If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you would know how one of the various different things that I keep trying to do, but fail miserably, struggling all along, is to embark myself into writing over here relatively shorter blog posts versus the rather lengthy essays that seem to have been more of the norm all along. Don’t take me wrong. Somehow the vast majority of you folks seem to enjoy those lengthy articles quite a bit, since blog traffic tripled throughout 2012 from previous years, but I am starting to think that it wouldn’t hurt to have little snacks every now and then, while we are all on the move, about interesting things that are happening out there, or relevant links worth while sharing across with an annotation or two, or just simply, reflect about a crazy new idea, a new thought, a new interesting initiative that may have caught my attention, etc. with just a few words to then develop it further along as time moves on and things settle down a bit. Well, here’s my zillionth attempt into aiming for shorter blog posts. Will it blend this time around? I am not sure whether it will stick around, or not, but I guess it’s worth while trying it out, once again, don’t you think?, and see how it goes… Now, I am not thinking about stopping writing lengthier blog entries, at least, not for the time being. I am thinking more along the lines of combining both longer pieces with shorter bites of things that may have caught my attention and that I would want to perhaps develop further along on it at a later time. Or if it has got to do with something related to Productivity and how we can improve, collectively, our overall sense of Effectiveness as knowledge Web workers, by all means, I am going to give it a try and experiment with this new form of combining both shorter and longer articles to help perhaps make the blog a bit more dynamic. That’s maybe the reason why it took me so long to come back to this blog in the first place. The fact that I kept aiming for longer pieces where I needed to reflect perhaps more than I should. So maybe I can prepare now for those crazy busy times ahead of me (As I am entering my last week of vacation) when time will be scarce but ideas plenty and I would need to have a place to air them out, so I don’t forget about them for when things may slow down and I can pick them up again.  So what a better way of kicking off these shorter blog posts than sharing a link to a rather interesting YouTube video that I bumped into a few weeks back and which I think would be incredibly helpful for those people who, like me, do plenty of public speaking and could do with a few tips on creating slides people will remember. That’s, indeed, the suggestive and rather intriguing topic that Nancy Duarte talked about on this video presentation that I can certainly recommend everyone to go through, since it’s just a bit over 2 minutes long, but pretty packed up with some excellent tips that I thought I would briefly quote over here, as a teaser, to get you all going:  "Use Slides Selectively Write the slides after you have prepared the speech Design slides people can "get" in 3 seconds Storyboard one concept per slide Remember that slides are a visual medium" Here is the direct link to the video, in case you may not be able to play it through the embedded version below:  I guess if this year we are, finally, at long last!, declaring war to PowerPoint and presentations in general, Nancy just shared across with all of us a nice, smart, succinct, knowledgeable manner of doing it without dying in the attempt, don’t you think? I particularly love item #1 which is why during the course of 2013 I’ll keep aiming to reduce tremendously my dependency on visuals and focus more on the power of the word, of emotion, of passion, essentially, on what drives me to do what I do and what I care about: having a good conversation where I can learn just as much as the audience does, if not more! That’s what presentations are all about. The rest are just master classes.

Before we move further on in trying to address the final conclusions I shared on a recent blog post under the heading Social Business in 2013 - A Challenge, I thought I would go ahead commenting further first on that third piece from that recent CMSWire article that I published earlier on, where I talked about perhaps one of the most important, key concepts for Social Business to thrive in 2013 and beyond: A Commitment. More than anything else, because over the course of the last few months, perhaps couple of years, I have seen very little of it, as I have blogged about a couple of times in articles like Why Social Business Keeps Failing to Deliver or Dear Social Business Evangelist, Where Art Thou? and somehow it’s starting to bring back memories of the same trip that Knowledge Management went through back in the day. About 15 to 18 years ago. Yes, the buzz is there, the hype, too! The selling and marketing of it, but when you are talking about making a commitment, that is, raising the stakes to provoke that profound business transformation we all know it’s fully capable of (about how to make it work), it’s nowhere to be seen. And that’s worrying. Very worrying. Perhaps we could go ahead and illustrate it with a cartoon from Tom Fishburne (Please do go ahead and read his blog post on the topic, too! It will be worth while a read!) that I am sure you would all agree with me that it would make the point incredibly well. If not, judge for yourselves on what I mean with that keyword of Commitment (With a capital C) and the lack of it in today’s current Social Business landscape: Just brilliant, don’t you think? I can imagine that at this point in time plenty of you folks out there would be musing about the fact that you may know plenty of firms who would fall under any of those various different strategies except perhaps for the "All too rare" that Tom mentions and that I feel is why we need to raise the stakes on not only what Social Business could do, but what it would eventually need to do! And not just with that flavour of a focus on delighting customers, but with employees and knowledge workers alike! Think about it. When was the last time that you helped your fellow colleague(s) to be more awesome, become smarter than you are at what you do… without asking anything in return? See what I mean? There are big key words in here at play in this so-called social business transformation that very few people, specially, vendors, have put into practice and perhaps that’s something that we can help them understand when talking about commitment. Concepts like empathy, equity, meritocracy, transparency, openness, authenticity, trust, engagement, participation, constructive feedback / criticism and so forth are still very much missing from vast majority of Social Business vendors out there. And I suspect that customers, whether internal or external, are just about to become really fed up with all of that NOT walking the talk from all of those social business vendors that in most cases are showing how full they are of themselves in any which way and nothing else. Very little substance coming along due to that lack of establishing some serious commitment behind their words on helping their own customers be more awesome.  In that CMSWire article I got published by the end of last year I described it in these terms. To quote:  "And finally, here we are with the commitment. In the quest for most brands to become more open, trustworthy, honest, transparent, interconnected, smarter and authentic, in other words, more engaging with their own customers AND employees, provide better quality service, better products, better customer service, and so forth, in 2013 we are going to see how vendors (and not just for Social Businesses, but everyone who may well be in Sales) are going to make that giant leap of faith and start walking the talk more often. In the world of Social, 2013 is going to accelerate the transformation of vendors talking one thing and doing a completely different other. It’s no longer going to work that way. Rather the opposite. Businesses, mainly through learning by doing, will be called upon by their customers and especially their very own employees, on the main reasons why they are not walking the talk. Why they are not provoking their own business transformation through social networking when they may well be big advocates themselves of the change? We are going to witness how trust is going to become more critical than ever, not from the perspective of how you can gain my / our / their trust, but more how you can keep it alive and kicking every single day of the year by starting to put your actions behind your words. Because if you don’t manage to make that happen in an effective and engaging manner, I suspect both customers AND employees will move on. Brands and businesses will be striving for authenticity, for uniqueness, for what makes them special, [essential] against everyone else. Customers and employees will be striving to belong to those brands and businesses whose commitment is one of wanting to transform themselves into the next generation of how we get work done in the 21st century: sustainable growth." That’s the Commitment (with the Capital C) that we are about to see unfold and unleash, both inside and outside of the firewall for most businesses out there. Of particular interest, I would think, would be the bold text highlighting the emphasis on walking the talk, on learning by doing, because we are starting to see, if not already, how businesses who bought into the idea of becoming a Social Business by purchasing some [Perhaps (too) expensive] social software a year or two ago are starting to wonder about what next, because, amongst several other things, it’s just not working! Remember how 70% of the corporate world knowledge workforce is totally disengaged? Or how 7 out of 10 Enterprise 2.0 deployments will fail, according to some piece of research that was conducted last year? Knowledge Management anyone? This is, indeed, when those social business vendors would need to stand out AND deliver. Put their actions behind their words. The smooth talk is way over by now! Not just for their customers, but also for their own employees. Only then will we be capable of talking about Socially Integrated Enterprises thriving to help you become *even* more awesome. The rest is just a waste of time. And we all know life is just too short to keep wasting along those precious moments, so I would suggest keep pushing not just for your / our customers, but, essentially for *all* of us. We cannot longer afford statements like Social Business / Enterprise 2.0 has been here for over 6 years and we still have yet to witness that true, rather profound, social transformation of today’s corporate world to become tomorrow’s social workplace. Our workplace. 

I found these slides by Cathy Moore Design Lively elearning with Action Mapping that illustrate the concept of action mapping most precisely . I thought this information to be valuable for most of the industry, as we often tend to lose focus on the business goal and what learners really need in order to perform their job better. Some of the points that I highlighted, in this months big question on learning circuits, speak about how learner-centric design, reference-hybrids, and learning outcomes will become more important in future work places. So though the term 'action mapping' seemed new, Cathy's slides made it evident as to how focus, focus, and more focus on the business goal and the learner needs in our training courses will get us the desired business benefits.The goal of Action Mapping is to successfully help you convert your formidable 'information dump' into a no-nonsense meaningful course, that focuses only on 'actions' that the learner needs to learn to perform his job better. The action mapping process, according to Cathy Moore, consists of the following steps:1. Identify your business goal.2. Identify what people need to do in order to reach that goal.3. Design activities that help people practice each behavior.4. Identify the minimum information people need to complete each activity.I believe this approach takes us away from the linear approach we had to covering courses earlier, wherein we would necessarily cover a lot of theory in the beginning of a course, hoping the user 'may' need it sometime. I think that approach is now irrelevant as it also indicates a level of uncertainty and lack of awareness on the side of the course designer. The benefits of applying the concept of action mapping to your courses are:1. Tightly focused materials.2. Realistic, compelling activities.3. No irrelevant information.4. More likely to have a measurable business impact.The things we need to avoid doing though are:1. Attempt to increase the learner's knowledge in their domain to an extent that you cover every bit of information that comes your way, and end up dumping information on the learner. For example, don't try and cover every single feature of the product. Remember that it is product documentation's job to do that.2. Create irrelevant quizzes in the name of engaging the learner and waste valuable learning time.3. Write statements that increase knowledge rather than teach actions, meaning write sentences that are task-oriented. For example, The Access Control dialog box, gives you many options to control actions of your users, can be better written as Use the Access Control dialog box to assign appropriate privileges to your users.The focus, so to say will be, the 'action' that your want the learner to learn in order to be able to perform better in their job.My 2 cents on action mappingI think we as instructional designers need to ramp up and define a niche for ourselves by proving that we 'can' understand the learner's needs and design courses to precisely address them. This will only be possible, owing to our ability to gain domain knowledge in the domain in which the training is being created. For example, if I am creating training for the telecommunications domain, I need to understand generic telecommunications concepts, as well as the way in which the product that I'm creating training for, will be used by the learner. So you, more than the learner, need to work very hard to gather this information and analyze it to the level of the 'actions' or 'tasks' that your learner will perform.I also believe that those of us who believe a lot in the traditional ways of training, need to move towards a mindset change here, and accept that the 'traditional' trainings that we created in the past were not necessarily the best solutions and recognize how practical concepts like action mapping can help us deliver effective training.There is also a need to create simple and usable user interfaces and interactions that will motivate the learner to learn more, rather than deter them from proceeding, owing to the complex nature of the interfaces.As Cathy rightly highlights, the associated practice activity linking to an action, should be taken from a real-life scenario rather than a fictitious scenario that sounds unrealistic to the learner. It becomes imperative on the part of the instructional designer to research on and create 'realistic' scenarios that the learner can 'really' relate to.In conclusion, I believe that as time moves on, the need to being practical becomes paramount and we need no more eye openers than we had in our past experiences.

