while I was there in León for a few days I was capable of confirming that statement several times and I thought I would put together this blog entry over here today to relate what it was like. It all happened at Barrio Húmedo, which is a relatively small area of the old part of the city that specialises on having a bunch of rather small, or relatively small bars, where they keep serving drinks and free tapas, like in the good old days, centuries ago. A stunning place on its own, worth while a visit, for sure, if you would want to enjoy quite a differentiating experience of food & drink with a unique purpose: enjoy it to the fullest! And I am 100% certain that you would always be capable of doing that. The range of options, the wide variety of tapas, drinks and atmospheres, along with different clienteles makes up for a wonderfully immersive experience that would certainly take you back in time. Highly recommended walking out and about several times! Each of them would be even more worth it than the previous one.  However, right in the centre of Barrio Húmedo, there is this absolutely gorgeous place called "La Bicha", which is a rather small bar, at St. Martin’s Square, number 4, that specialises on serving one of the most delicious black puddings (or black sausages) you can taste in the city, if not in the whole of Spain. World famous, for sure, judging by the huge amount of people who kept popping in and out, waiting in massively huge queues, under an excruciating heat, for a succulent slice of home baked bread with that black pudding spread all over it. Mouthwatering altogether, to say the least. Even, right as we speak!, as I keep writing this blog post. (Excuse me for a minute while I wipe out my mouth with a hankie …) Interestingly enough, if you look into a good number of different online spaces where plenty of people have been registering and sharing their reviews of "La Bicha" (In Spanish though, most of them), you would notice how their views and customer feedback is less than desirable for a business. In fact, some of the commentary verges on the vicious attack of what you should probably not do if you are the owner of such a business. Yes, indeed, some of the reviews are incredibly negative talking about the lack of hygiene, about the rudeness of the owner of the place, about how tiny it is, about how uncanny some of the verbiage of the owner is altogether and the list goes on and on and on. I tell you, if I were the owner of "La Bicha", I would be extremely worried, at best, at having such incredibly negative feedback about my place and my products. And I would be trying to do my utmost to engage with those clients to learn how I could improve the overall customer experience. Yet, if you look into those online resources, you won’t see a single reaction trying to engage on that online customer service experience. I am sure by now you may be wondering why, right? Well, in my opinion, because of a single reason that we keep taking for granted in most places and for most products: if you have got an incredibly good quality product that helps enhance the overall customer experience you don’t need anything else. Simple. Indeed, I actually went to that bar several times during the course of just one week, all in all to taste the absolutely stunning black puddings. And I noticed how the place was, indeed, very crowded to the point where, a couple of times, people had to wait outside of the bar for over half an hour just to enter the place and then for another 20 minutes to get their drinks and blood sausages. I noticed as well how the owner is, indeed, rather peculiar, verging on acting rather rude at times, although some other folks would consider that he’s rather comical. We surely had lots of good fun with the live, public entertainment. The service just doesn’t exist. It just happens when it feels like it is your turn. It sounds all very chaotic and everything, but the thing is that everyone is hanging out there, because they know they are going to get some of the best blood sausages from León itself, if not the entire country. So clients, basically, put up with all of that knowing the reward is going to be totally worth it. Eventually, their client experience will convert itself into a delightful one when they get to taste the goods. I can certainly guarantee you that, since I was one of them, several times, and had to make use of plenty of my patience to stick around. At least, on the first time, the others, knowing what the game was, was much better to endure, but then again, the end-result was a superiour customer experience tasting some of the most delicious black puddings I have ever tried in my life.  See? That’s where it really hit me. That’s when I realise that customer service, customer support, as some of the most popular use cases for Social Business would be a complete waste of time, resources, energy and effort if your product is of a superiour quality. You basically just don’t need it anymore. And I suspect that’s exactly what the owner of the bar knows from all along. If I have got the best blood sausages around, I probably can’t care less about what the customer service would be. You just come to enjoy the food, get a drink or two, move on. That’s exactly how it works and how despite having received such consistent negative feedback online over the course of the last couple of years, the place is packed every single day of the week for hours. Much to ponder and muse about for all of us, don’t you think? While I was in León I just couldn’t help thinking about how there is one other business out there that I can think of that has taken the overall customer experience with their products to an obsession difficult to match by others, resulting in such a successful strategy that there is basically no competition. Yes, of course, I am talking about Apple and its wonderful products. Who would have told me that 6 years after I got my first MacBook Pro, I would be raving about a superb customer experience where their social interactions are just non-existent, and ironically enough, I don’t miss them at all. I just know that when buying one of those products I’m probably getting the best there is out there! Just like La Bicha’s black puddings. Now we all know where Apple is at this stage, and I think the owner of La Bicha knows where his business is, probably one of the most profitable out there on that location. But what I think is also the most important lesson from these stories, at least, for me, is that social business may well not be *the* best, and only!, solution to each and every single product that aims at delighting their clients. In most cases, I have come to terms with the conclusion that if you excel with an incredibly good quality product and an imperious overall customer experience there is a probably a good reason why you may not even need to become a successful social business in the first place. Your great products will speak out for you to your customers. So do Apple’s and I am sure that if you ever drop by León’s Barrio Húmedo and check out "La Bicha" you would be probably agreeing with me that it’s *the* best blood sausage out there and you don’t need Social to taste it. You just basically go ahead and enjoy the experience, just as much as I did multiple times!  Have a good one and cheers! PS. Oh, you may have noticed how these pictures are not even mine. I know, very weird, because over the course of the years I have developed that habit of becoming a #foodie with a camera (My iPhone 4S) every food place I go. Yet, at La Bicha I guess I was just enchanted and didn’t feel the urge to take any snap shots. Just enjoyed the experience for what it was. Unique and very very yummy!

