Over the course of the last few years there has been one particular aspect of social networking for business that I still haven’t come to terms with throughout all of that time. That is, self-promoting your own content in your own blog that you may find scattered around all over the place (other blog posts, podcasts, vodcasts, webinars, seminars, online workshops, mainstream articles and so on and so forth). Somehow it just sounds a bit too meta. Perhaps it’s just me, but it’s something that I have always found it a bit too awkward, although it doesn’t bother me when people in my networks do it, because, essentially, I feel they are pointing me to some of the great quality content that they keep posting away in other places, rather than their usual hangouts. I guess it’s just me with that kind of reservation. Either way, that’s just about to end, because while I have been away these past two weeks I have realised I have been sharing content in multiple other places without pointers back to this blog highlighting the fact that as a result of it I am neglecting this blog perhaps much more than I should have and that’s not necessarily a good thing, right?  Specially, when talking about video. Yes, apparently, 2013 is the Year of Video. Specially, if you look into the rather significant impact it’s having across the board in multiple social networking tools. Perhaps the most vocal one being one of my favourite social networking tools: Google Plus. And this is when it really hit me, because I realised I keep spending plenty of time participating in Google Plus Hangouts (Or Hangouts On Air) on multiple various topics related to Social / Open Business that they never get to see the light over here. So I thought I would perhaps change that and eventually start sharing some of those links across to keep feeding the beast, i.e. this blog.  At the same time it’s been quite interesting to acknowledge how much more you can share through video than through standard offline text. This is something that my good friend Dave Snowden has been talking all about from the perspective of how we render knowledge (Still one of my favourite blog posts out there, by the way!). To quote:  "We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down. This is probably the most important. The process of taking things from our heads, to our mouths (speaking it) to our hands (writing it down) involves loss of content and context. It is always less than it could have been as it is increasingly codified" Indeed, this is something that I can vouch for as well. I am a fast typist, for sure, have always been all along, but I actually talk much faster. Perhaps even too fast at times, as I get carried away in excitement and passion when talking about all of these topics around social networking and knowledge sharing. And that’s probably why I am thinking of giving it a try over here and make the switch from that trend of thought of self-promoting your own content in your own blog and instead consider those other snippets sort of blog entries as well to go along with the usual regular blogging. Why not, right?  After all, I guess it’s all about sharing along all of those relevant and insightful pieces of content you think would add further up into the overall conversation. It’s the dialogue that matters, right? I would love to know in the comments what you folks think about it. Whether it’s helpful to point to those other tidbits or not. Feel free to let me know as we move further along…  To start with though, I thought I would go back to one of my favourite social networking tools that I mentioned above already. Google Plus. And, specially, Google Plus Hangouts, where I have spent a good amount of time lately participating in a few of them with other people. One of my favourites was a recent Google Plus Hangout On Air I did with my fellow IBM colleague, and good friend, Daryl Pereira, where we spent about 18 minutes talking around the topic of "Enterprise Social Networking Tips" covering the following items:  My current background and current role (For those folks interested… hehe) My own motivation to use social networking tools, whether internal or external (After 12 years heavily involved with social technologies) The benefits of being a Social IBMer in a digital world And, finally, some key points, practical tips on how to get started with social networking (for business), in case you may not have dived in just yet The beauty of Google Plus Hangouts On Air, and one of the reasons why I heart them quite a bit, is not only how easy it is to engage in the videoconferencing event without hardly any technical hiccups or issues or foreign software to install, but because it also provides you with an opportunity to have a recording of the event. And we did. You can find the link to it at this YouTube video, or, alternatively, you could also watch the embedded code below:  Hope you folks get to enjoy that 1:1 interview I did with Daryl on Enterprise Social Networking Tips just as much as we did when we recorded it live. From here onwards I also just want to thank sincerely Daryl for inviting me and for conducting the interview and I surely look forward to the next one!  And hope you folks, too!