And, finally, after "Social Business in 2013 - A Challenge" and "[…] - A Commitment", here’s the last article of the series, where I will be focusing on "An Opportunity" for Social Business in 2013 (and beyond), more than anything else by touching base on a deeper level on what I covered at both of those blog entries and what I have been experiencing and reflecting upon myself over the course of the last year or two. This piece would also highlight a shift of focus and purpose for yours truly with regards to the overall theme of Social Networking for Business. Yes, indeed, this is the so-called blog entry I have been talking about (Both offline and online) over the last few months about where to next … And with that I mean, mainly, where will I be moving along with my own efforts as a Social Business evangelist from here onwards as an opportunity to continue to grow, learn, explore, reflect, and share that huge new opportunity Social Business has got ahead, if it would want to succeed in today’s, more complex and uncertain than ever, corporate workplace environment. Indeed, a shift of focus away from that technology fetish, vendors’ speak, Sales, Marketing & Communications, Digital (Technical) Thought Leadership and so forth and diving right into what I have been sensing is the major key towards completing and realising that Social Business transformation we keep aiming at, but fail to deliver fully. Time to step up, level up the game, shift gears and go right to the heart, the core, of how businesses have been run over the last few decades in order for Social Business to thrive: Human Resources. Or, better said, the metamorphosis of Human Resources into Human Relationships. That’s what is at stake over here. In previous blog entries I have reflected on the fact of how I keep seeing how more and more businesses seem to stagnate in their adoption efforts of becoming a Socially Integrated Enterprise after the first or second year of deploying social technologies behind the firewall (Never mind the external side for a minute… More on that one later on…). It’s what some folks have called that lovely honeymoon period where rather Sales, Marketing or Communications have been taking the lead in jumping the shark and deciding to, finally, dive into the world of Social. And, yes, businesses eventually do. Knowledge workers ultimately adopt and embrace as well a much more open, public, trustworthy and transparent manner of collaborating and sharing their knowledge. And the raw benefits have been demonstrated time and time again. Have you noticed how little we see nowadays in writing that awkward, old, now obsolete, conversation about the ROI of Social Media? It’s gone! Nowhere to be seen anymore! Nothing. Zipped. Nada. Why? Well, mainly because everyone has stopped questioning the value add that social technologies can bring up to the day to day business operations and how they can help improve overall business performance. It’s there. It’s now a given. It’s just a matter of figuring out the How, so that you can incorporate it into your overall business processes and corporate culture. But there is something else. It’s what I call Human Processes. The ones that are driven by humans AND for humans. The ones that are not spoken, perhaps not even written about much anywhere, but that everyone understands they are a key part of the corporate culture to the point that they are the ones that rule how businesses operate. Essentially, Human Resources. In practical terms, something much more mundane that I suspect is going to become the main, key focus for most businesses over the next few months, if not already: Employee Engagement. But all along with a slight new twist added to it; it’s a two way street that needs to work in both directions: Employees to employer and employer to employees. Right now, it’s a one way only street (Employees to employer), one where employers are saying that employees should even be lucky to have a job, to be loyal to the firm, to have work to do. Well, that may well have been the case over the last 50 years, but we are now past way beyond the threshold to admit it as how businesses should operate in this, more complex, inter/ hyper connected, networked 21st century than ever. It just doesn’t work that way anymore. And that’s where Human Relationships kick in. HR’s own transformation to start facing AND do something about what I feel is their number #1 business problem to solve over the next year or two: reduce the huge % of disengaged employees we have got across the corporate world and for which no-one seems to be doing much. Or, anything at all, really.   And that’s where Social Business kicks in. That’s where some of the main key mantras behind it need to become a reality for HR to provoke that business transformation we all sense is almost there, but that it keeps escaping us through our fingers. It’s now the right time for HR to step up, level up the game, and get involved in becoming the centre of that social business transformation, specially, with regards to those key human processes. Key themes like openness, transparency, trust, recognition, (digital) reputation, empathy, equity, meritocracy, democracy, authenticity, engagement, participation, constructive criticism, knowledge sharing, collaboration, learning, connectedness need to become part of HR’s new speak. And not only just speak, but do as well, leading by example, learning by doing, diving into the conversations they keep saying that have been watching and monitoring from afar to judge employee’s sentiment, but that time and time again they have neglected to dive into the conversation, because they feel they still rule the corporate world, i.e. the knowledge workforce and therefore they don’t see a need for it. Really? Ever heard of Talent Management or Talent Wars? Ever read about plenty of research done around the huge %s of disengaged employees at work? That’s not what I would call ruling the corporate world. Quite the opposite. Indeed, more like destroying it altogether to no avail.  I remember when back in the day, nearly 10 years ago, when I first started blogging, both internally and externally (Nearly 8 years ago for the latter), one of the themes I decided to go for as its own category was Social Computing, then Social Networking. From there onwards Enterprise 2.0, followed by the Social Enterprise and, lately, Social Business. That was all part of what I felt was the evolution of social networking in a corporate environment. Well, as of today, and while I move on shifting my focus into that where to next … I have created a couple of new categories. One of them is just a renaming activity from a previous one. The other is an entirely new category that I will be using to post articles on that particular topic from here onwards. It will also mean how, after 6 years, I’m starting to sense it’s time to move on from those fully loaded monikers of Social Enterprise  or Social Business, since, you know, they eventually mean something completely different altogether and it’s probably a good thing to move on anyway. That’s why Social Enterprise / Social Business from here onwards, for yours truly, are going to be Open Business, following further up the superb piece of work that David Cushman did in setting up the stage of what Open Business is all about during the course of last few months. You may want to go ahead and start reading "The 10 Principles of Open Business", or "Introducing Open Business", or perhaps check out the Open Business Council to find out more about it and you will see how for a good number of years this blog has been permeating through plenty of the vision David shared across with that new concept of how businesses should operate. I know it’s not new, for sure, I mean, openness has been there all along, but if you read further into the principles that David shared across about this topic you would see how we still need to do plenty of work about it. And that’s essentially what I am planning on doing from here onwards. I would love to read your comments on this blog post about what you think Open Business would mean to you and whether you would feel it’d be something that could stick around and help us evolve the conversation around Social Business and look for that specific purpose and focus without getting confused along the way anymore by stealing terms and concepts, because we just couldn’t find anything better at the time. Oh, and in case you may not have noticed it will also mean I’m finally getting rid of that fully loaded concept of Social, which I know it’s kind of a taboo word for plenty of people out there since it has got plenty of various other different connotations than just work, like goofing away, slacking off, or just simply avoid doing work. I know it’s going to take me a bit of time to adjust and stop using Social or Social Business, so I would ask you to bear with me along the way while I get to adjust accordingly and I get to explore further along what an Open Business is all about. That’s essentially what I am planning on blogging further along from here onwards as well.  Finally, the new category I will be using on this blog from here onwards is Employee Engagement, more than HR 2.0, HR Transformation and whatever else. It’s going to be that focus area for me where I plan to write down articles, and share some interesting readings I have bumped into over the course of time around Employee Engagement itself, but as a two way street: from employers to employees and from employees to employers. It’s going to be an exciting journey, one where I plan to learn quite a bit on how HR operates and how we can *all* help out provoke that transformation from Human Resources into Human Relationships. I am hoping you folks would be helping me out adding further up into the conversations by sharing your insights, first hand experiences, know-how, skills, ideas and so forth on HR becoming the main driver of Social Business, errr, I mean, Open Business and help us bring forward that huge opportunity Open / Social Business has got ahead of us all over the next couple of years … Oh, and if you feel I’m way off base and heading into the wrong direction, let me know, too! Like I have always said, I do care a whole lot more about the journey than the final destination, so if I’m about to start the wrong kind journey, better to know well in advance, don’t you think? [This blog post series was inspired as a follow-up from the recent article I published at CMSWire under the heading "Social Business in 2013: A Challenge, An Opportunity, A Commitment" and I am going to hereby take the liberty of quoting the last piece on An Opportunity to see the context of where it all comes from and where I will be heading next … Hope you folks will also join me along the way on this rather anticipated and incredibly exciting journey!  "The opportunity for Social Business in 2013 and beyond is going to start with a challenge. A business problem. Actually, the biggest problem the corporate world has faced in decades, which despite the rampant use of social networking tools, we still haven't been able to solve accordingly: employee engagement. Recent research studies from Deloitte have confirmed how over 70 percent of our employee workforce is disengaged or totally disengaged at work. This is while we have witnessed and experienced the rampant adoption of social networking tools behind the firewall. How can that be that the surge of social technologies has taken the business world by storm, yet seven out of 10 employees are totally disengaged with their day to day work? The answer is rather simple. We have been missing a huge opportunity in the wider adoption of Social Business within the enterprise. We have seen where social technologies have been rather successful in communications, marketing, sales, learning, retail, consultancy, research, knowledge sharing, collaboration, customer service and so forth. Yet there is one group that has not been affected by this rampant adoption of social networking tools for business, and which could very well be the main reason why knowledge workers are not engaged at work. Without this group being involved, we are not really provoking the (social) business transformation we would have wanted or hoped for. I am talking about HR and their new transformation from being Human Resources to becoming Human Relationships. That's the huge opportunity for Social Business in 2013 and beyond. Help address employee disengagement across the board by having HR drive, right at the center, the transformation of how business gets done through Social. There are plenty of implications here, but one that's going to become key is the one around Talent Management, especially, when your employees are disengaged, finding that new opportunity to be rewarded, recognized and motivated and more, thanks to the meaningful, purposeful, engaging work they may have eventually landed in. This is the chance for HR to demonstrate that Social Business has never been about having the coolest tools, or the most impressive working business processes. This is going to be the final opportunity for HR to be back at the forefront of facilitating something we have been missing for decades: employees owning their work, taking more responsibility, making the right decisions, earning their merits and (digital) reputation, to eventually become recognised for what they do best — their job(s)."]

How amusing that the very topics I had planned for my blog became a topic of discussion before I could even write up my post. I was planning to list some best practices in my field of work since quite sometime now, as I'm a believer in the concept due to the goal it intends to achieve—better and efficient performance. Looking at the posts and comments on Jane Bozarth and Tony Karrer's blogs it appears that the term is either 'overused' or misunderstood. I never had any doubts about what it meant until I read these posts. I read Jane Bozarth's post on The Myth of "Best Practices" the day she posted it and empathized with her point of view that people expect to get best practices for almost anything they want to learn. She's right from her perspective in saying that before asking such questions, one needs to understand that...------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------A "best practice" is best only in the precise, specific context in which it exists.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today, Tony's post on Sharing Best Practices—Patterns originated from the same source, but I thought succeeded in dissecting the context and origin of term best practice and arrived at design patterns very beautifully. This is the way I would like to understand the concept of best practices too and totally agree with Tony. Thus, though I had absolutely no plans of writing a post on best practices, here I am writing one! After reading all the discussions, I now have formed an opinion that I want to share. Not intending to digress though, I think it is worth mentioning that today I read another post by Tony on New Blogs and how new bloggers have trouble thinking of topics to write. It seems that reading other bloggers posts intently can also give you wonderful ideas on what to write on your blog.Getting back to the topic under discussion, best practices and patterns, I suggest fully reading Jane and Tony's posts and the comments, before reading mine. In this post, I plan to illustrate the points raised in the discussions with real-life scenarios, which is my favorite way of making people delve deeper into a topic. Once you have context, you begin to see the value of things which otherwise seem meaningless or irrelevant. I urge each of you to think about the scenarios that you find relevant with this post and share your thoughts.Scenario 1:As instructional designer, I use a course outline and a storyboard template in order to eliminate the redundant task of thinking what all I need to cover in a course outline, and what all I need to write in a storyboard. Now this is a best practice we follow to help us work efficiently and focus on the main goal we're trying to achieve here—Build a Course!It is worth noting here, as to how the template was created; by observing a pattern of information that all courses largely require!The same example applies when I build a custom course template with a menu, previous, and next buttons. Even Rapid elearning tools are built on the concept of observed patterns in elearning courses. Using the custom or rapid elearning tool can be interpreted as a best practice in order to avoid unnecessary errors and stay focused on the goal—Building a Course!Scenario 2:I've just decided to update my Nokia handsets firmware as I discovered there is an update to it. I browse to their website where they have beautifully documented the procedure on how to update my Nokia phone's firmware. If you look at the pre-installation task list (Points to note), you will note that they are essentially best practices. You will also find FAQ that give you questions of exactly what may happen during your phone upgrade and under what circumstances you should or should not panic. The FAQ are designed based on observed patterns and help make the update process predictable for a first timer.The same can apply when you use any tool for the first time. Think about this; what if Nokia just gave you the software to download but never gave you the pre-installation steps and FAQ? What could happen? Your opinions are welcome...Scenario 3:I did save the best one for the last and hope this one illustrates the dicussion well. Let's say your organization has a retail product (consisting of ordering, billing and inventory) that they sold to a premium retail store. The product implementation is complex and cannot be installed and configured by just running a single setup.exe file. In order to get your product installed in the customer's enterprise, the customer needs to do many tasks:- Plan the entire installation—how many machines needed, what applications to install on each machine, and how to evenly distribute the load so that the system performs optimally.- Setup and configure several machines/servers for the database and application servers.- Install and configure the database and application servers respectively on each machine.- Install and configure each product.- Connect and integrate the products so they can communicate, meaning:- Ordering takes the order after checking with inventory.- Then confirms the order and sends the information to billing.You need to imagine a process running in the midst of all these applications and giving directions on what to do and when. By now you should understand that these are common but complex setups for an enterprise and involve a lot of risk.This, I believe, is a strong case requiring one to have best practices and available design patterns to implement a complete product solution. If the planning or the implementation of this kind of a system goes wrong, it could lead to disastrous results like:- degraded system performance;- system malfunction leading to loss of valuable business information;- unexpected system behavior.The result: A major loss in the business.The way to avoid such events from occurring, would be to follow certain best practices, as the problems listed above are actually common failure patterns observed in such systems. The way to prevent this problem would be to:- Create backup servers to backup data regularly.- Use advanced features like clustering to distribute the load on different servers (if your order volumes are high)- Go with recommended patterns for designing and integrating such systems.Finally, I'd like to conclude this discussion by reiterating some points:- Best practices can be arrived at only from experience and real time implementation of a process or product, and are always specific to the domain of expertise. Thus, I agree with the comment that called them 'expert practices'.- Using proven patterns as a base saves us from running into problems that others have already run into, and also prevent us from reinventing the wheel and wasting effort. It pays to work smart by leveraging on and building upon existing information or proven patterns to fit our need; just like I just did with Tony's post. I just used the theoretical knowledge he gave on his post and illustrated them with real-life examples. :)So irrespective of the name we'd like to give them, we do need 'things' of the nature of best practices and patterns to help us do our job better.I would like to hear from all of you as to what you think here...

I'm surprised to see such a strong post supporting Instructor-Led Learning only, in times when Web 2.0 reigns and the learning trend is slowly changing. Tony Karrer makes very good arguments in his post Long Live? and I suggest reading his views.I don't agree when Saul says that people in the community claim that ILT is dead. I am quite in touch with most of the posts on the community and that is definitely not what people are trying to say. From what I understand, we are in a transition stage where in people are exploring other possibilities of learning, and the means provided by informal learning was a welcome change for several reasons:- Accessibility to classroom training when you need help on the job- The cost of attending an ILT is high- Online courses were not sufficient to cover all that a learner neededSo, I think, the whole initiative is coming about as an attempt to make information accessible to the larger group, and enable them to learn on their own, by writing their perspective and sharing information from their experience. How often have we always wanted to know how another organization did the same job that we do, and what their priorities are? I always was curious.All of this only gets an individual to understand the bigger picture, and whats happening outside their own world. You are simulating an environment of group discussions amongst your community, by blogging your opinion/ideas and hearing what others think. You are allowing the learner to think and understand aspects on their own, stimulating the thought process and allowing them to create and build their own solutions after reading a bunch of related articles blogs etc. I think informal learning is about:- Broadening your horizon.- Learning actively rather than passively.- Being open to listening to others in the community and hearing their point of view.- Making your point after having sufficiently researched the topic you have in mind, keeping in mind that there are more perspectives and views that matter, not just your own.- Being open to appreciation and criticism without being biased.- Stimulating yourself to think rather than being spoon fed with everything on a golden plate.- Willingness to accept that there is lot more knowledge to be learned and researched, than what we already know, that the world is big and we can never know every single thing in our lifetime. In short 'Knowledge is an ocean'.- Doing what is best for a situation and working continuously towards improvement, knowing there is no limit to how much better you can do your job.- Knowing there can be more solutions to a problem, than what is given in books.- Exploring new possibilities, and reaching higher levels of cognition on cliched topics.- Accepting that what we have been doing in the past was a good solution then but not anymore!Coming back to the post we're talking about, I'd like to reiterate and agree with Tony that, no where does one say that informal learning replaces the ILT process. ILT is here to stay and so is elearning. But informal learning is the way to get on-the-job assistance, solve problems by questioning and debating, rather than accepting what a single individual source can tell you. It has more to do with the fact that there isn't any limit to how much you can learn.But then again, it was nice to have someone challenge what we all believe in, and have us rethink and validate our initiative on informal learning once more. Isn't that was informal learning is all about?