A few months back, I'd written about a similar topic. The case I mentioned in that post is dragging its feet in the apex court. In the meanwhile, the court has placed a ban on tiger tourism in the core zones of all 41 of India's tiger reserves. Since the ban first came about in the month of July, the conservation community in India has stood divided between those pro-tourism and those against. While listening to the views and counter views, I've participated in a few debates and then pulled out. I needed time to gather my own thoughts on the subject. As a wildlife photographer or a naturalist or a conservationist, I'm an absolute novice compared to some of the big guns out there. So I guess, I'm entitled to take my time to think through an issue as grave as this. The question before the supreme court is one of whether they should allow tourism in its current form or not. The answer to that is pretty clear - not. With all due respect to the honourable court, the eventual answer isn't 'no tourism' either. I'll try to explain my thoughts later in the post. The question before the conservation community is a slightly bigger one. It's a question of identity and realism. I'd like to touch upon some of these issues in today's blogpost.Divisiveness never helped a purpose"...all roads can lead to conservation if the intentions and actions are right, and that people from all walks of life can contribute equally." - Shekhar DattariThis month, Shekhar Dattari wrote a pretty interesting article about conservation. He argued quite rightly that no role in conservation is bigger or smaller than another. I'm not sure if it's me but I notice a huge amount of animosity in some sections of the conservation community towards others who maybe wholly or peripherally a part. For example, conservationists and naturalists seem to look down on photographers. Photographers look down on the general public. The general public looks down upon the forest department and forest dwellers. I like to believe that conservation is an orchestra - everyone plays their part. Sustainable conservation needs people from all walks of life - conservationists, activists, politicians, policy makers, the department, photographers and the common man. Why you may ask? In a country like India, the tiger is the smallest problem for politicians and policy makers to look at - let's be frank about this. Human beings are too short sighted to reconcile how the extinction of the tiger will lead to the crash of our ecosystem and eventually hit our water security. It's a fine scientific argument to pose to people and perhaps an item for long term education, but with 900 million Indians living at less than $2 a day, saving the tiger will never be a politician's priority. And the last I checked, tigers don't get to cast their own votes and even if they did, there's just 1700 of them! So for conservation to succeed, the tiger needs people to rally behind it. So the self-righteous attitude of 'certain people are bad for the tiger', needs to disappear in a hurry, or we'll see our tigers disappear before we can spell c-o-n-s-e-r-v-a-t-i-o-n."The tiger is a large hearted gentleman with boundless courage and that when he is exterminated; as exterminated he will be, unless public opinion rallies to his support - India will be the poorer by having lost the finest of her fauna." - Jim CorbettLets get off the moral high horseI participate on a forum of naturalists - quite obvious given my love for natural history. Recently we discussed the discovery of a flock of vultures in a remote village bordering Karnataka's Raichur and Bellary districts. It was happy news except when one of us jumped on a line from the report and said "...kudos for keeping the location a secret (I think you have already given too much information for picture hunters to swoop in)". To this, Santosh Martin(the naturalist who originally discovered the vultures) responded, "Picture hunters for personal glorification will never be entertained as before. Moreover, picture hunters these days are more focussed on tiger areas... Bellary is too far for them."  To say the least I was hurt by the commentary. I'm an amateur wildlife photographer - and for the record, I detest trophy hunting. Somewhere the term 'picture hunter' made me feel that the two naturalists who used the term equated photographers with trophy hunters. Somewhere it felt that they looked down on photography as a way to appreciate and observe wildlife. In his defence, Santosh responded to me and said, "Picture hunters are certainly different from responsible wildlife photographers.Wildlife photographers are those who employ their skill to interpret nature for the benefit of those millions who never get the chance to visit see the animals and birds in their natural habitat. They also try and document new species which have never been documented before." While I have immense respect for Santosh Martin as a naturalist, I believe this is the kind of thinking that's detrimental to conservation. A photographer need not document new species. A photographer need not reach millions. If a photographer can, through the observation of wildlife become an advocate for its conservation, that in itself is a big win! If a photographer can show his/ her friends fabulous photographs of a much photographed tigress and get those friends excited about nature, that's fabulous too. As nature lovers we seem to live in our own little bubble - believing that there's already tremendous support for the wilderness, given we already see so much media related to it! The truth is far from it. Bump into someone on the street and ask them if they know about vultures going extinct or what the Great Indian Bustard is. Look for the gaze of bewilderment and you'll know what I mean. We need to convert that guy - and unfortunately we can't do this from atop a moral high horse. I don't have a photography website or even a Facebook page for my photos. I make photographs for my own pleasure and to share with my friends and family. Over the last couple of