A few months back I put together a blog post over here where I highlighted the fact that Great Products Don’t Need Customer Service by pointing out one of my favourite experiences I went through when I went back, where I grew up, for the summer holidays, and enjoyed some of the most amazing morcilla. And for several days! Well, today I thought I would go ahead and venture to state that excelling customer experiences don’t need much of customer service either. And perhaps not much of Social for that matter! When was the last time that you had a customer experience where you felt touched, emotional, engaged, perhaps even loved? While you keep thinking about that one, I can tell you that I had to go way way back in time to remember my last one of those superiour customer experiences. However, there is hope out there, specially, when you bump into a rather short video clip that a fellow IBM colleague, Fran O’Sullivan, shared internally, in our social networking platform, and which has been making the rounds quite a bit, although externally it looks like it has faded away a little bit. Unfortunately.  In The Simple Truth of Service Barbara Glanz shares along one of the most inspiring, touching, mind-blowing stories you are probably going to hear, read or see this year. No doubt. It’s about a story where "you put your personal signature on the job". About how you, the seller employee, needs to think about "something you can do for your customer to make them feel special", building up on a memory, or series of memories, that will make them come back to you for more.  And there it begins the wonderfully touching story from Johnny the bagger. No, not to worry, I am not going to spoil it for you folks. It’s a delightful 3 minute long video that I would ask you to stop anything you may be doing, including reading this blog post, and watch it through in its entirety and then come back:  Truly amazing and rather incredible story, don’t you think? I am not sure about you, but I guess, after watching it, excelling customer experiences have taken a new meaning for me. Hope for you, too! One where "everyone is having a lot of fun creating memories". One where the focus shifts away and turns into "our customers are talking to us … they are coming back, they are bringing their friends" [Emphasis mine], more than anything else, because for the first time in a long long while employees choose "to make a difference".  Barbara herself highlighted it very recently what it is all about: "Great service comes from the heart!", but in the exceptional case of Johnny it lies even deeper than that, as it is brilliantly quoted on the video clip itself:  "Johnny’s idea wasn’t nearly as innovative as it was loving. It came from his heart — it was real". That’s what touched customers, his peers… and those who read this story" [Emphasis mine] They say that Social / Open Business is all about inviting customers to participate and share in open, direct, transparent conversations with the ultimate goal to delight them. In short, it’s all about engagement. But I guess we should never underestimate the power of stories either, stories that go rather deep, that touch our hearts in places we never thought even existed. In stories that truly bring up what an exceptional customer experience is all about: everything, but technology. It’s all about emotion and essentially how much of that emotion, passion, loving AND caring you put into it all. And for the vast majority of cases you may not even need to use technology for that. Just your human nature. That special one we all have hidden somewhere deep inside ourselves and that I sense needs to start coming out more and more often as we transition into that fascinating world of Open Business.  "When the heart is in the right place, The ego gets out of the way.That’s when great servicecomes shining through" Wise words, indeed. So next time that someone asks you to define what a truly engaging and delightful customer experience should be like, we probably don’t have to look any further up than Johnny the bagger. The simple truth of service.

Collaborative learning, (I prefer collaborative as it seems more like an organization thing than social) basically informal learning, is the way to go today, and yet we seem to have so many questions coming up:How can we get it to work to really bring value to the organization and the customers?How can you ensure it is used the right way?How do you ensure authenticity of information that is critical to the organizations goals?All very valid questions to ask while we are still bordering on the implementation of the collaborative learning project, and trying to measure what value it would bring after implementation. It is possible to convince management that collaborative learning would work for the good of the organization, just like brainstorming and knowledge sharing sessions did in the traditional models. The advantage here is the time saved on those meetings, and converted into information accessible through the medium of Web 2.0 resources. These resources have proven outside the organization in triggering conversations and bringing in a lot of collaboration to fully define facets of a single idea. Let's take the example of collaborative/social learning so to say. We know the benefits by now:Helps establish virtual relationships and trigger good discussions that result in brainstorming on certain thoughts and ideas. Thus, helps in arriving at conclusions based on the thoughts expressed during the discussions.Helps one get a wider perspective on certain topics and allows them to read up all available resources before