Earlier on in the year, while doing some casual reading out there on the Web around HR related topics and how it’s been impacted by the world of Social, now that it’s become my new focus area around Open Business, I bumped into an article at Forbes that clearly reminded me how we may not have learned much in the last 18 years around knowledge sharing, collaboration, connecting and building personal business relationships through digital tools and the overall concept of social networking for business, as we keep applying lipstick on a pig trying to dump traditional social components into every single aspect of a business organisation, whether Sales, Marketing, Communications, Development, Retail, and, now, of course, Human Resources as well, since it seems to the hot topic du jour that everyone is trying to hop into. But seriously? Haven’t we learned anything in the last 18 years since we had the first instances of social software tools with blogs and wikis? It looks like we haven’t.  At least, judging from that article Jeanne Meister published earlier on under the heading "2013 - The Year of Social HR" and where she gets to develop further on a good number of different social media trends that will be affecting HR over the course of the next year. It’s interesting to note how those very same trends attempted to have some kind of impact around other areas of the business and with very mixed results. So it looks like it’s now a good time to try them out on HR and see if they would work. Never mind the extended first hand experience we have had in the past proving that some of those trends just didn’t even make the mark. Shouldn’t we be aiming higher with regards to HR and the impact of Social for that matter?  Allow me to explain briefly further along tackling each and everyone of those various different trends that Jeanne mentions on that article to explain a little bit of what I mean:  Gamification Becomes A Standard Practice Well, I surely hope it won’t, and big time! I know that in the recent past I haven’t written much around the whole topic of gamification or serious games at work, but those folks who know me from interactions on several social networking tools out there would agree with you that it’s currently one of my pet peeves from the world of Social. More than anything else because we have been trying it out for the last 15 to 18 years in the field of Knowledge Management and because time and time again it keeps failing under a singular, specific premise, amongst several others, that keeps getting ignored time and time again: put a gamification engine of whatever the sort behind the firewall and people will naturally tend to game it, never mind the unhealthy competitive nature that will inspire knowledge workers to protect and hoard their own knowledge even more, so that they can continue gaming the system to be on top! Therefore making it a waste of time and resources, as well as a huge disappointment for the entire workforce for not delivering much on helping improve engagement, after all. It may well be a matter of semantics, but for as long as we keep using gamification as the wording / concept it will never stick around in the corporate world as we know it, based on those couple of reasons I shared above. An alternative? Probably I would go with Behavioural Dynamics, which has got completely different connotations to what gamification has been all along, and perhaps I should develop further in additional blog posts what is meant with that behavioural dynamics, to help influence how knowledge workers engage through social technologies behind the firewall.  I, for once, would hope that gamification and social business vendors would finally put a stop on wanting to infantilise the corporate world as we know it, because that’s essentially what they are doing. You can’t engage knowledge workers by treating them like kids playing silly games of gaining points here and there, competing with one another in an unhealthy manner, showing with pride their badges. For what purpose? Reputation? Engagement? Really? See? Gaming the system will provoke one single element to come out that could even destroy the corporate culture of your own organisation: lack of value add from your own online interactions with others, just to earn that badge. We have already done this in the past with KM and we don’t seem to have learned much about it, have we? If HR would want to re-engage back the knowledge workforce I would certainly stop focusing on gamification and instead adopt the mantra of Open Business as in Open HR, meaning, becoming more open and transparent around both HR and Human driven processes, engage in direct dialogue with the workforce to find out the many different reasons they may have as to why they are no longer feeling engaged, to evaluate what can be done to revert the change, be capable of accepting constructive criticism not only on what works, but mostly on what doesn’t work, so that HR can have an option AND the opportunity to revert the tide back again. And, overall, bring back into the conversation topics like equity, democracy, meritocracy, social eminence, trust, open knowledge sharing and collaboration, meaning, purpose, focus, motivation and so forth, which have been missing on HR’s narrative for far too long! The Death of the Resume Nothing really new on this one either, I am afraid. Not even a trend anymore, but more of a reality, I can imagine. For instance, I just can’t remember the last time that I updated my official CV. I think it must have been about 8 to 9 years ago, if not longer!, yet in all of that time I have been moving around in between projects, business units and what not and I never had to revert back to the CV to show what my skills and experience are on a particular subject matter. Instead, indeed, both my personal business blog, and, specially, my extended social networks have become my new CV, which is probably the reason why my curriculum has now become the first page of Google Search results for "Luis Suarez" (i.e. my blog et al). See? Building a digital footprint is now more the norm, rather than the exception, and perhaps the end goal for all knowledge workers out there wanting to establish themselves demonstrating their subject matter expertise and their passion for a particular topic by making a smarter use of the digital tools to not just get the message across, but also to make sense of it all through meaningful conversations. Something that Howard Rheingold has described beautifully on his most recent book Net Smart. The primary goal over here for HR then would be to help prepare knowledge workers to become more knowledgable and savvy to move their traditional, fixed, always out of date, paper based CV into the digital world where it’s constantly updated on a regular basis and with perhaps much more accuracy, since it will incorporate both the expertise from those knowledge workers, along with their networks’, by how they demonstrate their thought leadership always adding business value into the conversation(s). Your Klout Score Will Become A Measurable Currency Goodness! I surely hope not! In fact, I would strongly encourage everyone that every time you may bump into a job vacancy where they are asking for your Klout score, or to have a certain score for the job, to not even think about joining that firm, because right there they are reflecting how they don’t respect much your own privacy as a knowledge worker, based on how Klout destroys it by just trying to figure out how influential you are in social networks by being rather intrusive, never mind how flaky the algorithm is and how restrictive it is when measuring that social influence since it just focuses on the easy part: how verbose you may well be in blasting out your marketing messages out to others!  Yikes! No, thanks! Seriously, if you are looking for a job, and in that job description HR mentions the word Klout, the best thing you can do is run away! As fast as you can! There are way better jobs out there waiting for you where your privacy is well respected while measuring your social influence in an smart and responsible manner. Alternatives for HR? Look into the bigger picture. Look into how you can measure the influence of knowledge workers out there in the digital world by focusing more on the conversations and the value add they put forward in their various networks and communities, rather than how many times they manage to blast out their own marketing messages without focusing on anything else. This is something that other services like Little Bird do extremely well, that is, focus on the networks, the communities, and how they are influenced by those experts (More on Little Bird shortly, by the way…) Personal Branding Will Be A Required Skill Not much of a trend this one either, is it? From the moment that knowledge workers are keen on going digital, using whatever the social Web technologies in place, this is no longer a growing trend, but a well established one. In fact, it’s been in the making for nearly 10 years now, even way before Enterprise 2.0 became the buzzword, when folks resorted to their own personal business blogs as their best personal branding tools. And that’s still going rather strong when that aspect has been hugely amplified and augmented with all of the social networking sites we are all far too familiar with.  The role of HR in this one, as an opportunity to lead by example on that mantra of Open HR, is that one of helping knowledge workers facilitate plenty of opportunities to build their digital footprint with enough resources, education, coaching, mentoring, facilitation, so that instead of becoming a hurdle where some HR departments may not be in favour of employees being out there in the open in fear of being snatched by talent hunters, they work even harder to make that happen so that they can have a chance to fight for them by caring about them. There is nothing for HR to take more pride on than having your employee knowledge workforce being enticed by talent hunters to make a move. That’s basically sending out there a tremendous message: you have got a high performing, rather talented, motivated and engaged team. It’s your job now, HR’s, to retain it.  Recruiters Will Find You Before You Know You Are Looking For A Job Finally, perhaps the most interesting of the various different trends that Jeanne talks about on that Forbes piece, not so much for the opportunity of looking for a job, way before you sense you may well be in that situation, but, specially, from the perspective that this trend on its own could well be the confirmation of another well known one that will surely tear apart the traditional concept of the knowledge workforce and the corporate world as we know it. Essentially, the shift from the traditional payroll employee workforce into that free agent, freelancer workforce that gathers around networks and communities to deliver their expertise and extensive know-how, get paid for it in good terms, and then move elsewhere.  This is the one area where HR would surely need to go through a major transformation from being right at the centre of managing employees / resources, to be shifted around the edges facilitating alumni networks, freelancers, and a small core group of employees to be part of the same ecosystem. One that, at long last, is going to reach the final frontier: The Social Web.  2013 may well be the year of Social HR, we will have to wait and see, but what I do know is that judging from the reflections I have shared above 2013 certainly is going to be the year of Open HR, where openness, transparency, publicy, equity, trust, engagement, meritocracy, purpose, meaning, online / digital reputation, recognition of networks and communities vs. just individuals are becoming common HR speak, that is, HR’s new narrative to be able to re-engage back the workforce and if we were just to learn a little bit from what we have done in the recent past, what worked AND what didn’t work!, there is only one way forward: focus on the success of your failure(s)! Essentially, learn from them, don’t make the same mistakes again and continue through that learning and sustainable growth path. Yes, I know, there won’t be a way back! Fascinating and exciting times, indeed!

Learning more about the world through photography, has been the motto of these websites—Trek Earth, Trek Nature and Trek Lens, that I ardently use to learn about my hobby—Photography! I think this has been a noble initiative that has been helping amateurs like me around the world learn the art and science of photography. I believe this site works, as I have seen people who initially had very regular photos and have now shown such improvement that I was amazed!The reason I choose to speak about these sites is not to advertise them, but to highlight how the whole learning process here is a collaborative one, relevant to what we all speak about in informal learning. The users of this website range from professionals to mere beginners like me, from people with the most high-end DSLRs to basic Point and Shoot versions. Whatever you use, does not deter you from posting your photos here and having people critique your work.These sites have some common features like:Regional Groupings of Photographs, that allow you to browse photos within Continents, Countries, Regions, States and Cities.Critique System, that allows you to give and receive constructive feedback and comments on photos.Workshops, that allow members to post edited versions of your image providing a useful visual example on how to improve a specific photo.Alerts, to receive email alerts whenever new photos are posted according to various criteria.Multilingual Capability, that allows you to view a page in any language (currently Chinese ~Traditional & Simplified~, Dutch, English, French, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish).The way the site works is you may:Post your photos, go and view other photos and critique them, thus increasing chances of people navigating to your photo and leaving you valuable comments. Critique other peoples photos and do workshops to help others learn even if you don't put up your own photos.On this site, you get credits for:Giving useful critiques that help others in the community improve their work.Giving useful workshops that others can learn from.Writing useful notes that give more information on your photo, the location and history, how you took that photo, what settings you had on your camera etc.All the above parameters are based on ratings given by members of the community. Based on your rating you can be a silver or gold star—critiquer, note writer, or a workshop editor. Besides this each member who likes your photo can give you up to a maximum of 2 points.The way you work when you are new to the site is to upload your photo, then review other photos that you find interesting. You need to be persistent, and over time people start visiting your profile more often and leaving you critiques or comments, doing workshops, marking your notes useful, etc. You reply to them and thank them for appreciating your work or giving useful feedback, and eventually end up connecting with a few members of the community whom you follow regularly, much like how we have a blogging fraternity in our community.Few things I would like improved about this website though is the user interface, which hasn't changed much since the sites inception, and to have some cool and latest Web 2.0 features like Flickr.I highly recommend this site for people who are willing to learn more about photography. But when I do, I often have people look at the photos there and say "Wow, these are too good. Are my photos worth putting up here?" My only answer to them has always been, that this is not a place for professionals to flaunt their talents, but for photography lovers at all levels to share their knowledge and learn from.I'd like to hear from all of you if there are similar sites for learning photography or even any other subject.

Continuing further with that new influx of shorter blog posts over here on this blog and since, lately, I seem to spend plenty of time, effort and energy on becoming a better public speaker doing plenty of reading, rehearsing and learning from those who do it best, I keep bumping into rather interesting resources on doing presentations right: engaging, inspiring, interactive, passionate, involving and rather energising, so I do love learning along the way not just with practice, which we all know makes perfection, but also reading the theory about how other people face having to deliver a presentation, whether they are well seasoned or just getting started. There is always something that we all get to learn. The key thing though is whether we are all ready to absorb, change and adapt our presentation skills to make even better pitches to engage our audience(s), which, I guess, is what matters at the end of the day… But what happens when you inadvertently kill your own presentation without even knowing? What can you do then?  That’s the exact same premise that Jeanne Trojan addressed on a presentation that she put together a couple of years ago, and that when I bumped into it, just recently, by chance, I couldn’t help thinking how scarily accurate it was, and still is, with regards to the engaging art of delivering presentations and what pitfalls to avoid in order not to run into trouble far too soon. Thus I thought I would go ahead and share it over here, so that you would have an opportunity to see those "7 Ways to Kill Your Presentation" and ponder whether you would need to do something about not only addressing them, but fixing them for your upcoming presentation(s) for this year:    Seven ways to kill your presentation from Jeanne Trojan After going through that lovely presentation put together by Jeanne, I bet you may be wondering what could be done in order to improve your own presentation skills, now that you have been made aware of those 7 pitfalls, right? Yes, I know, I had that very same thought, so I kept digging and saw how Jeanne herself has put together another presentation, from just a couple of days ago, where she has collected some extended advice on Presentation Tips from the Pros, which is pretty packed up with some excellent advice on how to not just deliver an engaging, passionate, meaningful and refreshing presentation, but also how you can prepare it, and prepare yourself, beforehand in a proper manner, so I thought I would go ahead as well and take the liberty of embedding it right here for other folks to enjoy as well:  Presentation tips from the pros from Jeanne Trojan Finally, here’s one other helpful source from a good friend of mine, and fellow IBM colleague, Louis Richardson, quite an amazing public speaker I have had the real pleasure of watching him live a few times now by the way, about what to expect when putting yourself in front of an audience to deliver a presentation and what you can do to get the better of you out there to engage those who are investing their time AND their attention on you, the speaker, and your message, while on stage. Check out "Top 10 Tips for Stepping Up Your Presentations":  Top 10 Tips for Stepping Up Your Presentations from Louis Richardson The really good thing about bumping into these rather helpful and insightful resources on Presentation Zen and with such a good timing, is that I will be able to put them all into good practice as soon as a couple of weeks from now, when I will be co-sharing the stage with both Louis Richardson himself and my other good friend Luis Benitez (Yes, indeed, The Three Luis’!!) at the IBM Connect 2013 event in Orlando, Florida, January 29th at 5:30 to 6:30 pm ET, under the session heading "Pardon the Interruption on Social Business" that both Louis and Luis have been blogging about it already in their blogs, respectively. The best part of that presentation? Well, amongst several other things [*cough* beer *cough*] I could probably say it’s YOU setting the agenda of the session by participating through this Twitter hashtag right as we speak > #pitsocialbiz as that’s where the three of us are currently gathering questions from the audience that we will be addressing each and everyone of us live at the event around the area of Social Business, and, maybe, why not?, around Open Business, too!  It promises to be some really good fun and I am hoping that these presentation tips I have shared across from both Jeanne and Louis would help make it all an event better experience for the live audience and for those of you folks reading along. Will we be seeing you there though? [We surely hope so! Come and join us!]