years, I've got several of my friends thoughtful about nature - I can say this about everyone in my immediate team at work. I haven't reached millions and I have no desire to do so and yet I believe I've achieved a conservation victory of my own. Running an inclusive conservation and tourism orchestra The fact that the Supreme Court now has this case pending before it, gives the conservation community an opportunity to appreciate the roles we all play to protect our wildlife. We can't be looking for ecocentric solutions to the problems of an anthropocentric world. For conservation to succeed, we need people to support it fully. So the solution that emerges needs to be win-win and this means a few trade-offs. I'm no expert, but if I had any authority, here's what I'd recommend:Let's ditch the pseudo-science: There's no correlation between tourism and tiger numbers. Simlipal has no tourism and yet has a healthy tiger population and while Sariska and Panna had great tourism, they lost all their tigers in 2005 due to lack of protection and improper monitoring and administration. On the other hand tigers have grown in numbers in Ranthambhore, Tadoba, Corbett, Kanha, Pench, Bandhavgarh and other parks despite the heavy pressures of tourism. If anything, the only thing we can say with confidence is that tourism has no adverse or favourable impact on tiger numbers.Locals play a key role: Local people pay the heaviest cost for conservation. They usually lose ancestral land (albeit with decent compensation) and often get second class treatment to tigers and tourists. And when tigers kill their livestock, they have to go through a painful compensation process. If wild cattle ravages their crops, they hardly ever get compensated. In such circumstances, wildlife is like vermin to them - better dead than alive. To make conservation successful, locals need to have a stake. What incentives can they get for a healthy tiger population? What part of tourism profits can they share? Is there room for a community centric ecotourism model like Il Ngwesi in Kenya?Let's not impose human emotions on tigers: If we really care about tigers we need to stop humanising them. We should be concerned more about maintaining the sanctity of the forest than about how a tiger feels when there are people on an elephant beside it. We have no reason to believe that the tiger near the tourist elephant is a 'poor animal'. Let's remember that these are animals that could become invisible whenever they desire and the fact that we do see them indicates their possible tolerance towards us. Let's appreciate every stakeholder's context: Yes, we all need to operate with compassion and respect for the wilderness, but to be begrudging of others smacks of a holier-than-thou attitude. First time casual tourists need education. Yes, their noisy behaviour is often irritating and admittedly disturbs the sanctity of the forest - yet, the potential that one among them could possibly bat for the tiger in months to come, is a fair trade-off to live with. Wildlife photographers will want the best shot and go lengths for it. Yes, this may be irritating for naturalists and conservationists - but please understand the value of visual storytelling. That photo could be their way to get their family and friends inspired. There's nothing wrong in judging people, as long as you're willing to be judged yourself. The attitude amongst some naturalists and photographers seems to be that everyone; everyone but them, is a disturbance to wildlife. Nothing's further from the truth.Let's be ready to live with restrictions: This may seem odd coming from someone who is admittedly pro-tourism. I embrace the educational value of tourism but at the same time tourism can't be anti conservation. We need to have proper emission norms for safari vehicles that enter our parks. We need to decide by some form of established science the optimal number of safari vehicles that can ply at any given time without adversely affecting the ecosystem. We need guidelines for resorts that operate in and around national parks. We can't have another Kosi fiasco. We need tourism to be zero impact to the ecosystem - in that it gives back more than it takes from it. The ministry of environment and forests needs to create a scheme of equitable tourism that allows local communities to benefit and participate in tourism. This is the only way they're likely to help increase the forest cover is if the wilderness is worth more alive than dead.Let's not have double standards: Given our colonial history, we seem to have a sense of disdain for all things brown. So it irks us to see several brown people line up in jeeps to see a tiger cross the road. And yet, the same naturalists and photographers happily go to the Mara and see 60 vehicles line up for a cheetah and 40 vehicles surround a mating pair of lions and have nothing but great stuff to say about the place. The tiger is the proudest piece of our natural heritage and there's a certain beauty in the fact that 80% of the visitors to our national parks are Indians - as against what you may see in Africa. The fact that everyone from the prime minister to an ordinary country bumpkin can see the tiger for a nominal fee is something we should be proud of and strive to preserve. If we believe we appreciate and love nature, then let's play a role in helping others develop the same passion - instead of trying to judge those who may be less informed.My intent here is not to take a dig at anyone. All I care about is that every person in this country has an opportunity to experience its rich natural heritage. I believe there's a nature lover in every one of us - our culture is one that inherently respects wildlife. You just need to take a good look at our mythology to believe me. I don't want to pre-judge anyone's intent, our wildlife could use every bit of support it gets in a country with huge population pressures and international poaching threats. I cannot bring myself to support a system where in a foreseeable future others will not have the opportunity to enjoy the privileges I've enjoyed in my life. Most importantly, I'd hope for the conservation community to stay together in its purpose.© Sumeet Moghe