concluding on a topic.Generates a sense of satisfaction to have adequately researched on a topic, discussed it with people in the community, heard peoples experiences, and finally reached a consensus.I think all of the above are necessary activities we anyway need to do, in order to work effectively in an organization and bring value as individuals. So then whats missing and why are we apprehensive about implementing collaborative learning and measuring the outcomes? How is it different from the traditional ways of achieving the same goals?In my opinion, one of the main factors here is that all this happens virtually, in an uncontrolled environment, where anyone in the community can be the source of the information. How do I validate the information before using it for a task? Please help me out here.The solution??My goal is to suggest a solution about how you may ensure authenticity of the information. I think the idea here has to be locally dealt with by the management and implementation team of a collaborative learning solution. Their effort has to be in the direction of:At what level is the implementation of such a model feasible? It should ideally be at a business unit level where employees work on a set of related products or services.Devising a model that will work for the organization given the culture that exists. For example, we will use our existing blog, wiki and forums and integrate search into it. We will add more Web 2.0 tools as we go along.Define some high-level directives as to what they would like to see being discussed and in what forms. For example, encourage employees to share information in certain high level categories like, possible product implementation models, product architecture related topics, improving product performance, product usability, best practices, tips and tricks, troubleshooting, customer scenarios, other ideas, etc.Benefit or recognition they can provide to an individual who shares their knowledge or idea that eventually brings business benefit. For example, management should come up with some reward mechanism or tie the task of sharing knowledge as part of the individuals performance.If we do not take pains to evaluate how best we can implement such a model in our organization, we would be repeating the past when we thought that elearning was the best way to go, and later realized that it was ineffective mainly due to inadequate research and planning of the course design. We missed aspects of learner motivation and relevance, and created learning that was just an information dump. Let's not repeat this with collaborative learning if we want it to succeed and achieve greater heights.I'd love to hear what you all have to say about implementing collaborative learning at your workplaces.

If you look into the corporate world of today, I am sure you would be able to identify a whole bunch of rather cringing and devastating business problems that somehow we keep trying to solve, but fail miserably in the attempt. Issues like fraud, corruption, bribery, lack of morals and ethics, and what not, keep adding further up into providing perhaps one of the most dodgy business environments, with a rather profound econoclypse flavour, we ever had in recent history. Yet, somehow, I do feel there is another much more fundamental problem that we even haven’t come to terms with when thinking of the huge impact it’s going to have over the next 20 years. Indeed, yes, you are reading that right! 20 years, at a minimum! And to define that business problem I won’t have to do anything else than just mention three simple words: Ageing Working Population. I have always believed that, whenever we would want to end this financial crisis, we would eventually be done and dealt with in like no time. We just need to put our minds and hearts to work at it and it will be sorted out right away. In a heartbeat. Those business problems I have mentioned above somehow seem to be relatively easy to solve if the collective sets their own mind to it, too! It’s just probably a matter of time, intent and willingness to make it happen. However, the much more urging problem of an ageing population is something that would be rather tough to solve. At least, in the short term.  The thing is though that we are running late on the short term already. I read somewhere, for instance, that over the course of the next 19 to 20 years in a row, yes, 19 to 20 years!!, every second, a single US (knowledge) worker will reach the age of 60. And that’s just for the US, country where perhaps ageing is not as alarming as in other countries like Japan, Spain or Italy. The thing is that ageing is not really the problem. It never has. It never will be. It’s actually one of the many many things to treasure as you grow older with experience, know-how, and an extensive fountain of knowledge readily willing to be shared across as part of what some of us have been identifying all along as leaving a legacy. Your legacy to the world. The problem comes around when you don’t have anyone to transfer that knowledge to. And this is the main business problem that, right now, Europe, and, specially, Europe, is facing big time! And I suspect other geographies are not lagging behind too far. Right now, there are about 5 million youngsters, that is, young people under 25, without a job. In countries like Spain, as a rather dramatic example, the % of unemployment for the under 25 year olds is coming to 52%, which, eventually, is just unsustainable. So what can we do then to revert this tragedy? It’s well known how interconnected and complex the business world is nowadays, thus I am thinking how examples