This months Big Question is about Stuck?Getting Unstuck? Stuck, is exactly how I feel, and the reason I started blogging and connecting with people. My blog becomes a forum to get my ideas out. So there's the problem and the solution right there! But come on now, don't we all feel stuck at different points in our work or even personal life? Well, being stuck is very much a reality as anything else, and I've felt this way many times before. Each place I worked posed different kinds of challenges, but to get to the point, here we're talking about being stuck in your organization with a lot of great ideas about how to improve things around you and the service you deliver to the customer.There are several reasons why one gets 'stuck' so to say:Your organization is just very happy doing what they always have been doing as it earns them money anyway.Your team members, who drive a lot of the initiatives because they've been around longer than you, just don't know what's changed in the market outside. They're fine to keep doing what they always did in the last 8 to 10 years cos the management is happy!Sometimes employees see or hear whats changing but completely fail to see the value in it.Sometimes employees just feel more secure doing 'proven stuff' than exploring new possibilities.Some employees respect the management so much, that they will wait until the end of time for the management to initiate something new. "Why get your hands dirty in trying something the management hasn't even figured out? This is easier."Some people listen very intently to the people who give new ideas and tell them, "Yeah, that sounds really cool, and right too. But you know what, this is the way they do it here. I've been around here really long and I know, nothing will change!"Sometimes your team leads and managers may tell you after hearing your bright ideas—"All that's fine, but what happened to that issue we had the other day? You better figure out or we'll miss the deadline!" or simply—"Haven't you enough to do?"The Result?Imagine the plight of the poor bloke who just had this brainwave after reading loads of blogs, wikis and cool discussions on the Internet. Depressing really! But that's the reality, and it will probably remain this way in almost all organizations, but with varied levels of intensity. I'm sure, at least two of the above points will be true for any employee unless he's the boss and takes the decisions.The employee, who was once really excited with his brilliant idea and imagined what value it could have brought to the organization, is demotivated, and begins to think that he or she is not going to get anywhere in the present organization. The employee starts questioning himself—what happens to my future and career? What happens to my dream? Will I stop learning if I continue to remain in this environment? Should I leave this place and try somewhere else, somewhere where people have more sense to see the value in my ideas? Or should I just surrender to the circumstances and become a drone like the rest?The Point?So, the implementation of all ideas on last month's Big Question, about Workplace Learning in 10 years, are immensely dependent on the organization's willingness to invest and bring in change, not forgetting that change only comes in gradually and never upfront in such cases. It takes time to provide the infrastructure to support all the changes, and most importantly the people who will help bring about the change. It requires support and acceptance from everyone involved to adapt to a new way of doing their job.So what can you do in such a situation?Rebel and let everyone know that what you are suggesting is the next generation thing, and that they're too stupid to see it? Disclaimer here: I think you should try that only if you want to loose the one or two people who took time to listen to you and advise you! You may loose even the smallest chance of ever getting your ideas across in the organization as people will start thinking you are an arrogant, alien-headed, snob! Now that's really not the ideal situation to be in, so here are a few things you can do.Step 1:First, evaluate if your idea is that of immediate action or a long term one. Based on this, set your expectations of the time it may take to get it implemented. Ask questions like "Based on the business need, will they find use of the idea? Will they need it now or later?" If your answer to these questions is yes, then go ahead and plan to give your ideas to the management.Step2:Whatever you do, it is most important to:Say the right thing at the right timeTell the right person about itNow you may ask, when is the right time? Who is the right person? My answer is, strike when the iron is hot, meaning speak about it in a relevant situation or discussion. Plan your idea well and back it up with what benefit it brings to an individual or the organization. It is hard to decide each case above, but you have to figure this out by studying the organization and their priorities over time, or discussing them with someone who has been around longer.My ExperienceWhen I had an idea, I first started asking around if there is any idea management forum in the organization. When I didn't get the information, I threw the question to one of the top managers after he gave a session on the organizations goals and how he plans to achieve them. He thought for a while and realized there wasn't any such place. He then asked me what my idea was? On explaining the idea, he seemed to like it, and asked me to send him an email with the details. He responded back after researching it himself and appreciated me for bringing it up. He now wanted to start a forum thread to collate ideas from employees. I thought that was a good start.The other part of giving ideas is the expectation we have once we have given them. But, you need to remember here that it takes high priority to implement any idea. That's how businesses work I guess!So to conclude, I can say that you may feel 'stuck' in spite of having given your idea, but its important that you at least got it across. The fact that not much changed immediately should not deter you from thinking and innovating. Try and innovate in your regular activities to make it more interesting. Try suggesting something new, but each time remember to back it up with sufficient evidence so people understand the context and the benefit that will come out of it. Try and blog the ideas that are not directly related to your company's benefit, and share it with the community. Let's accept it, its not a fair world we all live in. It is therefore important to make the best of every situation.

Over the course of the last few years there have been plenty of metaphors that people out there have been making use of to describe the transformation the traditional world of the enterprise is going through with the emergence of social networking tools to help improve the effectiveness of how we collaborate and share our knowledge across. Some of them have been incredibly helpful in describing how we are moving away from that traditional taylorism method of managing businesses top down driven by hierarchies into something a whole lot more liquid, permeable, flowing, flexible and network driven (A la Wirearchy). But if there is one metaphor out there that surely keeps grabbing my attention every time I bump into it is that one of associating the Enterprise with one of those creative activities that makes us all, humans, unique in this world: Music.  It’s Friday afternoon, and I am sure plenty of people out there would be finishing up the first pretty packed up work week of the year. For me, the last day of the week that will see the end of my vacation, since next week I will be back at work as well after having enjoyed quite an amazing holiday recharging my batteries, unwinding, disconnecting (from almost everything) and, eventually, resuming my long time dormant blog and a couple of other things I have got on the side that I will be writing about shortly over here as well. But, first things first. How about finishing off your work for the week, and my last vacation week, with one of those videos that will not only inspire you tremendously (I am certain!), but that will also be a pure treat for your ears, just to get you in the mood before the weekend kicks off? That wouldn’t be too bad, right?  Well, here you have it. Earlier on this week I bumped into this absolutely delightful YouTube video presentation from the one and only, Don Tapscott, that he did at the Association of Fundraising Professionals in Toronto, Canada, where he presented on The New Models of the Enterprise (With a slight touch on Philanthropy) covering a good number of relevant topics that have clearly set the stage of how the corporate world is slowly, but steadily, moving into that Open Business modus operandi. Key elements like Collaborative Innovation, Openness, Molecularisation, Self-Organisation, Interdependence or Dynamic Leadership were covered on that presentation by Don, but with a rather peculiar touch: playing some amazing jazz with an improvised orchestra lead by the brilliant Shannon Butcher.  For the rest, I am afraid I no longer have words to describe how wonderful and inspiring was to spend a bit over 30 minutes going through each of those topics and how some very talented jazz musicians, and the heartwarming and rather touching voice from Shannon herself, make them their own when playing several songs together, even if they have never played together in the past at all, making you realise how unique that experience could well be. Well, it surely was! … Talking about creativity and intent with a purpose! I am not going to add further more into this blog post other than highly recommending you all that if you are at the end of your work day, or perhaps way into your weekend already, take these 30 minutes to watch some pure brilliance of what makes us, human beings, unique in this world by letting music (Jazz in this case) do its magic, go through your ears into your brain, close your eyes and prepare to be wowed big time! on what the enterprise world could very well look like:    See? If Open Business is all about this, and so much more!, I am all IN for it! And you? Hope you, too!  What a stunning way of starting off the weekend! Have a good one everyone!

After reading Beyond Kirkpatrick by Tom Werner, and Jane Bozarth's post on Alternatives to Kirkpatrick, I was satisfied to hear that there has been effort to better the evaluation process. This is the kind of information I was looking for when I posted Kirkpatrick's Four Level Evaluation Model, knowing that people would have tried, tested and evaluated the model by this time.I did receive feedback supporting Kirkpatrick's model from John Pasinosky, Richeek and Geeta Bose. All of them supported the model and said it had worked well for them. John Pasinosky said:--------------------------------------------------------------------------I have tried to incorporate the 4 levels in my instructional design practice. It is very valuable if you don't have any other plans in place. ( - In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king!). The good part about it is less that you can make a better product than that it gives you a framework to know what went wrong when it does go wrong - or someone is unhappy with the results.---------------------------------------------------------------------------Geeta Bose, agreed that the Kirkpatrick model had been useful. While saying that she added:--------------------------------------------------------------------------While this is a great foundation, like all other methodologies, this too should evolve to fit the changing needs of the training industry. This model (in the classical sense) does not help measure the ROI from training. This model also emphasizes on "post training evaluation" while evaluation should be an ongoing process. At Kern, we have evolved an evaluation methodology that has worked well for us and our clients.--------------------------------------------------------------------------Richeek agreed too adding:--------------------------------------------------------------------------It is definitely practical. It all depends on how you market it. If managers & other decision-makers see the value, they'll definitely agree. I have gone into meetings where managers have come in late and start a meeting saying they have to leave it early and then have them say at the scheduled end, "Can we extend this meeting? Would you have the time?" --------------------------------------------------------------------------Another presentation I found by Bersin and Associates (designed way back in 2006) gives a good insight into the problems in Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation, that I found practical. I don't mean to down sell Kirkpatrick's model but all I'm saying is that we need to move on and come up with more current ideas. Quoting from Jane's post:--------------------------------------------------------------------------In the interest of fairness I would like to add that that Kirkpatrick himself has pointed out some of the problems with the taxonomy, and suggested that in seeking to apply it the training field has perhaps put the cart before the horse. He advises working backwards through his four levels more as a design, rather than an evaluation, strategy; that is: What business results are you after? What on-the-job behavior/performance change will this require? How can we be confident that learners, sent back to the work site, are equipped to perform as desired? And finally: how can we deliver the instruction in a way that is appealing and engaging?-------------------------------------------------------------------------I believe this would be true as change is the only constant in every field.My 2 centsIt's good to know that certain strategies and models have proven in the past, but our requirements today are changing greatly and we need to move on, redefine strategies and redesign models to address the changing needs of learners. I believe it is imperative to re look at our existing training strategies, and evaluate courses to bring in this change.My questions to all of you would be:1. Do you think there is a need to change the way we design training?2. Do you think we need to have more dynamic ways to address the problems faced by our learner?3. How do you think evaluation should ideally be done to help improve and impact learning greatly?

Over at Harvard Business Review Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic has put together, just recently, a rather interesting and relevant article on The Future of You that clearly highlights three rather intriguing career suggestions for knowledge workers out there for the new year to carry out, if they would want to raise their visibility, demonstrate their subject matter expertise and build their social eminence effectively in a social world infested with perhaps far too much noise. The article itself is worth while reading on its own, for sure, as it highlights some of the challenges, but plenty of the advantages of what it is like having a powerful personal brand, as a knowledge worker. But I would think there is something missing on the article itself that makes me a bit too uncomfortable: the enterprisey touch.  I am sure you may be wondering what do I mean with regards to that enterprisey touch, right? Well, if you take a look into the article you would see how Dr. Chamorro celebrates three suggestions he thinks are going to work really well for knowledge workers, but perhaps he forgets how the whole thing changes as soon as you enter the corporate world. Here is an example. In that article he quotes the need for more self-branding, along with plenty of entrepreneurship, as two key traits to succeed in the business world. Part of me would definitely agree with those two traits big time, specially, in the context of the Social Web and pure knowledge Web work, but then again, if I look into the corporate world itself, and judging from both first hand experiences while interacting with customers and other thought leaders in this space, self-branding, a.k.a. personal brand, would only work out just right IF (And that’s a *big* IF) the corporate brand doesn’t decide to kill it in the process.  Essentially, the corporate brand needs to evolve and both embrace and celebrate the richness of powerful employee brands, because, if anything, they surely help amplify and augment the overall corporate one; yet, what you see on a rather regular basis is how businesses ensure that the personal brand remains subjugated to the corporate brand’s needs and wants, resulting in turning off completely the motivation from employees to even look after their own. They just don’t see the value of being just one more voice adding to the noise, which is essentially what most companies want (mistakenly). There are better ways. Never mind that thought from companies that employees with powerful brands could become a threat to the  business or they could just be snatched away by talent hunters. Well, not really. It just depends on how hard, you, as a business, would work your magic to engage, from the knowledge worker perspective, those employees to augment AND increase both the visibility and mindshare of the overall corporate brand. Right now, that hard work is just not happening. It’s non-existent. The easy way out has always been undermining or terminating the employee brand, as soon as it is considered far too powerful or a threat to the business.  This is certainly an area where I would expect HR to take a much more active role in helping knowledge workers develop the right skills set, as much as corporations to learn how to live with that personal branding trend for their own employees, because it’s only going to become more and more relevant over time. Remember? People do business with people, not with brands. People, after all, like to talk to other people when doing business. It’s just that simple. So the sooner HR can dive into the conversations and act as referees defending with good counter-arguments the opportunity for knowledge workers to develop their brand as part of their key, essential personal development opportunities, the better off we would all become, because it will help address part of that business problem I keep referencing time and time again: employee engagement.  With regards to Entrepreneurship, we have seen that for enterprise knowledge workers it’s slightly different. Over here, in this blog, I have been talking time and time again about it referencing it as Intrapreneurship with perhaps this specific article as the most relevant one to the context of what Dr. Chamorro talks about on the HBR article. I would love to know in the comments how you folks feel about Intrapreneurs, because, somehow, I suspect we are going to start talking more and more about them as Trust Agents, Wild Ducks, Liquid Freelancers, become more and more prevalent of the new Workplace of the Future that we are currently shaping up! And, finally, the one other suggestion that Dr. Chamorro mentions in that article and which I think is perhaps the most exciting in the context of Open Business altogether: Hyperconnectivity. That is, the ability of you, as a knowledge Web worker, to act both as a powerful connector, as well as that empowered node to find what you need, which, in most cases, it’s not going to be down to you, but down to how well you have nurtured, cultivated and looked after your own social network(s).  It’s in this context that I thought I would finish off this blog post referencing a webinar presentation that I hosted way back in November 2012 for IBM’s Academy of Technology on trying to define what that hyperconnectivity would be like in the context of defining the significant impact social networking tools can have in helping redefine the workplace of the future with some essential critical traits. In "Cultural Impact of Social Networking in Defining the Workplace of the Future" you would be able to see my attempt of describing the new kind of skills set that knowledge Web workers would need to excel at if they would want to thrive in an Open Business environment. Here’s the embedded code of the presentation, so folks interested in it could have a look and see what you think:  Cultural Impact of Social Networking in Defining the Workplace of the Future from Luis Suarez My good friend, and fellow colleague, Brian Cragun, host of that IBM Academy of Technology event, arranged to have the session audio recorded, as well as a transcript of my speech, along with the live chat transcript and I thought it would be a good idea as well to share that across over here, so that if you would be interested in spending a bit over an hour listening to it, while flipping through the charts, you would be able to do so accordingly. I have zipped all three files into a single one and you would be able to download it all from this link. Dr. Chamorro’s conclusion of the article highlights the need for employees to become a brand, their own personal brand, to transform the way they work and become powerful change agents with an opportunity to keep challenging the status quo of how certain things happen while at work and with an innate ability to link to useful information scattered around your various social networks. Somehow I suspect that the hardest part of making all this a reality is not just going to be down to the employees themselves, but more down to HR, Open HR, that is, as an opportunity to help prepare for those upcoming talent wars and personal development initiatives that will help define the workplace of the future in the Knowledge / Open Economy. Somehow, something tells me that this is one of the main reasons as to why HR will cease to operate, or be perceived to operate, around the edges and become *the* central hub that makes that business transformation of the employee workforce a reality.  The challenge is on though. Will HR be capable of transforming itself into Open HR, as part of Open Business? I surely hope so. After all, we don’t have much of an option nowadays anymore, I am afraid. Do we?