I am certain that if I were to ask you to name your Top 10 most inspiring thought leaders and thinkers on whatever the discipline out there, I would say there would be one or two that may come up on every single list and I would venture to state that probably one of those folks would be Seth Godin and by far. With his blog being one of those essential daily reads. He would definitely be on my Top 10 list of influential thinkers and thought leaders in various different fields. But today I just want to highlight his, once again, brilliant insights around the area of Social Business and the Social Enterprise, because a couple of his recent blog posts have pretty much nailed it for yours truly on why social networking for business makes sense, business sense, that is. And it all has got to do with a key concept that we have been discussing over here for a while: corporations are people and people are corporations, after all, so we may start behaving as such. As (responsible) people. Indeed, in the rather insightful blog post "The Race to the Bottom" Seth comes to confirm how easy it is for businesses and corporations today to be enticed by the good old forces of money, power and greed, at whatever the costs, even human ones!, as he brilliantly quotes as follows: "We can eliminate rules protecting clean water or consumer safety. We can extort workers to show up and work harder for less, in order to underbid a competitor. We can take advantage of less sophisticated consumers and trick them into consuming items for short-term satisfaction and long-term pain. These might be painful outcomes, but they’re an direct path to follow. We know how to do this". He comes to state how easy it is to be tricked by the short term benefits of profitability and growth and I would venture to state that we are just far too close to seeing way too many instances in today’s corporate world of such businesses, to the point where it is getting a bit tiring, if not disappointing altogether. We know better, we should do better. However, he doesn’t recognise that they would be successful in the long term and accurately states the following to go along: "You might make a few more bucks for now, but not for long and not with pride. Someone will always find a way to be cheaper or more brutal than you" [Emphasis mine], which is a rather inspiring introduction into what it would be like the race to the top, that is, to become a successful social business:  "[…] The race to the top is focused on design and respect and dignity and guts and innovation and sustainability and yes, generosity when it might be easier to be selfish. It’s also risky, filled with difficult technical and emotional hurdles, and requires patience and effort and insight. The race to the top is the long-term path with the desirable outcome" How brilliant is that quote as an inspirational definition of what a Socially Integrated Enterprise should be like, don’t you think? Notice how the emphasis and the focus from such wording does not have anything to do with applying, embracing or living social technologies, but it is more about having the right set of core social values, the right corporate culture, and the right aspirations for sustainable growth, hinting that the clue to it all are not corporations, nor businesses alike, but right to their core, their people. Which is where it gets really interesting, because on another fascinating article, under the suggestive heading "Corporations Are not People" he comes to explain what it would be like with an example of what not to do and with a marvelous quote of what to do. In that particular entry Seth picks up the recent debacle from Progressive insurance, which is certainly going to have a whole lot more consequences than originally thought out together, but he also comes to describe how such business practices are not going to be tolerated anymore in a networked, interconnected, intelligent, connected world: "[…] if someone in your neighborhood used this approach, treating others this way, if a human with a face and a house and a reputation did it, they’d have to move away in shame. If a local businessperson did this, no one in town would ever do business there again". And rightly so! Because as he quotes shortly after "[…] They [Corporations] bet on short memories and the healing power of marketing dollars, commercials and discounts. Employees are pushed to focus on bureaucratic policies and quarterly numbers, not a realization that individuals, not corporations, are responsible for what they do", we may well be witnessing the tipping point where knowledge workers start, finally!, turning themselves into corporate rebels, i.e. rebels at work, outrageous optimists, heretics, free radicals, you name it; realising that certain business practices that may have been tolerated by the system for decades!,  are not just sickening practices altogether, but they also lack both ethics and morale. And therefore they feel, at long last, they need to protest, and rather vehemently, because their social responsibility, their co-ownership of the firm, their openness, their transparency, their trust with / by others, their connectedness with the entire ecosystem, i.e. that Connected Company, is helping them remind, and rather strongly, those very same corporations that they "don’t have to act like this". Those knowledge workers are finally awakening, realising that "it’s people who can make them stop", that they are finally comprehending that those people are just they themselves. They are, at last, realising that "Corporations aren’t people, people are people", and, as such, certain bad business practices will no longer be tolerated, nor encouraged. Rather the opposite. They are starting to get challenged by each and everyone of us, knowledge workers. And, once again, rightly so. Like Seth himself stated … Sign me up. About time, too!