like this one are going to have a huge impact on the overall workplace of the future in the short, medium and long term. We are basically running out of time. And to such extent, I keep wondering whether technology, in this case, social technologies, could help us out solve this bleeding issue of renewing the corporate workforce over the course of time. Something tells me that technology will be playing a key, differentiating, paramount role. Here’s why… I felt totally inspired  when I bumped into this IBM YouTube video from the series of Solutions for a Smarter Planet - Solutions for an Aging Population. Disclaimer: Yes, you all know it already by now, I do work for IBM, but look at the beautiful and rather compelling story portrayed on the video about how technology can have a huge impact within our ageing population. The video clip is rather short, a bit over 4 minutes, and it tells the story of how Bolzano, Italy, has decided to think forward and help their elderly become even more autonomous and independent than ever, to keep enjoying their own lives to the fullest by putting technology to work for them:  Now, think in that context of what it could mean for that ageing population still at work, but already on the brink of retirement, to have the unique, unprecedented opportunity to engage with the younger generations through the use of social technologies to transfer some of their knowledge, because we all know it’s going to be impossible to transfer it all, so that the younger knowledge workers would have a good opportunity to become self-sufficient and self-serving, along with rather autonomous, with that knowledge shared. Right there is the baton being transferred from one generation to another. Work will continue. It will not longer stagnate and things will move on forward.  Yet, we are not doing it. At least, we are not doing it at a level that would be fast enough to react in time. Again, like I said, we are late into the game. Remember, there are 5 million youngsters under 25 currently unemployed in Europe. That’s some serious business issue that’s going to cost the corporate world millions of euros in terms of finding the right talent for the right job, but most importantly in helping prepare that talent for the job. If I were a CEO running a business that would pretty much depend on the knowledge and skills and expertise of my ageing knowledge workforce I would be extremely worried by now, if I didn’t have a plan already in place of how I’m going to be capturing the knowledge of those older generations to be able to transfer it to the younger ones. Yes, I will repeat it. If I don’t have a plan already by now, I’d be extremely worried, because I’d be coming late into the game.  Social technologies are pretty inexpensive nowadays, we all know that. Social technologies have helped us understand, as knowledge workers, we cannot longer work alone, in silos, disconnected from the rest of the world. Instead, we are now much more hyperconnected, engaged, collaborative and knowledge sharing prone than ever before. Younger generations don’t need to be told, educated, enabled and whatever else, on how to make use of all of these social networking tools. We all know they bleed them. Older generations are adjusting really fast! Think of it, the current largest population of new Facebook users, as an example, is people over 65! Ha! Who would have thought about that, right?  So we can see how the Social Web is impacting big time our societies, yet, in the business world it doesn’t seem to be happening at the same scale, which is a real shame, if you ask me, because, like I said, I believe we are already too late.  Are we? These working styles from both older and younger generations mixing together are just not rooted deeply enough in the business world just yet, and I am not too sure whether it’s due to the fact that there continue to be plenty of struggles around power and money, entitlement, prestige, reputation and merit (For all of the bad reasons!) or just a lack of democratising and humanising the corporate world as we know it. Either way, it’s not helping us advance fast enough to adjust that worrying trend of older knowledge workers on the brink of becoming pensioners.  Yet, the solution is just right there! Forget about the power and bullying struggles, forget about entitlement, forget about the oldest form of gamification in the workplace, the bonuses, forget about the old corporate business models operating in the 21st century still. We need to shake all of that off! And NOW!! We need to address what will remain as our biggest challenge event for the next 20 years, which, I am not sure what you would think, but I suspect it’s going to be requiring vast majority of our attention, effort and hard work just trying to retain a small % of that knowledge that’s just about to leave the workplace.  Yet, like I said above, the solution is just right there! Right at our fingertips. It’s just as if we have been blinded all along when we just need to turn around and look into one of the most powerful techniques ever invented by us humans in terms of knowledge transfer: storytelling. Indeed, storytelling that moves people. 