Tony Karrer raises a valid point in his post Social Learning Measurement : eLearning Technology. Just the point I was thinking of after wanting to have a social model implemented in my own organization. It seems very interesting and attractive to have means to access information informally on-the-job and have it exactly when you need it. But I see the following challenges in the implementation of social learning at workplaces:- How do I ensure the information is organized well enough for an individual to access it when needed? The search feature has to span across all available information resources related to the subject to give me what I need.- How to ensure the authenticity of the information? We are in an organization dealing with real customers. Hence we can't take the risk to goof up based on something written in a social learning network. At a high-level I can imagine a reviewer/moderator model being implemented where all of the information entered is validated by experts. But this hard to implement given the amount of time commitment needed from the product experts when compared with thier priorities upfront. This model also needs to make space for new ideas that crop up and not just depend on legacy and proven information.- How do I ensure I am getting the latest and most current information?Thinking about measurement, which is the most critical factor in deciding if this model is getting us real tangible results, I can suggest a few ideas at a high level:1. Have polls on topics to gather information about whether the information has been useful or not.2. Every post should have a rating associated with it. The search should list posts that have received good ratings at the top level.3. Do regular sanity checks as information in organizations change as fast as the shelf life of a particular release of a product and are outdated quite quickly.4. Finally, the most important is to measure the learning outcome in terms of how it helped make the product better, or received appreciation from a customer, or helped tackle a complex business problem. This would be the true reality check and can be enabled by maintaining metrics or statistics that can be collected from the online systems and consolidated into reports that can be queried from various perspectives. Much like how we measure effectiveness of formal training.But let's admit it, measurement is the key to prove that social learning forms have helped employees bring value to an organization.

Over the course of the last few years, there have been a good number of occasions where, when working with fellow colleagues, customers or business partners, plenty of knowledge workers kept asking me what would be the best way for them to get started with their own adoption efforts of social software, both inside and outside of the firewall, so that it wouldn’t be too painful, but at the same time they wouldn’t lag behind too much in the attempt. They just wanted to have a jumpstart, but they didn’t know where to begin. Sounds familiar, even today, doesn’t it?  You could probably sense that fear, or a strong sense of fearing being rejected, is lingering around in the air, but it isn’t really and we probably shouldn’t think about it in those terms anymore. It is mostly about how to get started without looking too silly, or how to get started without making a fool of yourself in front of others. Or perhaps how to get things going without ridiculing yourself, or your well established reputation on whatever the subject matter. Like I said, I don’t think it’s down to fear, but more towards that reluctance of wanting to dive in thinking that you may be doing something wrong according to what someone may have established in the past, like best practices for social media. Not really!  We need to move on. We really need to. We have got lots of hard work ahead of us still. No matter what people out there may be telling you time and time again, there are *no* best practices for knowledge work, specially, for social networking tools and how you interact and make the most out of them to build powerful, caring networks around you who can go the extra mile for you, just like you could do for them. Time and time again then I have been suggesting, instead, a good number of different options and adoption techniques, or strategies, on what I have experienced myself first hand over the course of the last 11 years or so, but, lately, I seem to have concentrated most of that advice and efforts on a couple of, what I feel, are rather simple, yet critical, aptitudes to embrace for those knowledge workers wanting to shine at being practitioners 2.0 with their own networks: Active Listening and Helping others become more awesome. That’s probably the main reason why I really enjoyed Craig Chappelow‘s recent article at Fast Company under the rather inspiring title: "A Resolution You Won’t Fail At: Helping Someone Else Achieve Their Goals" about one of those totally unexpected New Year resolutions that could surely have a rather significant impact, yet without being too demanding upon yourself: that is, help those around you, i.e. your networks, become better at what they already do.  Who would have thought about that, right? I mean, who would have thought that you could be a power house in active social networking, both walking the talk and learning by doing, by just doing something so relatively easy as Active Listening of what’s happening around you, specially, as more and more knowledge workers keep embracing that mantra of Working Out Loud or Narrating Their Work. In short, Observable Work (a.k.a. #owork). Or by just doing something so uncomplicated, but yet so incredibly rewarding as helping others excel at what they are already good at! See? This doesn’t require much hard work like putting together an influx of blog posts, or scheduling dozens of tweets per day, or looking after LinkedIn groups, or Facebook Pages or even several Google Plus Communities. This is more down to earth. This is all about embracing something that we may have struggled with for far too long, but that yet, when done correctly, could be the next huge thing in the corporate world: become more open.  Indeed, as we progress further raising the stakes of the so-called Social Business field and embrace more of that Open Business movement, it’s that openness and transparency, not just to listen actively out there, but to open up your day to day workflow, so that you would allow other folks to dive in and help you accordingly, if you may need their help, that’s going to accelerate the adoption rate without looking too foolish in the attempt, even if we struggle along the way. Time and time again I keep telling people that if they would want me to help them out, I would be more than happy to do so, and I will probably go the extra mile, too!, if they are part of my social network(s), but there is something very important out there that I would be asking them out. More of a reflection than a question, actually, but here it is: How can I help you achieve your goals if I don’t know what you are doing, or working on?  For us, your network(s), to be able to help out, we first need to know a bit about you, about what you are good at, what drives your passion, what it is that you are incredibly knowledgeable about and what you may be struggling with. Only then would we be capable of helping out address those potential issues you may be going through to fix them and help you advance forward. Just like what we would do ourselves with you. Yes, I can imagine some of you folks may be thinking it’s rather tough to open up just like that, to others, specially, if they are your work colleagues, because you don’t want to show them you are weak, vulnerable, even a bit stupid, because you keep asking the same silly questions. Not really. Someone once told me, a few years back!, that there isn’t a single one stupid question out there. The only stupid questions are those that don’t get asked, because they never get an answer and therefore make you become stuck without moving forward. Now, that is silly. That you are showing your vulnerability? So what? Who cares? Actually, making yourself vulnerable is the best thing that can happen to enter the world of true leadership, because that’s when people around you, specially, those who care, would become more empathic, caring and resolved to help you out. And that’s probably why we are not so good with social networking out there today: we are not showing enough how vulnerable we all are after all. And perhaps we should.  Craig’s article actually covers this really well, although he doesn’t mention it by name specifically, but he suggests 4 things that you could implement rather easily in order to help others achieve their goals while you dive into the world of social networking tools to evoke that open and transparent, collaborative environment. To quote: Call B.S, Shove, Use Tough Love, and More Love, with perhaps this particular quote being one of my favourites from the entire article:  "But what if your responsibilities include helping other people reach their goals? Is there something you can do to get them through January and-gasp-beyond? Whether you are a manager, parent, or friend, research on goal-setting shows there is plenty you can do to help someone out" So there you have it. Next time you question yourself how you could dive into the social networking world of Open Business, or next time that someone asks you how to get the most out of Living Open there is a great chance that you, too, could suggest on doing plenty of active listening and above all helping those folks around you, your social network(s), become better at what they are already good at: doing their job(s)! You will then be well on your way to become part of that exclusive club from the bottom right corner from this cartoon Tom Fishburne shared a little while ago and which, I agree with him 100%, is far too rare to see, even nowadays:  We need to change that. Today. Not tomorrow, please, but … today.

Not long ago I mentioned over here in this blog how one of the many reasons why I went through that extended blogging hiatus towards the end of 2012 was due to a rather intense business travelling schedule that took me on a tour of several different European countries to participate, as a speaker, on various conference events, customer meetings, enablement workshops and so forth. Intense is probably the right word to describe what it was like, but another one that I can think about would be memorable. I do have, indeed, plenty of fond memories about the vast majority of those events, but if there is one that has got a special place in my heart is that one event that kicked off last year and which raised the stakes incredibly high on its first edition to the point where it will always be in my thoughts not only because of the tremendously energising vibe it had all around it, throughout, but mainly because of the amazing experience of attending, speaking and participating in an event like no other in search for something that I am starting to feel we need nowadays more than ever: Meaning.  Of course, I am talking about the Meaning 2012 conference event that took place in Brighton, UK, on October 1st and that three months later I am still remembering it as it were just yesterday. What an amazing event! Not only was the quality of the agenda and speakers top notch (I had the privilege of being one of them giving me a unique opportunity to continue learning from the greatest and the most unexpected), but the atmosphere around it was just electrifying and incredibly energising. The amount of hard work and the dedication to make things right, the incredibly warm sense of hospitality we enjoyed while in there, and the humanity shown throughout the entire event by folks, now really good friends, like Will McInnes and Lou Ash, along with the rest of the NixonMcIness team!, was absolutely a pure delight. Something other conference events should mimic and learn from a great deal! And all of that on their first edition!  There have been several different blog posts, articles, references, highlights shared across by a good number of folks who attended the event, which have made it quite a rewarding experience going through as I am writing down this blog entry, remembering the wonderful event that we got exposed to over the course of a single day and, most importantly, the sharing of some of the most brilliant ideas we got to exchange and share openly not just from the speakers themselves, but also from people attending the event live with all of the networking that went on and on and on. A delightful experience all around!  That’s why I couldn’t help resisting the urge to create this blog post where I could point folks to the recordings of the various different speakers, which you can find them all right over here, so that you could have a look and go through each and everyone of them. At your own pace, whenever you would want to. They are all worth it. Big time. As usual, and like I have been doing over the last few months, I did a bunch of live tweeting from the event itself as well, and I then captured all of those annotations into a .PDF file that I uploaded into my Slideshare account for folks who may be interested in reading further what it was like experiencing the conference live. The direct link to it can be found over here. And here’s the embedded code in case you may want to flip through the pages as we speak:  Luis Suarez Live Tweeting Highlights from #meaningconf Event, Brighton, October 2012 from Luis Suarez I had the privilege as well of being the last speaker of the day, wrapping up what was quite an amazing day that would be rather tough to forget in a long long time. Of course, I talked about one of my favourite topics from over the last 5 years: Living "A World Without eMail". This time around expanding further on the notion of what a collaborative future may well look like and hold up for us with the emergence of social software tools in the corporate world. I got to talk about plenty of what I have been learning in the last 5 years after I started that movement, back in February 2008, which reminds me that we are getting close to that 5th year anniversary, where I have got a couple of lovely surprises packed up that I am sure folks who have been following this initiative all along would find rather interesting and surprising. But more on that later on… For now, I thought, as a teaser, as perhaps an interim update from my last blog article on the subject (Yes, I know! I am long overdue an update on how things have been moving along, aren’t I? Well, coming up shortly!), I would go ahead and share the link to the recording over here, so that those folks who may be interested in the topic (It lasts for a little bit over 17 minutes), can have a look into it and watch at your own pace. I’m sure it will evoke a good number of questions and additional insights that I am more than happy to entertain and facilitate on the comments section below, so feel free to chime in as you may see fit, and stay tuned for that upcoming update on the progress report of what it has been like living "A World Without eMail" in the last 12 months. Oh, and don’t worry, it’s not going to be as massively long as the last one. That’s where one of the surprises would kick in eventually … hehe Here we go:  Hope you folks would enjoy watching through it, just as much as the huge blast and true honour I had myself on stage delivering the speech.  The vibe in the audience was something that will be very hard for me to forget. Ever. And for that I am eternally grateful to both Will, Lou and the rest of the NixonMcIness team!, for their kind invitation and for making of Meaning something that I can just define with a single word: special! … [Truly special] An enormous thank you, indeed, to everyone involved in making it happen!