Last weekend, I participated on a thread that caused me much angst. As someone who's participated in online communities for about 12 years now, I feel strongly about a sense of sharing. And yet I found my sensibilities challenged in this debate about sharing bird photographs under the creative commons license. Let me give you context. Indian Birds is a Facebook group with about 10,000 members. As the name indicates, most of the members are birders, quite a few being bird photographers. A few days back, the owner of the group made a suggestion - to make all postings to the group subject to the Creative Commons license. His intent was that all material and pictures posted on the group will be free: to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the workand to Remix — to adapt the workThe range of objections I heard to this seemingly well intentioned proposal made me think quite hard about the spirit of sharing on online communities. In effect, as a community manager it made me think about one more thing I'd like to consider - ownership and licensing. Before I get into the details of what this may mean for your new community, let me explain my stance first. Full DisclosureI have to be honest. I'm biased towards the Creative Commons licenses. If this changes your views about the value of this article, you may want to stop reading. I also must say that I'm not a supporter of Creative Commons because of some deep desire to be awesome. While I think it's about being nice, I think it's also very practical. It's very difficult for creative people to write proper licenses for their content. Now the moment you publish a piece of work, you automatically own the copyright to it. And yes in cases of photography and similar art work, you can also put up a notice that says:"Copyrighted by ... and may not be used, downloaded in any form, or Print Media website without written permission of the Photographer."This however is an untruth. Under the terms of fair use or fair dealing anyone can use your work in part for the purpose of education, criticism, commentary, reference and review. So, in that a statement like the one you see above isn't very useful and it leaves a lot of room for ambiguity. You don't quite indicate the rights you're willing to give to your viewers and the rights you'd like to reserve for yourself. Now you can hire a lawyer to write all of this up for you, but that'll cost a heap of money. Instead, you can choose the Creative Commons licenses and select the rights you wish to reserve for your benefit. There are some great lawyers behind the Creative Commons system and your reserved rights are pretty air tight. But the bigger benefit is that you make your reservations quite explicit by making the rights you give away very clear. Of course there'll always be jerks who violate copyright, and the way to deal with them is no different from the "all rights reserved" world. So, that's my personal stance about Creative Commons - hopefully that sets the record straight.Licensing community contentOne of the things you want in a community that you set up for sharing, is people shouldn't sue each other for the simple act of using content from the community. Now communities are all about sharing. If you don't intend to share and to give other members the ability to benefit from your work, you shouldn't post to the community. If you participate on Indian Birds, you'll see that the majority content is photographs. It's perhaps 95% of the activity. The big question is - if you're unwilling to share, then why would you post a picture? For free publicity and marketing? I guess there are other opportunities for that. This is where some amount of legal protection is necessary. Now again you have two options. You can write your own license. This is what we've done for our internal community at ThoughtWorks. All content created by ThoughtWorkers on the community is the property of ThoughtWorks and for the benefit of ThoughtWorkers. So the question of suing each other doesn't arise. In our situation as a consulting firm, this approach makes sense. It may not make sense however for an externally facing community, especially one that's like Indian Birds. This is where an approach like Creative Commons comes in handy and saves you the trouble of writing a license for yourself.FAQs and misgivings about the Creative Commons licenses A few days back I watched a great episode of Chase Jarvis live. It was amazing how a well known commerical photographer like Chase promised to put his non-contractual work under the commons to make his commitment to sharing and his rights clear. The episode is very educational for photographers in particular to understand what it means to share their work online and the licensing that makes sense. That said, I realise that Creative Commons still isn't common vocabulary for a lot of people. In view of some of the objections that people raised to these licenses, I thought it might be worthwhile to dispel some of those myths and answer some questions.I cannot sell any of my work if I apply Creative Commons licensing. If a community uses these licenses, I cannot participate for this reason.This is incorrect. You can use any of the Creative Commons non commercial license to reserve rights to your work. If your community is also using one of these non commercial licenses, you can quite easily sell the work you share there and also other versions of the same work.Once I use Creative Commons, I cannot revoke the license at a later stageThis is true, but do remember that this applies only to the version of the work you share under the license. So let's say, you share a low resolution image online and apply a Creative Commons license to it, it's only that picture that is permanently in the commons. The high resolution version and it's other derivatives stay unaffected.Commercially viable and high quality artwork is never in the commonsFar from the truth. You've got to see the portfolios of Jonathan Worth, Kalyan Varma, Trey Ratcliff, John Harvey and others to know that. In addition, just do a search for Creative Commons photography on Flickr. The number of great photographs you'll see out there is just tremendous! If a community adopts Creative Commons licensing then violations become the responsibility of the community tooThis depends on who owns the content. If the community is set up so the community itself owns the content, then yes it becomes the responsibility of the organisation running the community to take action against violations of copyright. However, if the community only requires members to post under a Creative Commons license while retaining their copyright, then the community has no liability to get into legal battles. As in any other situation, enforcing copyright is still the responsibility of the artist.Why should anyone decide the licensing for my work?You're right. No one should decide the licensing for your work. However if you post to a community you should be willing to share your work. In return for publicity, appreciation and social currency, you give some benefits to the members of the community. If the community adopts a Creative Commons license, this is to balance the rights of community members and copyright holders. In case you're unwilling to share your work, you can still decide to reserve all rights by not posting to the community!If people want to use my work, why can't they just ask me?This is usually unnecessary friction. Empirical evidence shows that most people don't ask, they just use your work, either under the terms of fair use or not. Instead, a clear statement that allows people to use your work with attribution under the terms you specify is far lower friction and gets you publicity that you may have not even imagined!If I use a Creative Commons license, people can modify my work without permission.You can very easily reserve this right by applying a no derivatives license. This stops people from remixing your work in case you're uncomfortable with it. If your community uses a Creative Commons license, you can speak to your community manager about this.Why pre-empt the beautiful prospect of a friendship between user and an author/artist that