2013 is the year of storytelling. Apparently. Actually, I have always felt that every year is the year of telling stories. It’s who we are and what and how we learn. No matter what. The amount of knowledge that we keep absorbing through sharing stories can’t probably be equalled by anything else. Yet, we don’t do much, or not enough for that matter!, at the workplace in this aspect, despite the huge amount of incredibly insightful writings available out there to set the stage of how powerful business storytelling could well be in helping you solve your biggest problem today and in 20 years time. Now, think of it, think of how both younger and older generations could make use of Social / Open Business and all of these social technologies to share their stories. Stories of how they have acquired and applied their own knowledge. Of how they have been bleeding these social tools all along since they were born. It’s all about convergence. And, yes, things are converging already, although perhaps not at a faster pace, because of lack of various different initiatives driven by the corporate world to try to adjust accordingly.  Here’s an example. How many of you folks, specially, in Europe, are aware of EURES? (In Spain, as another example, how many of you are somewhat aware of Eurojoves?). Take a minute or two to answer that question. It’s important. You will need to, because if you are not aware of it, right now you are missing what promises to be one of the most powerful, yet rather hidden, it seems, resources out there to start working your magic into capturing what, without any doubt, would be one of the most talented generations out there in the last few decades; incredibly eager and rather thirsty to absorb the knowledge, experience and know-how from your ageing working population through that wonderful and inspiring world of business storytelling through the extensive use of social technologies.  Wouldn’t that be quite something? That, instead of you trying to figure out where the young talent is nowadays in all of those social tools out there on the Social Web while you engage in useless talent wars, that you would instead head over to that giant pool of talent who has been waiting around for you to show up and proactively promote an opportunity to renew your own workforce, right with what you need, by just offering to become the social bridge between those generations? Isn’t that something that should have become a huge priority in the last 3 to 5 years? Again, are we too late? Did the train leave already? How is your business facing that ageing population issue over the course of the next 20 years … Got a plan? Not yet?  Ok, here are a couple of suggestions you can think about, not for too long though. Remember, we are running at full speed. Clock is already ticking… Social technologies + (business) story telling = an empowered, engaged knowledge workforce across generations and working styles.  A win-win situation for all, don’t you think? So WHY aren’t we doing it already then? What are we waiting for…? We have already lost some precious years we are not going to get back anymore. Let’s not waste more time, please. It’s time to ACT NOW! Don’t leave it for tomorrow as the knowledge AND the talent behind it may be gone for good, with no return, by tomorrow. 

If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you would probably remember how concepts like Employee Engagement make me cringe a little bit. Specially, when it’s abused left and right by HR departments and corporations alike, in general, as that magic bullet that will help address and fix the number #1 business problem of today’s corporate world: employee disengagement. Or put together in simpler terms: people no longer owning or caring for their work. Don’t take me wrong, I do believe rather strongly in Employee Engagement. Seriously. I do. What I don’t believe much in is the current form of how businesses are thinking about engaging employees implying that they know better than them, that they can just throw it out there, put together some social technologies around it all and people would come and be re-engaged at work. Well, no, sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Employee engagement is a two-way street and unless both employees and employers are not willing to walk through both we won’t have it. Well, hello and welcome to the wonderful world of Arbejdsglaede! The first time that I ever heard about Arbejdsglaede was at the rather wonderful and delightful Meaning Conference in Brighton that took place late last year and which, the conference itself, still keeps bringing up lots of very fond memories, every time that I think about how much I learned during the couple of days I stayed there and also how much I savoured the wonderful conversations I had throughout the whole time. But, like I was saying, I learned about Arbejdsglaede from Alex Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer (Yes, I know, gotta love job titles like that one! I do!!), while he delivered perhaps one of the most inspiring presentations I had the privilege of attending live during the course of 2012 (And perhaps in a long while, too!).  Arbejdsglaede basically means a feeling of happiness you get at work, which, as he clearly indicates, is not the same as job satisfaction. It’s way deeper than that. It’s all about reflecting on what makes you happy at work, and, apparently, it’s just too basic things:  Results Relationships And bang! That’s when it really hit me. That’s when I realised that true employee engagement is all about that! Focusing and repurposing your efforts as a (knowledge) worker towards striking new meaning in providing exceedingly good and top performing results, while building meaningful, empathic and caring personal business relationships. Talking about striking for that rather strong sense of ownership and co-responsibility, of belonging, really. That’s what, to me, employee engagement is all about. It’s about finding that happiness at work that clearly gives you that little bit of extra energy to get up every day and look forward to a new exciting day where you are going to, hopefully, learn, collaborate, share openly more of your knowledge (Without asking for much in return) by interacting with your (social) network(s) understanding that "happy people do better work": "more productive, creative, helpful, better at service, focused on quality, better team-players, more open, more flexible, showing more empathy, selling more, more optimistic, motivated, engaged, energetic, with an ability to learn faster and eventually become better leaders".  