If you have been reading this blog for a while now you would know how, all along, I haven’t been very much in favour about supporting the argument of the digital / generations divide or the distinction of various different generations at work, whether baby boomers, Gen-Xers, Gen-Yers or whatever else. However, and with that said, I do realise how each and everyone of those generations do really bring up a tremendous amount of diversity into the workplace with their own habits and unique mindset which, back in the day, I described as different working styles in place and that for the corporate world to benefit from those different ways of getting the work done, businesses would need to do, if anything, a single thing to make it all work: embrace them and celebrate such wonderful diversity, more than anything else because that’s what makes working in a now more complex than ever environment quite an exciting and unprecedented adventure for learning and growth to flourish.  And with that premise I thought for today I would go ahead and share a rather short (10 minute long) video clip that I bumped into in my good friend Felix Escribano‘s Google Plus stream that I thought would be worth while sharing across over here to demonstrate how those various different working styles have been operating over the course of the last few decades till today. The actual video clip is based on a piece of research from the smart folks from Box1824 and it’s packed up with lots of useful information on behavioural data, trends, ways of living / working from those various different generations and it’s perhaps one of the most insightful documentaries I may have seen in a while that clearly describes, and rather accurately, I must admit, too, who we are, regardless of age, work context, ambitions, motivations, mantras, aspirations and so forth. If you are working in a corporate environment where you are exposed to all of these various different working styles, I can certainly recommend you take a look into it so that you have got a good chance to be exposed to the diversity of what’s behind each and everyone of those generations. It will be worth it the 10 minutes it lasts, so here is the embedded code so that you can start playing it right away:  What do you think? Not too bad, eh? Did it help change your perception of those colleagues from those generations you work with on a daily basis? Here’s the key question though: how identified do you feel with your own so-called generation? Did it represent you well enough or can we then stick around with those working styles that I mentioned above? Either way, while I would love to read in the comments what you would think, here’s the one liner that describes how I feel about that argument of the digital divide and the various different generations at the workplace:  "It really seems to be more important to have fun on the ride, than to make it to the final destination" Or this other one as well for that matter:  "It’s all about exchanging knowledge, no matter your age" Or perhaps this other one, much more impactful altogether: "Besides having a job, it’s becoming more important to have a purpose that can be carried out in different forms at the same time" Or, finally, the kicker:  "It is about living better in the present, with no illusion that the future can be controlled" Followed, perhaps, by the one and only question that every single knowledge worker out there should be asking themselves every day as soon as you get up in the morning and while you get ready to go to work:  "Are you doing what you love right now? No? So start!"

On January 20th 1997, while I was holidaying in The Netherlands, I started my adventure into the corporate world with a new job at IBM, as a Customer Support Representative for the Mainframe. 16 years later that adventure continues, and big time!, still having just as much fun as I did in Day One. So much so that later on this week I will begin tasting the Joy of Business Travelling, once again, and that this year is going to take me to a good number of countries and continents I haven’t visited just yet, for which I am really excited about, as you can imagine. But, for now, I’m starting to get things ready for IBM Connect 2013, which kicks off on January 27th till the 31st, and which surely promises to be one of those events difficult to forget around the space of Social Business. Are you ready?  Well, before you answer that question, and while you may want to go ahead and check out the superb agenda put in place, I would like to ask you to go and have a look into the wonderful short article put together by the one and only, Seth Godin, on the topic of "When a conference works (and doesn’t)". What a delightful read packed up with plenty of helpful tips on how to build, perhaps, a new strategy, in case you haven’t done so in the past, when attending face to face conference events, like I am about to do later on this month.  I thought perhaps for today’s blog post I would go ahead and highlight a couple of those tips that I thought would be worth while sharing across and which match, somewhat, some of my own experiences attending face to face conference events in the recent past. As a starting point: "[…] someone is going to say or do something that might just change everything. Something that happens in the moment and can’t possibly be the same if you hear about it later […] In the digital age, if I can get the notes or the video later, I will" Indeed, this is what I have been telling folks over and over again. Focus on the face to face conversations, the networking aspects of the event, specially, with those folks who 1. You may not know just yet, so you can keep expanding your network beyond your usual suspects or echo chamber(s) and 2. You may not be able to see them F2F again throughout the remaining of the year. Think of it as your last chance in the year to catch up with them F2F. Don’t waste that opportunity. Seize it and make the most out of it. The notes, and video streaming, indeed, you can always get them later. No doubt. The conversations, you won’t. "[…] If there’s vulnerability and openness and connection […]" This is something that I am going to be trying it out myself quite a bit in numerous other conference events this year, but certainly going to kick if off at IBM Connect 2013. Actually, not just me, but two of my co-presenters and myself, when on Tuesday 29th at 5:30pm local time, we will go up on stage to kick off our session on "Pardon the Interruption at IBM Connect 2013" around Social Business, Adoption Techniques, Enablement, Collaboration, Online Communities and Social Networking for Business in general. Perhaps even a bit on Open Business as well, why not?  Yes, that will be the time when "The Three Louie" (Louis Richardson, Luis Benitez and yours truly) will throw themselves into the lions living through that vulnerability, openness and connection in chunks of 3 minutes at a time with whatever the question folks in the audience may well have around all of these topics related to social networking for business. We are currently gathering questions over in Twitter under #ptisocialbiz so if you happen to attend IBM Connect 2013 as well and have got a burning question you would want to share with us, drop it over there and we will grab it for the session. If not, take them with you and ask them live while we are all there. Perhaps even more fun to show how vulnerable we may all well be with the unexpected! After all, what are the chances for you to see The Three Louie on stage at any given conference event? It’s a rare occasion, I can tell you that, since it will be the first time we are all three on stage on the same session. That promises to be plenty of really good fun, I can guarantee you that! Even more if you look into the time of the day for our slot and what we may be bringing up with us along the way … Following further along on Seth’s reflections about face to face events and how to get the most benefits from them, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the entire post:  "(At most events, competitiveness born from insecurity trumps mutual support)" And you know why that happens in most cases? At least, in my own opinion? Well, mostly because, due to that competitiveness flair going around, people who attend face to face conferences don’t have a tendency to be generous on the information, knowledge and experiences they share. Quite the opposite. They are always a little bit reluctant to share openly what drives their passion, their interests and their motivation to attend the event, just because they feel they need to protect something: their selves. Well, not really. This is pretty much what I have been saying for years around the well known mantra of "Knowledge is power". Yes, it is, of course, it always has been and always will be. But make it square, please! It’s "Knowledge SHARED is power". Indeed, the more you share generously about what you are doing, what you know, what you are good at demonstrating your thought leadership, the much more powerful you become, because it’s that visibility at conference events that clearly highlights how you will continue to build those strong personal business relationships. So get out of your comfort zone a little bit. Throw yourself into the lions, once again, of those who are thirsty for your knowledge and share it across generously. What’s the worst thing that can happen? That they now possess your knowledge? So what? You are the one who knows the most about that piece of knowledge or information in the first place and you would just need to remember that we, human beings, are just so bad in documenting and transferring our knowledge across through oral or written forms that no matter how much you share openly you would still be the one who knows the most about that particular subject. Always. Do remember the brilliant KM principles from my good friend Dave Snowden on Rendering Knowledge that would still apply and very much so. Don’t forget that tidbit that most people seem to ignore time and time again since they decide to go the easy way out: hoarding their knowledge. Don’t! Share it generously. For your own benefit and for the benefit of your networks. They will remember you for that.  As Seth mentions in a rather smart and succinct manner on his blog post, you will become their hero because you have finally realised, at long last, you don’t have much to lose, but a lot to win.  [Really looking forward to seeing everyone at IBM Connect 2013 and, please, don't be shy. If we bump into each other, say "Hi!". It's the greeting that kicks off the magic of serendipitous knowledge discoveries from conversations you may have with  your networks and other people!] 

A few days back my good friend, the always inspiring and thought provoking, Dan Pontefract, put together a rather interesting blog post which is just a beautiful story of a conversation he recently had that I could see myself behave and react pretty much in the same way that he did. In "Should Companies Allow Facebook at Work?" he comes to talk about that number of companies out there who, still, in 2013!, are blocking the use of social networking tools for their employees, so that they wouldn’t waste time at work, or goof around unnecessarily. Yes, still today in 2013, and despite the huge impact of social technologies in our society, there are businesses out there that seem to be rather happy with shooting themselves in their feet. Isn’t it time that we finally, at long last, wake up and embrace the inevitable? Social Networking is here to stay and for a long while even.  In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned how perhaps if there would be a major challenge for the corporate world of today with regards to social media tools is not how some of those firms keep blocking their use, but it’s more the assumption from knowledge workers that if they get blocked, like they are doing, apparently, right as we speak, they are receiving a significantly loud and clear message from their employers that all of these social tools are to be used for private and personal reasons. And they do that eventually, resulting in people switching off the work context of living social and just apply it to how they do interact with their family members, friends, relatives and acquaintances. Essentially, personal, private use.  A missed opportunity on its own, if you ask me, because when those very same firms decide to start their own social business journey(s) they are going to find out how they are facing a much tougher challenge with regards to adoption of these social tools, because their employees won’t just see the connection anymore. "Remember? You told us we can’t use these social networking tools at work, so we are not going to start now" is what most folks would probably say. And that reluctance can surely undermine whatever efforts you put in place to help drive that adoption. It just won’t happen.  In the past we have seen some very insightful articles on the topic of whether employees do really waste time at work with social technologies or not, or other relevant pieces where, if anything, they are offering plenty of sound advice as to why businesses should not block the use of social media tools; on the contrary, they should promote them quite heavily, if anything. Perhaps my favourite article so far, at least, from the ones I have read over the course of time would be the one from TechRepublic by Jack Wallen under the title "10 reasons NOT to block social networking at work", which, basically, covers some of the most compelling reasons as to why businesses, again, should not only encourage the use and adoption of social technologies, but embrace the many perks behind it. I am not going to reference each and everyone of them, for sure, but I thought I would just go ahead and share a listing of them, as a teaser, to see the kinds of perks that embracing social networking tools and letting your employees be not only responsible, but accountable for using these digital tools to get work done in a professional and responsible manner could do for the business. Your business. To name:  "Morale Reputation Communication Advertising Collaboration Social Research Skill Building Transparency PR Networking" Needless to say that in the world of Open Business my favourite perks of embracing social networking tools in a work environment would be those of Transparency, Collaboration, Networking and Reputation from the list shared above. More than anything because those would be some of the key ingredients towards provoking that particular business transformation that has been in the making for perhaps a bit too long already. Who knows. Businesses today are starting to look more how they can become more authentic, more transparent, more unique on how they do business, on how they can help differentiate their brand. After all, we all know and fully understand how people do business with people, so the more transparent, open, collaborative, networked those conversations and interactions can well be amongst knowledge workers in a world where you have to work really hard to earn the merit and reputation with your customers and business partners, blocking social networking sites is not going to be very helpful for your overall mission, i.e. becoming a socially integrated enterprise. As Dan himself concludes: "Social is the new normal. You are the antithesis of collaboration […]". Actually, I would go even further. Social is the new post-normal, as my good friend Stowe Boyd wonderfully described just recently in a couple of very good articles describing what it is like. But it gets better, because if you have a bit over 30 minutes I would strongly encourage you all to have a look at the recent presentation he did on the topic at the Meaning 2012 Conference in Brighton, UK, that I blogged about recently and which was, without any doubt, one of the best presentations from the entire day and perhaps one of the best from the whole year. Watch through it and you will see what I mean. Here’s the direct link to the video clip and the embedded code if you would want to play it right away:  So, there you have it. Next time someone approaches you and comments on whether they should block the use of all of these digital tools in the Open Business era, or if you engage in a conversation with people whose companies have already blocked the access to these social technologies, remind them how we are living in the Social Era whether they like it or not, in case they may not have noticed it just yet, and how we will be keep moving forward. With or without them. It’d be their choice. 

And here we are! Nearly a couple of weeks since I started working again, after an extended holiday break, I’m on the road once more. First business trip of the year, and perhaps one of the most exciting ones that I can think of so far. As usual, it’s the yearly pilgrimage to Orlando, Florida, to attend IBM’s event of events in the space of Social Business and Social Collaboration, formerly known as Lotusphere, now morphed into IBM Connect 2013 (Check out the stunning agenda put together so far!). Yes, of course, I just can’t wait to see everyone in there, fellow IBM colleagues, customers, business partners, industry analysts, and, certainly, good friends whom I haven’t seen in a little while and that I’ll have a chance to meet up again face to face to do a proper catchup. After checking out the live tweet stream coming from #ibmconnect it looks like folks have already gotten things started and somehow I sense that, once again, I will keep struggling with keeping up with this blog, while attending the event, embarking myself on a massive experience of offline social networking. Yes, the best one there is out there still!  This year though, I am planning on doing something … different. I am going to keep it quiet for a little bit and hide it as a surprise and see whether it would work out all right or not. It’s something different, like I mentioned above. Very different. Something that I haven’t done in the past and that, if it works very well, I may adopt it for future face to face events that I may attend during the course of 2013. It would be interesting to see … Thus stay tuned and see how it would go further along… It will probably kick off on Sunday, while I’m in Orlando already… Today though, I am in Madrid, where I hosted a couple of face to face workshops on social business enabling fellow colleagues on making the most out of social networking tools, along with a couple of 1:1 coaching sessions on the same topic with some managers and it’s rather interesting to see how there is plenty of eagerness along the way to get involved and fully immersed into the whole realm of social technologies for business, but there are still plenty of questions raised as to how to get started in an effective, efficient and, specially, smarter manner. Well, I keep going back to basics and refer to what I think is the number one activity that not only managers, but also knowledge workers in general, should master before embarking into blasting out messages out there for everyone to digest and be exposed to it. In fact, the first pillar of interactions that I always suggest to get started with begins with something so simple in theory, but yet extremely complicated in practice. Of course, I am talking about Listening, or, better said, Active Listening.  I have always described being an active participant in social networks as just not necessarily broadcasting or marketing your messages out there without being interested in following up, diving into the conversations or whatever else (Which we know is perhaps happening far too often nowadays, unfortunately). There is a whole lot more than that. In fact, one of the most interesting, engaging and powerful activities, also as a good overall learning strategy, is that one that helps us build the skills and the ability to listen carefully to conversations to then decide whether we would need to dive into them or not and add value into the overall dialogue. Something that doesn’t seem to be happening far too often, unfortunately. Again. But there is hope out there, because just when you need it the most, there is the wonderfully insightful, as always, Tom Peters coming to the rescue of all of us to stress out, not just to managers and leaders, but for everyone out there wanting to dive into the world of social networks, how important and critical it is to master the art of active listening and break off the old bad habits we have developed over the course of the years. And if he can then pack it up in a superb short video clip of about 3.30 minutes you know you have got to watch it. It’s the least you could do. And listen… Carefully. As I am wrapping up a pretty intense week at work where there has also been some massive soul-searching for yours truly (Now completed, by the way!), after bumping into that odd diversion of your own attention from what really matters (But more on that one later on …), and, just as we are getting started with the weekend, I thought I would go ahead and leave you with one thought Tom shares across with something that we all perhaps need to make much more frequent use of: Passion. To quote:  "(Strategic) Listening is a profession that has to be learned […] Your profession is listening" Thus as several thousands of us are heading into Orlando, Florida, to attend IBM Connect 2013, I would strongly encourage everyone to practice listening quite a bit, to master the art of active listening, AND learn, before you embark on with your own agenda. There is a great chance you may not have realised about just yet that even your own agenda will start with going back to basics in the world of social: listen with intent, to then decide how you are going to help people become even more awesome! That’s just as good as it gets… The rest is just irrelevant. Nice challenge ahead, don’t you think? Oh, if you, too, are going to IBM Connect and would want to hook up with yours truly, while in there, to say "Hi" and perhaps catch up on some conversations around Social Business, not to worry, I’ll be there … listening at @elsua with intent to then get together. Don’t be shy! That’s what massive face to face events like this one are all about… People listening, talking … connecting with people. 