could stem from a request to use a particular piece of work? Why make Creative Commons a middleman?Sure, you could always argue against the commons this way. Let me tell you of a different perspective though. By virtue of the fact that all my work and this blog fall under the Creative Commons, I've received innumerable words of thanks from people who have just used my work in a presentation or as part of their day to day life. I was quite glad some months back, when a reader of my blog found some articles so useful that he fashioned them into a little ebook. He shared it with me under the Creative Commons license too! It was quite beautiful. Kalyan has a similar story which actually took his photography career to prime-time. So while you may lose one way of striking a relationship, you create several more ways to create this bond.I'm not trying to make a watertight case for Creative Commons here. I'm sure there'll be more questions. The point I'm trying to make however, is more about the purpose of most online communities than about licensing itself. Licenses only serve to protect the rights of both community members and community authors. We need to ensure that authors still retain the opportunity to benefit from their intellectual property, while community members still benefit by using knowledge shared in that context. With this tension, Creative Commons feels like the simplest solution available to us community managers at this point. If things change anytime soon, I'll have something else to say!© Sumeet Moghe

If you would remember, I finished last Friday’s blog post with an inspiring and rather revealing quote that is still lingering in the back of my mind. More than anything else, because of how much it means in helping us all transform the corporate business world from what we have known and experienced over the last 30 to 50 years (that, by the way, doesn’t seem to have taken us very far, if we judge by the current econoclypse we have been going through for the last 4 years), as a way to prepare for the next 30 to 50 years into what real, meaningful, purposeful and sustainable growth is all about: "Corporations aren’t people, people are people".  So with that mantra still lingering around, and rather deep, I thought I would bring back the Inspiring Video of the Week series, since I have left it behind for a little while now, and I think I may have the perfect one to keep things going and still follow the flow of the reflections we shared in last Friday’s article "Racing to the Top Where Corporations Are People". It’s, of course, another TEDx Talk, this time around in San Diego by the always insightful and rather stimulating Simon Sinek, who, over the course of a little bit over 12 minutes he came to talk about "Restoring the Human in Humanity":   The presentation itself is from early 2011, but I am sure that after you watch it you would have to agree with me that it’s now fresher than ever, specially, as we keep embarking into figuring out a way of how we are going to provoke that social business transformation that we all keep raving about, but that it looks like it’s pacing itself slower than never. Probably, due to the fact that corporations are finally coming to terms with the realisation that it is no longer possible to put a stop to it, nor neglect it, nor ignore it. So you may as well embrace it at a good and comfortable enough pace to be able to disrupt the whole model of how business has been conducted over the last few decades. And in this particular case Simon does a superb job at it, because, on his dissertation, he places the focus right where it belongs to make that transformation happen: the people. The knowledge workers themselves, once again. People who come together, because, after all, "humanity is made up of humans, of individuals", and, like I have been saying over here for a long while now, we are social animals with an ability to form a community, a culture. He does a wonderful job in setting up the stage of what would define a community, a company, a nation: "it is a group of people with a common set of values and beliefs, where trust emerges as a distinctly human experience of individuals sharing that very same common belief". WOW! Powerful stuff!  He gets to talk further along during his presentation about how critical and rather important trust is, whether on a personal level, or on a work environment, although he keeps questioning why is it so tough to generate such trust at work versus our own personal lives. We have seen in the past, and over the course of time, indeed, how critical trust is in not only helping build healthy personal business relationships amongst knowledge workers, but, much more importantly, with customers and business partners. Yet, he brings up some excellent points as to why building trust in whatever the corporate environment is as paramount as being capable of striking a new kind of sustainable business growth. Trust becomes *the* new currency. [By the way, if you are looking out there for some fascinating and delightful reads on the topic of trust and how much it disrupts the way we have done business putting humans back into the equation, I can strongly recommend you read these blog posts from my good friends JP Rangaswami (a.k.a. @jobsworth) and Rawn Shah]. His notion, Simon’s, that is, and further explanation of "The Split" is just pure genius. Precious little gem worth while going through on the presentation, because he links it, and rather accurately, to loyalty, a sense of fulfillment, a sense of purpose, of cause, before they fade away to no avail and with no turning point.  And technology won’t help to bring it all back, since, according to Simon, it would make things happen faster, therefore becoming an accelerator of the wrong behaviours, amplifying, therefore, that Split: "Technology is wonderful for making connections, for exchange of information, for driving transactions. [However,] Technology is terrible for creating human relationships" [Emphasis mine] This is the point in Simon’s presentation where things get really interesting, because he comes to postulate something that we may have just taken for granted for far too long and, of course, we are paying for it, right as we speak: "Human experiences require humans, not technology". We keep starving for a human union which is, perhaps, one of the main reasons why we still keep going to face to face conference events. Seriously, what makes us go to live conference events, when technology can be a good enough substitute? Well, Simon keeps questioning that we have gone perhaps a bit too far, considering that a person should not be a luxury. That our mere survival depends on that notion, that is, not to take for granted individuals and those personal business relationships they have built over time, because, essentially, what we need is more human interaction, to shake hands. According to him, we need handshake leadership (Gosh, I *do* love that expression!), we need to have handshake conversations, handshake friends, handshake dialogues, handshake meetings. You name it. We just need to bring back the human spirit into all of the interactions we keep getting involved with. It’s eventually what makes us all more humans, with that rather strong sense of autonomy, decision power by lowering down the centre of gravity, co-ownership, co-responsibility, in short, smarter work. For everyone. Goodness! I know! At this point in time your head is probably spinning just as much as mine is, but to be honest, the icing on the cake is this absolutely brilliant quote from his presentation that I think needs to become everyone’s motto, mantra, mojo or new career aspiration, or just simply a redefinition of the corporate knowledge worker of the 21st century: essentially, we need to put ourselves in situations where "we can create real human connections" and "where trust becomes a standard, and not the exception". Truly outstanding! Let’s not forget about that, please, and let’s keep it in mind for every single human interaction that we carry out on a daily basis. Starting today, tomorrow. And always. Only then would we be capable of achieving a stronger sense of human awakening. 