Whoaaahhh! See what I meant with employee engagement? Now, imagine this, how many businesses out there have got those kinds of aspirations for their own employees by engaging them from the very beginning to help drive a new purpose, a new meaning for what they do at work? Something tells me that perhaps not too many. Or, at least, not enough! Why? Well, because we still have got that huge, problematic issue of 70% of our employee workforce being totally disengaged. Simple. I know, it even hurts deeply. Sad. Rather sad, really.  Back in 2007, Alex put together a rather interesting and very much thought provoking blog post that I saw re-surfacing through my networks a few days back and that triggered me to eventually put together this blog entry. In Top 10 Signs You’re Unhappy at Work he listed what, back then, appeared to be some of the most profound signs as to why employees are not happy at work. Fast forward to 2013 and it looks like we are still seeing pretty much of the same… Allow me please to quote and list those 10 signs, while I would encourage you all to go and read the entire article. It’s just brilliant as well in how it entices you to do a little bit of a mental exercise and a test to question for yourself how happy you are at work after all… So, to quote them:  You procrastinate You spend Sunday night worrying about Monday morning You’re really competitive about salary and titles You don’t feel like helping co-workers Work days feel looooong You have no friends at work  You don’t care. About anything Small things bug you You’re suspicious of other people’s motives Physical symptoms Fascinating read that blog post, don’t you think? I bet that vast majority of us have experienced any of those signs at some point in our so-called careers, perhaps some of us are even suffering from any, or several of those, right now, in 2013, at the time where plenty of people keep claiming that in the Social Era employee engagement through social networking tools is going to rule the world and is going to help reenergise employees again. Well, not really. It won’t. It won’t until we get our mojo back and start embracing that culture of Arbejdsglaede. Because that’s what it is all about. It’s that two-way street I talked about earlier on and that I feel is going to be incredibly important over the course of time, if not already.  And how do we get to Arbejdsglaede, you may be wondering, right?, as the golden panacea of Employee Engagement? I have got my very own ideas on the topic, but, instead, I am going to leave it down to the master on the topic. Here’s the blog post that Alex put together where he talked a little bit about his keynote session. Then here is the link where you can download his presentation materials and, finally, here’s the link where you can spend 30 minutes (well worth it, by the way!!) watching the recording of the session where he gets to talk about some pretty compelling conclusions that I thought I would quote over here as well to see them in the wider context of re-engaging back the workforce:  Make arbejdsglaede your #1 career goal Be happy at work - not just satisfied Do something about it! And, finally, my favourite quote on what that two-way street concept for Employee Engagement would be all about not only in the Social Era, but also on the Open Business Era: Do or do not. There is no try! Who would have thought that Arbejdsglaede would be such a beautiful word and such a magical concept after all, in terms of re-engaging knowledge workers, doing things just right through social technologies, around openness, transparency, meritocracy, caring, empathy, trust and, above all, purpose and meaning. Well, try now to pronounce it and be ready to chuckle!

Today, March 17th 2013, is St. Patrick’s Day. So while the rest of the world has already embarked on a massive celebration (Happy St. Patrick’s Day, by the way!!), I am also celebrating something rather special, so I thought I would let folks out there know about it, since I keep getting asked time and time again. No, it’s *not* my birthday, as the Social Web keeps proclaiming to the world and beyond. Actually, I have lied on the Social InterWebs, because my birthday already took place a few weeks back. However, on the Web, and a few years ago already, I updated all of my social networking profiles to put an incorrect birth date, just because I didn’t feel the world needed to know that personal detail. Oh, not to worry, I am not too fussed about my age, 41 this year, but it’s the principle that with that accurate date and a couple of other details people could impersonate you and steal your identity. So I thought I would lie about it and instead pick up a date that still is rather special and dear to me: St. Patrick’s Day. Why is March 17th such an important date to yours truly?, you may be wondering, right? Well, mainly because 9 years ago, exactly today, I moved from The Netherlands to Gran Canaria, my home base, making it by now the second longest time that I have ever lived in a place, outside of my parents home. So, in a way, it is my home, don’t you think? That’s right! I wasn’t really sure whether I was going to be able to make it for that long, but I guess that once you settle in a place and you decide that’s going to be it, it kind of becomes a special place. One that is part of you, and you are part of it. And that, to me, is Gran Canaria.  