As you may have noticed by now, the little experiment that I had in mind to go and play with while I was attending last week’s IBM Connect 2013 conference event in Orlando, Florida, didn’t work too well, not because of lacking the intention, the motivation or the energy for it, but mainly because I killed my voice on the first day of the event. On Sunday. Yikes! How unfortunate and what a bad timing, because I was really looking forward to exploring that new experiment I have been toying with for a while now. Oh, well, next time around then, I guess, right? Either way, I am now back home, still in full recovery mode from 36 hours non stop return trip, but you may be wondering why I broke my voice on the first day of the event and what provoked it, right? Well, nothing more than plenty of wonderful conversation after conversation around perhaps what I feel has been the main theme throughout the event: Social Business Adoption! Indeed, if there would be a highlight of what I learned, what I participated in, spoke about, talked about with fellow colleagues, customers and business partners, I could surely summarise it with a single key word: Adoption! It was truly fascinating to see how mature the Social Business field has become over the years and how plenty of the customers I talked to last year around Adoption were this year’s keynote or breakout speakers sharing their story, their journey, on becoming socially integrated enterprises. Yes, fascinating is a good word to describe the overall experience and the huge sense of pride I experienced (even today!) when I get to see customers sharing very powerful stories all around their social business journey(s) with lots of incredibly refreshing and inspiring success stories. Yes, of course, and the good lessons learned here and there, too!  I think it was also the first time ever, in the 20 years the conference has been running (All along known before as Lotusphere), that there were more case studies and customers on stage and breakout sessions than ever before, which I guess is a really good sign that highlights how mature the whole field of social business is when the customers are the primary focus. That’s probably the best part of the conference, where you just sit back, relax, free your brain from any constraint and just learn. That is essentially what I did for the entire week non-stop!  I tried to attend a good number of the sessions with customer case studies and success stories, but, unfortunately, I didn’t succeed in making some of them. Not because I didn’t want to, but simply because I had lots of other customer meetings myself, plenty of them for the first time ever that we meet face to face, and that I am sure next year they would be on stage as keynote or breakout speakers themselves sharing their own story. Yes, I feel that confident it will happen. The energy was there, the excitement, too!, but specially, the commitment, purpose and focus to make it happen all around. In fact, I raised the challenge for each and everyone of them that a year later they should be the ones on stage!  And they accepted it! Game ON!  Either way, like I was saying, the main reason why I broke my voice during the event on the first day was because of the huge amount of conversations I had with people, fellow colleagues, customers and BPs, non stop around adoption strategies and mainly describing IBM’s own journey towards becoming a successful social business that prevented me from even hanging out at the poolside bar, which, for instance, was the place that I spent most of my time last year. Well, this year I only visited it once and on Thursday evening, once the event was over! Ha! I need to work on that, I guess, and get closer next year. After all, the weather was just gorgeous whole week long!  Over the course of the next few weeks I will be sharing plenty of additional highlights of what I experienced and learned throughout the conference, since I will have a chance to reflect on what I was exposed to and inject those learnings into new blog entries that I will try to connect with the overall theme from this blog. Perhaps the most exciting one insight I can share now is how a good number of the conversations I had moved around Open Business, which is starting to grab more and more attention by customers as an opportunity to open up, become more transparent, honest, and authentic on how they would want to conduct their business with their own customers. So I will have a good chance as well to talk about that over the course of time. So much so that on the #ptisocialbiz session that I co-presented I stated how my main objective for 2013 is going to be to drop the Social Business moniker and instead adopt Open Business. For now though I thought I would just point you into perhaps one of the main resources out there that I will keep referencing time and time again about the event itself, which, in this case, it’s the link to the Livestream presentations that took place and that, although didn’t cover them all extensively, some of my favourites were recorded for later viewing as well. Like the Opening General Session, which I thought didn’t present us with much of a WOW! - Bang! Boom! feeling confirming, if anything, that social business is now mainstream. It’s here to stay and it’s here to transform the way we do business and instead of focusing on a massive spree of new features and capabilities the shift now has moved on into how I can apply it to my day to day business, regardless of the industry. Refreshing altogether! Another favourite session worth while checking out would be the keynote from Day 2 where there were some of my favourite case studies shared through a short video clip, along with 3 live customer stories where David Jones pretty much just nailed it, sharing plenty of insights and helpful tips on accelerating their own adoption of social software for business! But for the rest, I will be talking about it at a later time in a number of different articles, like I mentioned above. Perhaps, for now, I will give you a teaser sharing along, and like I have been doing for other conference events, the .PDF file with all of the extensive live tweeting I did during the whole week, so you could have a glimpse on what customer case studies sessions I was rather interested in, what other general sessions I attended and, specially, what kinds of conversations I embarked on throughout the event itself, both face to face and virtually.  As usual, you would be able to find the .PDF file over at my Slideshare account (Here is the direct link to it), and here’s the embedded code, so you can take a look right away and breeze through it. Like I mentioned, I will be covering in the near future plenty more ground of those social business adoption stories, some of them so inspiring that I still have got a lovely aftertaste that will be difficult to get rid of. So here it goes:  elsua’s Live Tweeting Highlights from #ibmconnect in Orlando, Florida, January 2013 from Luis Suarez And that would be it for me for today for the first, of several, blog entries on some major highlights from IBM Connect 2013, although I am thinking I’m not going to share them all right away, so I can pace through some other interesting reflections I have been musing and pondering about since my last article over here. That way we can balance it a bit nicely in between multiple other things that are happening at the moment.  Oh, in case you are wondering, the picture I decided to include above on this post was also one of my favourite highlights from the overall event: a live snapshot taken while at the Opening General Session where Alistair Rennie (General Manager for IBM’s Collaboration Solutions) gave a huge shout (and mention!) to a smashing, talented, gifted group of individuals who are taking brand advocacy into new levels: the IBM Champions for Collaboration Solutions. Splendid highlight for sure and the perfect way to kick off quite an amazing event: start by treasuring and nurturing your brand advocates and social evangelists. It’s the least you could do to recognise, acknowledge and embrace their extended hard work and their ever going the extra mile for you and your brand! Always.

A couple of months ago, when my good friend and fellow colleague, Louis Richardson, came to talk to both my twin brother Luis Benitez and myself to participate at the IBM Connect 2013 conference event in Orlando, Florida, following the well known format of "Pardon The Interruption" we knew, back then, it was going to be a risky bet, one where we thought it was going to be rather a huge massive smash hit or just simply a notorious everlasting failure. Since all three of us do enjoy challenging ourselves on a regular basis we decided though to, what the h*ck, take the risk and go for it! We may as well enjoy the ride along the way, right? Well, we surely did! That’s how "Pardon The Interruption in Social Business" came into being and how it was a stunning success we can now go and treasure for a long while… Indeed, that was the breakout speaker session the Three Louie (#troislouie) decided to embark on, making it the very first time in history that three Luis’ heavily involved with Social Business would be making it on stage at the same conference event, at the same date, at the same time talking with passion about the same subject. Of course, there was a bunch of preparation that took place before that day arrived. Louis got us all three organised (without even sending a single email across, by the way, but collaborating through IBM Connections Activities < W00t! Yes, walking the talk!) and before we knew it we were off to something magical. Earlier on, indeed, while in the preparation stages, we knew that in order to make it a successful event we needed to count on a little bit of help from the audience, so a few weeks before the session took place we dived into Twitter and started socialising the #ptisocialbiz hashtag, where folks, who would be attending the session live, would be capable of sharing across their questions so that we would then be able to incorporate them into the PTI presentation and give ourselves 60 seconds each, or less, to share that insightful thought that would serve as an educated answer. Somewhat. And the audience responded! Oh, boy, and brilliantly! Overall, we got through over 18 of those questions over the course of one hour making it a quite fun, interesting and fast paced presentation, which is something that was well perceived seeing the time the session took place at (5:30pm to 6:30pm). Right from the start we knew that we all three needed to be somewhat radically different, so we decided to play some roles as well where Luis Benitez was the traditionalist social product manager, Louis Richardson was the pragmatic social sales evangelist and yours truly was the social business outlier, a role I have grown to become rather fond of over the course of time, perhaps, mostly as a result of "A World Without eMail". The vibe during the session was amazing. We had a packed up room with very few spaces left and from what we were told later on in the week coming closer to 300 people attending the session overall. Right then I realised it was going to be a smash hit. The atmosphere was just perfect: relaxed, condescending, inspiring, rather jolly and, above all, brilliantly engaging. You could feel it in the air. Just brilliant! Just the perfect ambience to let your brain do its magic and let yourself go, let all of that passion, wit, knowledge and accumulated experience on living social shine through, just as the audience was rather attentive, alert and willing to be wowed! Well, we were the ones who ended up ourselves being the ones wowed and big time! We know the quality of the audio throughout the large room was not up to the optimal stage. In fact, we were told by those looking after the sound / mikes that we would better stay close to the main stage as to avoid poor quality of the audio coming through and that was perhaps a bit of a bummer, because, originally, we had the intention of mixing and mingling with the audience, walking about, and bringing forward different points of attention depending on where we may well be in the large room. Oh, well, may be next time around! The good thing though is that right from the beginning we knew the session was going to be recorded and everything, so, at least, we would have a good quality recording to share across when it would be over. And we surely did. In fact, Louis has already put it together with a copy of the slide-ware we used and shared it across over at his Slideshare account. So folks who may be interested in taking a peek and go through it may be able to do so with the embedded code shared below:   Pardon the Interruption: Social Biz Hot Topics from Louis Richardson What an adrenaline rush! Still getting shivers through my spine as I keep reflecting on what we learned going through that exhilarating experience of throwing yourself into the unknown and see what would happen, and in front of such a large audience! Just wonderfully delightful and highly recommended altogether! Judging from the superb, generous feedback comments we received throughout the following couple of days, both offline and online, it looks like it was worth it. My good friend Stu McIntyre probably summed it up nicely with this particularly tweet that we surely appreciate very much, specially, thinking about the initial reservations we had when initially diving into it for the first time:   I think the #ptisocialbiz format is the best thing to hit this conference in years. Could do this for technical sessions too #ibmconnect — Stuart McIntyre (@StuartMcIntyre) January 29, 2013 To me, it was also a bit of a special session, since it was the first time that I ever spoke at IBM Lotusphere / Connect in the 5 years I have been attending the conference event in a row, and it is probably something that I will keep remembering and treasuring as that new format presentation that perhaps will mark a new beginning where instead of focusing on delivering master classes of slide-ware we eventually throw ourselves into the audience to embark on a 2-way open dialogue bridging both the online and offline worlds, where both speakers and attendees learn just as much as we can from one another. Surely one of those fond experiences I won’t be forgetting any time soon! So much so that perhaps there will be a v2.0 next year where we will expand further on in the concept and take it to a new level. Who knows… For now, we just want to thank dearly and sincerely Stu, for that wonderful piece of generous feedback shared across in the moment, and to everyone else who came over to our session and participated rather actively to help us keep up with our learning curves, the pace and the rhythm on what it is like thriving in social business where the collective keeps trumping the individual master class(es) of those so-called slide-ware prone gurus If you have a chance to go through the recording and the presentation, we also want to thank you for taking the time to go through it and please do let us know through the comments what you thought about the session itself and how we could improve it for the next time. Because, you know what they say, right? There is always plenty of room for improvement! Practice makes perfection (Or so they say…) We hope to see you all next year at the next #ptisocialbiz session, hoping it will be just as much fun, entertaining, educational and enlightening for everyone all around as this year’s, if not more altogether! [Oh, did you notice our answers for one of the very last questions from the session on "What is your personal plan / objective for 2013 to support the adoption of Social Business and IBM Connections?" Well, if you have been reading this blog for a little while now, like since the beginning of this year, or longer, you will know what my answer was… … Challenge is ON!]