When you're making pictures instead of taking pictures, the one thing that helps your execute great images is confidence in post processing. There's no substitute for getting the shot right in camera, but unfortunately the device isn't always the best at representing reality. Cameras lack the eye's dynamic range and also the ability to translate colours accurately. And every now and then we all make mistakes that we'd like the opportunity to correct after the fact. So, first things first, shoot in RAW - the amount of flexibility this gives you is quite awesome. Enough said about that.Now you have the choice of using Lightroom/Aperture or Photoshop. The difference is a good $400 - at $123 retail, Lightroom 4 is a real steal given the amazing non-destructive editing it allows you to do. Can it do all that Photoshop does? Of course not. That said, there's a lot Lightroom can do which Photoshop can't. Managing your photos, tagging, organisation, printing workflows, tagging, branding are just some of those advantages of Lightroom. I guess it's a toss up between Lightroom and Aperture for the Mac. Given it's availability on multiple platforms and my current familiarity with it, I prefer the former. In today's blogpost, I'll introduce you to the basics of post processing in Lightroom 4 and save you a boatload of cash. This is not an exhaustive set of tutorials, but just enough to get you started. If there are more tutorials you want me to add, please let me know. One word of caution. I assume that you know how to use your camera and to read your histogram. I also hope you know the basics of picture controls such as saturation vs vibrance. If you have some of that covered, these tutorials will help you take your images to the next level. The TutorialsI've gone ahead and added all the videos to a playlist on YouTube - you can either play them on the site or off this post. I don't have much more to say - I hope the videos are useful!Introduction to Lightroom and Adobe Camera RawImport Pictures into LightroomBasic Editing in LightroomRemoving Blemishes in LightroomWork with brushes in Lightroom (and reduce wrinkles)Noise Reduction in LightroomHue, Saturation and Luminance Adjustments in LightroomBlack and White Processing in LightroomProcess Landscapes in LightroomSharpen Images in LightroomAdd a vignette to your image through LightroomSplit Toning in LightroomExport your images from LightroomI look forward to hearing from you about the utility of these tutorials. My next aim is to create a series of tutorials on Photoshop and focus it on editing photographs. If there are specific topics you'd like me to cover there, just let me know. Thanks for being patient with my erratic posting.© Sumeet Moghe

A few weeks back I published a set of tutorials to help you get started on Lightroom. I hope that those of you who do use Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw found those tutorials useful. I've now created a set of Photoshop tutorials for you to learn how to use the most popular post-processing tool for photographers. Along with the Lightroom tutorials, these videos form two hours of instruction with real photographs from the field and should be a comprehensive starter pack for you to post process like a champ! Hopefully I can save you some money that you may have ended up spending on a post-processing course. You can use that cash to buy yourself some equipment or maybe fund a short trip!The TutorialsLike the previous tutorials, these videos are also part of a YouTube playlist and I've licensed them under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You'll find these videos most useful if you play them in high definition. That way you'll see the detail a lot better. Have fun!Introduction to the Photoshop interfaceIntegrate Photoshop with RAW processing softwareBasic Adjustments in PhotoshopNon Destructive Editing in PhotoshopUse Soft Light to Enhance your Landscapes in PhotoshopStraighten your horizon and Darken your Sky in PhotoshopReduce Noise on your Images using Photoshop PluginsBlack and White Conversion in PhotoshopNon Destructive Dodging and Burning in PhotoshopNon Destructive Healing and Cloning in PhotoshopMasking in PhotoshopSharpening Tools in PhotoshopCreate Frames and Copyright Marks in PhotoshopCreate Custom Actions to Automate your work in PhotoshopIf you find these tutorials useful, then do share them with your friends and popularise the tutorials. While I don't intend for these videos to be a comprehensive dive into Photoshop, I hope they serve as a good introduction for people to feel familiar with the application and to get started. If no one ever had to attend a basic post-processing course, it'd make these tutorials immensely successful.© Sumeet Moghe

One of my favourite topics du jour is that one of the Future of Work and, more specifically, how the world of Social Networking is helping redefine it by provoking one of the most profound business transformations we have lived through in our entire history. But then again work, per se, is a whole lot more than just in a business context. Work keeps morphing at a rather rampant and unstoppable pace moving from being that physical space where things happen to become nowadays a state of mind. Work happens wherever you are, in a specific, unique and given context, with the tools you have at your disposal (and the people you may have around you to help you get it done). We are no longer restricted to the traditional office, nor a fixed top-down driven hierarchical team with a specific set of goals. We probably have got nowadays much better collaboration and knowledge sharing tools than ever before, allowing work to flow versus stagnate thanks to those unstoppable open knowledge flows amongst knowledge workers, whether inside or outside of the firewall, participating in meaningful conversations with customers, business partners, competitors, thought leaders, etc. etc. The traditional concept of the workplace is now a thing of the past. And about a good time, too! We are work. Work is us.  Later on next month, on September 21st, I will be participating, as one of the speakers, at the superb Joint Alumni Conference (a.k.a. JAC 2012) event that will be taking place in Zurich and my dissertation is going to be around this very same topic, i.e. The Future of Work. Over in Google Plus I have been having an exhilarating and rather inspiring conversation with a few folks, that I would love to invite you all to check it out, drop by and leave a comment, or two, if you wish to as well (Will be using that thread live on stage!), on what I will be covering on this very same topic and while doing plenty of research on stuff that I would want to talk about I bumped into another G+ Post from my good friend Jim Hays that clearly helps redefine our traditional concept of work. And how we may need to start shifting gears and make a mental switch from what we have considered, traditionally, as work, and what lies ahead for all of us, specially, in the current turmoil and financial econoclypse we have been going through in the last few years. I think I would just go ahead and take the liberty of embedding the screen shot over here that Jim re-shared, so you can see what I mean with that redefinition of the state of work:  To quote: "If you’re unemployed it’s not because there isn’t any work - Just look around: a housing shortage, crime, pollution; we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there is work to be done. So ask yourself, what kind of world has work, but no jobs. It’s a world where work is not related to satisfying our needs, a world where work is only related to satisfying the profit needs of business. This country was not built by the huge corporations or government bureaucracies. It was built by people who work. And, it is working people who should control the work to be done. Yet, as long as employment is tied to somebody else’s profits, the work won’t get done." I am not sure what you would think about such brilliant and incredibly provocative quote, but the Hippie 2.0 side of me keeps telling me that we are probably starting to witness an unprecedented and unique opportunity to go through a massive change on how we view work and how the business world needs to start readjusting to a new reality. A new reality where if it is not an integral part of helping improve the well-being of our societies, of our qualified workers, pretty soon we are going to reach that point where we may not have those workers anymore, not even qualified ones. Which certainly helps me get reminded about a quote that I recently blogged about by Don Tapscott that I think clearly defines the main big challenge ahead for the business / corporate world of the 21st century, very much along the lines of adapt to the new reality or die in the attempt:  "Business can’t succeed in a world that’s failing" Indeed, I do strongly believe that the corporate world has been, long enough, perhaps for far too long!, totally disengaged with (knowledge) workers AND their societies. That lack of outer meaning, focus and purpose out of the short term, individualistic corporate profit (Driven by power, politics and greed, mostly) is soon reaching an end-point, if not already, whereby if businesses would want to survive in the 21st century they can no longer thrive in isolation, but must find their way to embrace and apply that so-called concept of corporate social responsibility, because otherwise knowledge workers will find a way to continue thriving without paying too much attention to the traditional business world environment. Remember that myth of employee engagement? Well, thanks to social computing, and social networking tools, whether internal or external, we now have got a huge opportunity to revert that myth back, embed business back into society, our collective society, and continue through that learning process of redefining work to make it more human, democratised, accessible, universal, worthy, just and meaningful not only for those people who are actively working, but for everyone else altogether, as part of a single, unique ecosystem: society as a whole.  Exciting times, indeed, to live through! However, let’s just not waste that opportunity (again). We may not have another one coming up soon enough… and, if anything, let’s not forget that we, the workers, are the ones redefining the workplace of the future. Let’s ensure we get it right this time around with the little help and good effort from social software. We all are capable of wonderful things, we all know that. We just need to show it and demonstrate it. If we have been looking for a purpose for Living Social, I think this is our chance. We all know what’s the alternative, and how ugly it is, so it’s probably a good time to make a stand and start owning and take a bit more responsibility of our work. After all, it’s perhaps our only way to make this world a better place, not just for a few, but for everyone else altogether for that matter…