A couple of weeks back Laura Dinneen put together a rather interesting and insightful blog post on the topic of "Five Essential Qualities of a Social Business Champion" where she described, quite accurately, some of the various different traits Social Business Champions need to master and excel at if they would want to keep pushing the limits and change the way we do work nowadays and make it more social. That article got me thinking, of course, about my own role as a social business ambassador (champion, evangelist, or whatever other term du jour you would want to make use of) from over the last 12 years I have been doing this myself and I thought I would put together this article over here today where I could expand further, but perhaps around the field of Open Business evangelism. After all, I committed this year to get rid of the Social Business moniker for myself, remember?, at IBM Connect a couple of weeks back, so better get things moving then. So what are some other key characteristics from Open Business Champions? Before we move further along, let’s cover for a couple of minutes the main qualities Laura covers on her blog post to recap what we have got so far:  Passionate: Of course, otherwise what’s the point? How can you be a Social Business champion (Or a champion in any other subject for that matter), if you are not truly passionate and enthusiastic about your topic? How can you transmit that energy, that enthusiasm, that subject matter expertise, or that purpose and focus on the topic if you are not passionate about it altogether, right? Indeed, not much more to add further up on this one, I am afraid…  Innovative: Not necessarily an exclusive quality from Social Business Champions per se, but perhaps more from knowledge workers in general. The key thing here is that social champions will always be on the look-out for innovative ways and methods about how they can share their knowledge across on that particular topic in order to have their voices heard, which I think is the main reason why creativity and innovation walk hand in hand for them. It’s not an easy task, for sure, but one where they certainly need to master over time, if they would want to be really good at it as time moves on.   Collaborative: Another quality that’s a given for social champions, more than anything else, because if there is anything that they need to do above and beyond their call of duty is to walk the talk, learn by doing, and this implies that they are the very first ones who breathe this collaborative nature, if they would want to succeed. They fully understand they are part of a network, of a community, but they also understand they are just one node of that same network and therefore one more of the pack wanting to change things, to collaborate more out there versus trying to keep protecting and hoarding their own knowledge. They wouldn’t. They shouldn’t! Rather the opposite.   Flexible: Flexibility is, for sure, our middle name. I don’t know of any social champion who may not be flexible enough to understand we are living in a rather complex, networked, hyperconnected, distributed and rather virtual working environment and therefore we would need to live that flexibility in getting our work done, because otherwise we would not be advancing much further along …   Courageous: Definitely, one of those qualities you would probably not expect to see that often in a work environment, yet, incredibly critical for those champions, because being courageous means they do not fear anything, not even their managers! They are in a position where they feel that passion, that innovation, that collaboration and that flexibility would allow them to achieve everything they may well get their heads around in trying to push the limits. And it’s that very same position the one that empowers them to be fearless, even if they are seen as a potential threat, due to their own influence with those around them, i.e. the network(s). As my good friend Richard Collin once presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris, social business champions need to come to work with this mentality: "Come to work each day willing to be fired" As you can see, I took the liberty of adding some additional commentary around each and everyone of those qualities that Laura mentioned on her original article. It’s now time for the second part of the blog entry where I would want to reflect on another ten critical open business qualities champions would need to master and excel at, because they are going to define the challenges they will be facing over the course of the next few years. Interestingly enough, all of them have got a lot in common with the ones referenced above, but with a little bit of a twist. Let’s have a look:  Open: Indeed, Open Business is about being just that: open. Open to the unknown, to the unexpected. To uncertainty. Open to living our lives in perpetual beta, as a constant form of improvement, of learning on the go, of adjusting accordingly, of understanding hiding away behind your Inbox, for instance, or your own little cubicle is no longer good enough. Open means embracing those serendipitous knowledge accidents where magic happens to transform how we collaborate and share our knowledge. Essentially, how we work.  Transparent: And along the lines of no longer being capable of hiding away from everything at work, here comes the need for Open Business champions to become rather transparent on what they do. So that instead of protecting and hoarding their knowledge, their expertise and their networks, they transition successfully from that good old mantra of sharing knowledge "only on a need to know basis" vs. sharing publicly by default. Or that other one that I keep referencing time and time again on "Knowledge is power" (so if I share my knowledge across I share my power), when we all know it’s all about "Knowledge SHARED is power". It’s that openness and transparency the two single traits that have got the most significant impact on helping business realise that journey of become socially / openly integrated enterprises. Empathic: In the world of social networks there is one quality that shines through time and time again; a quality that social champions have passed on to open business ambassadors when interacting through these digital tools, which is, essentially, empathy. Our ability to build much more fruitful personal business relationships highlights the need for each and everyone of us to become more empathic with those around us. To help them when they need it and for whatever they would need, all in all without asking for much in return. We would need to be patient and resilient; to persevere, because we know that good active listening and understanding can take you very far. And showing that you care is what matters the most at the end of the day… Engaged: I don’t think I have ever bumped into a social / open business champion who may not be feeling rather engaged at work. Have you? Indeed, they are a special breed. They define their own rules of how they would want to work, what kind of work they would do eventually and who they are going to be working with. For them, hierarchies just don’t work. They live through wirearchy. They understand that if someone moves their cheese it’s their turn, and full responsibility, to re-engage back again into what they live for and engage back. They won’t be asking the traditional hierarchy for much help. Their free radical nature, their outrageousness, their eternal optimism, their hippie 2.0 lifestyle, their (corporate) rebel at work nature will help them shake off that disengagement and find their cheese again. They are essentially the good outliers who know how to get things back when someone decides they are becoming too much of a threat and use their political / bullying power to displace them. Not to worry, they always find their way back and when they do come back, they are even much stronger, more powerful and engaged than ever before! Trustworthy: Open Business champions live on trust as well, of course, as I am sure you know all along if you have been involved with social networking tools for business over the course of time. Trust takes plenty of time to build up (And a split second to break it away forever). It’s about getting to know someone, i.e. what they are good at, what they are not, what they are passionate about, what they care for, how they build personal business relationships through nurturing to the extreme their social capital skills. So much so that in the end it becomes second nature. Yes, trust, we all know, is an essential quality, but it’s one that it’s not been worked at much over the course of time and I guess we are paying for it at the moment seeing how the financial econoclypse keeps hammering multiple economies and countries worldwide due to that lack of trust. Say, for instance, when was the last time you had to work with someone you didn’t trust? Something tells me it wasn’t that long ago …  Authentic: If there is anything that these champions will be excelling at as well, as a living proof of what an open business should be all about, is how authentic they all are. Essentially, how they keep building very powerful authentic personal brands, that, if anything, help amplify the overall corporate one. If there is anything they do rather well is they walk the talk. They don’t come around and talk to you about how wonderful and how great these digital social tools out there are, and then go and hide inside their mailboxes processing email, because, you know, they have got work to do! Never mind you won’t see them complain much about how overloaded they are with email, because, eventually, they don’t get much. They no longer live there. They are out there, in open networks, interacting and collaborating with their peers and knowledge workers helping build further up on those digital footprints and authenticity that they know customers and business partners would appreciate quite a bit, because it’d help them convince businesses and brands that they, too, need to be just that: authentic. Honest: And right along those qualities of being open, transparent, trustworthy and authentic would surely permeate into perhaps another trait that we may have been neglecting for far too long in the corporate world: honesty. Call me Hippie 2.0 and everything you want, but I feel that if businesses and people working in those businesses would have been a bit more honest with not just themselves, but with the societies they live in, we probably would not be where we are today: perhaps one of the most serious, critical, and revolting crisis times where lack of ethics and morals have surely trumped people in the millions, while only a few benefit. Honesty knows better. Honesty fosters ownership and responsibility, not just towards you and your business, but towards the societies we live in. After all, what’s the legacy we would want to leave behind for future generations? Just like social / open business champions are much more honest, so do businesses in this brave new world. I doubt we can afford heading in any other direction without having to pay for the consequences in the short AND long terms…  Autonomous: Right along the lines of being engaged, here comes one of those qualities that is perhaps the most refreshing one, coming out of the tailorism regimes we have been living in over the course of decades: being autonomous. Having the opportunity to think for yourself, to make decisions on your own grounds based on the experiences and skills you may have, without having to depend on your manager to make those decisions for you. That lowering of the centre of gravity, of the decision thinking process is probably as good as it gets on empowering your employee workforce to learn (even from failures) into doing things better, much better. More than anything else, because along with that autonomy and free thinking comes along dissent, i.e. constructive criticism, which we know in today’s corporate world is far too rare and almost inexistent, because we just don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. Well, it’s not about that. It’s much more profound than that. It’s just that we have become much more comfortable with not having to think much and let that task to others so we get to live the easy life… Social / Open Business champions aren’t like that at all! They transpire autonomy, they define their own rules of how they would want to contribute to change the game, how they would want to redesign the way we work, which, if anything, has demonstrated how the last 50 years we haven’t done much in terms of progressing further in our thinking processes. That has been of the most liberating capabilities from social technologies today: give us a new opportunity to think and think freely, something that may surprise most, but it’s part of our human nature. It’s just been too hidden for far too long altogether! Motivated: What can we say about motivated champions that may not have been said before, right? I mean, do you know any social / open champion who may be rather demotivated on wanting to keep pushing the limits of how we work and look for ways and methods that could help transform not only the way we do business, but also our very own organisations? I surely don’t know of any and, like I have mentioned above, if someone decides to demotivate them, because they may have reached a level of autonomy difficult to control and manoeuvre around, there is something out there very clear that we can see time and time again come afloat: they will fight back. Finding new energy, new ways to show their passion, to build even more powerful social networks, to eventually become motivated again about what they do, to keep sharing with passion what drives them to work over and over again. And, believe me, they always find the way to re-motivate themselves. Remember? They are rather resilient and perseverant with plenty of flexibility, so they would always find out there what would motivate them. Ask them and they would tell you how they do it. They are rather open and transparent about it after all … Caring: And, finally, perhaps the quality that I find the most inspiring and refreshing to have happened in the corporate knowledge workplace thanks to social technologies for a long long time: caring for one another. I know that this one may also sound a bit too Hippie 2.0 as well, but I keep thinking that if there is anything that all of this social networking has done for all of us within the corporate world and within our societies for that matter is help us understand how over the last few decades we haven’t done much to care for one another, but to care only for ourselves, because that’s how we have been taught and educated about it thanks to those individual performance traits and reviews that measure, if anything, how good of a fighter we are trumping everyone else’s efforts along the way. And it shows… It shows, indeed, where we are and where we may have gone wrong all along. Can you imagine a business world where we could do plenty more caring for one another with just trying to answer a rather simple question that I have quoted over here in this blog a couple of times already: "how you are going to help people become even more awesome?" Well, how about starting with caring plenty more about them and what they do, instead of just focusing on your own self that, we all know, over time, is not going to take you very far…  Yes, I know, this has been another relatively long blog post that I have put together over here. I guess that’s what happens when you are stuck in a plane, en route to Philadelphia, to then land in NYC, to spend an entire week with your work team, and you have got plenty of thinking time, and lots of space to write about it comfortably. But here is the thing, you may be wondering that these social / open business champions are far too rare inside companies or too hard to see / notice them, while demonstrating those qualities at work. Well, maybe not. Maybe it’s just that you haven’t paid much attention to what’s happening outside your self. They are all around us. Amongst us. With us. We are us. They are slowly, but steadily, coming along as a rather powerful network of change agents that, if anything, should be treasured and nurtured by every single business and, mainly, because of a single reason: they are the only main reason why your business still exists today, as my good friend Carmen Medina described a little while ago on a rather short, but incredibly insightful and relevant presentation on why we needed to cultivate and treasure those outrageous optimist rebels at work:   

Once again, it’s been a little while now since my last blog post over here, and I am sure most of you folks may be wondering what have I been up to in the last couple of weeks, right?, specially, after returning from my last business trip to New York City on the week of February 11th. Well, if I were to tell you that loads of things have happened, that I have been embarking on a massive non-stop frenetic roller-coaster ride, some of which have had a significant direct impact on yours truly, you may not believe much of it, right? After all, it’s not the kind of thing that I usually get to talk about and share across over here. That’s about to change though. At least, this time around. I’m going to give you all a little bit of Pep Talk. And then we are going to talk about Who Moved My Cheese? Because someone just did that.  Ok, I will leave the Pep Talk for a little bit later on … You know what happens when someone decides to move your cheese without telling you in advance, right?, that, when it hits you, it’s already probably too late. Lucky enough, I have always thought it is never too late. So when it, finally, happened to me a few weeks back, it was a good time to start that process of soul-searching that one embarks on once in a while and see where I will end up going. Judging from my close social networks somehow I sense that for everyone out there 2013 is going to be the year of Change (With a capital C). Well, for me, that soul-searching process is now over. And that week I spent in New York City surely has changed my life and in so many different ways that it’s going to be a bit too tough for me to relate it all over here. Yes, I know what you are thinking… How much more cryptic can one get when reflecting on all of this, right? I mean, can you just tell us what’s going on and why have you been absent from your external social networking activities for perhaps far too long?  Hummm, in its due time. Not yet though. I am still not ready to share it along. Many years ago, nevertheless, I bumped into one key online principle I have lived by ever since that has been perhaps the most helpful piece of advice one can give to someone else who is just about to start participating in the digital world and the Social Web: never, ever, write anything online in a blog post, a tweet, or whatever else, when you are upset, angry, frustrated but also EXCITED or far too exhilarated about something.  I guess that in the last month I have gone through both ends of the spectrum detailed above, which would explain why I haven’t written much online out there. Before my business trip to New York City I was on the very negative side of the spectrum and right after the NYC trip I was right at the opposite end. I guess that’s what one of the most amazing places on this planet can do to you over the course of a week, or, in my case, in 20 minutes. Yes, I know, here I am again, being rather cryptic, aren’t I? Sorry, it’s not intended, nor on purpose. I’m just trying to reflect on the fact that certain things and certain decisions usually taken within minutes can have quite a significant impact, one way or another. And probably the best option is to just take it as it is, re-think quite dearly your purpose, meaning and focus and go and start searching for that new cheese.  Till you find it. And I did! And I am excited. Actually, I am incredibly excited, but, like I said, I am not ready to share it or talk about it out there, just yet. Still a bit too soon. Which is why I thought I would finish off this blog post letting you know that I’m back with my usual regular blogging schedule, now more intense and relevant than ever to the main themes from this blog all along, including Open Business, of course, and with a huge piece of news coming up soon that I am hoping will help explain why I have been relatively quiet out there on the Social Web. For most folks out there who know me somewhat it’s going to be a bit of a shock, for those of you, my dear friends, who know me personally, it’s going to be something I have been waiting for for the last 12 years and it’s finally here. Yes, I know, the suspense and the intrigue are killing you all right now, aren’t they? Well, here’s the Pep Talk piece of this article then. Through one of my fellow IBM colleagues, who blogged about it internally, I bumped into this delightful short YouTube video, about Kid President sharing with us a little bit of a pep talk that I am sure we would all need to watch every now and then to remind us about what really matters. It’s one of those amazing inspirational video clips that would not leave you indifferent, to the point where it may help provoke that soul-searching activity you may have been parking on the sideway for far too long. In the context of what I have just shared above, it surely has for me, which is why I thought I would share the embedded code over here so that you folks would have an opportunity to watch and see what I mean about the video being one of the most motivational, hilarious, witty, relevant and smart discourses you will bump into out there. If not, judge for yourselves:  Like I said, there is probably not much of a need to worry when someone decides to move your cheese without you not knowing anything about it; there is a great chance that change is good and perhaps this pep talk from Kid President will help you get back on track while you redefine your new purpose, your new focus and, specially, your potential new meaning to everything you do. "I want to be anyone that leads to … awesome" (Yeah, me, too!)