I guess time flies pretty quickly when you are having fun, right? Because even though it looks like as if it was yesterday, with the odd blink here and there, it’s already been 9 years since I moved to the island. And I wouldn’t change a single one of those years. It does feel like a re-birth, for sure, since when it happened I was going through one of those life changing experiences that you know you are going to bump into at some point in your life that makes you question and wonder about the small things, i.e. you know, the things that matter. So, perhaps in a way, I am celebrating today my re-birthday after all. Who knows…  The thing is that life works in mysterious ways and does magical and wonderful things, because how ironic it is that today I’m celebrating that 9th year anniversary of having moved to Gran Canaria, in Utrecht, The Netherlands, where I am staying for a couple of days to participate and present at the Congres Intranet 2013 (#intra13 is the Twitter hash tag, if you would want to follow it up over the next couple of days…). Yes, I know, very ironic, isn’t it?  Anyway, it’s still a wonderful celebration and I just couldn’t help dropping by over here in this blog and, like every year, share a short note of appreciation for how much of an impact such a tiny island can have in a person, like myself and everyone else who may have lived or visited there. So perhaps I thought I would share over here a couple of snapshots that would give you a glimpse of why Gran Canaria has got a special place in my heart for over the last 9 years and still going strong …        And those pictures surely remind me of the warm weather that I am already missing while over here in Utrecht, where it’s rather cold [Brrr] despite spring being just around the corner! So I guess it will also help me as an incentive of what awaits me in a couple of weeks when I return back home. Yes, that’s right, Utrecht is not the only city I’m going to visit during this business trip. I’m going to be on a little bit of a European Tour that will take me in a couple of days to Paris (Where I will be attending and presenting at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit - Follow the hash tag #e20s on Twitter, if you would be interested), then from there onwards on to Leuven, Belgium, to present at BLUG (#blug) and over the coming weekend onto Prague, to present as well at the Heutagogy Conference event on March 27th.  Goodness! I told you, a little bit of a European Tour, wasn’t it? I am excited already and I haven’t started it just yet! Either way, like I said, in two weeks time I will be enjoying the lovely warm weather, the lovely people, the lovely food from the one island that decided to become my new home 9 years ago: Gran Canaria. Thus happy re-birthday to me! PS: As usual, if you are going to be around any of those cities while I’m on the road, throughout this business trip, and would want to meet up for a drink or a coffee, or even a quick "Hi!", feel free to reach out through the usual social spaces … I’m just about to end the self-inflicted Twitter and G+ silence, provoked by something I talked about a little while ago …

You may have noticed how over the course of the last few days, things have been a bit too quiet over here in this blog and for a good reason. Last week, IBM hosted the Client Experience Jam from March 12th to March 15th, to commemorate not only the 10th year anniversary of the first IBM Vales Jam, but also to help redefine those very same values that were established back then in 2003. It’s really unimaginable that 10 years ago the company that has always been flagged as archaic, hierarchical, over-structured, rather rigid and strict, complex, obsolete, and what not, a dinosaur, basically, gave such a unique opportunity to all of its employees to air our their voices on establishing the core values that would dictate how the company would operate in the 21st century. Well, 10 years later, it did it again, but this time around not only as an opportunity to redefine those very same values, but going even deeper with something so fundamental and so much en-vogue nowadays as the client experience. That is why over the course of last week you haven’t seen much of me out there on the Social Web and on this blog. My self-inflicted Twitter and Google Plus silence was supposed to end up last week as well, but didn’t. Right from the very beginning of the online event, I decided to focus all of my energy and free time in engaging in as many conversations as I could possibly do not only to share my own past experiences while doing client work in the hopes of adding further up into the conversations, but mostly because of the huge learning opportunity IBM Jams always give all of us in sharing experiences and plenty of know-how with fellow peers. Yes, I know, this time around, and contrary to other Jams in the past, IBM conducted this one for IBM employees only. And it was a massive success! It’s probably a bit too early to share some additional insights in terms of Jam statistics and metrics, but I can tell you that they have been stunning and rather mind-boggling. However, and as usual when talking about metrics, the important bit is not really so much the focus on the social analytics, but more in the quality of the conversations and most of them have been outstanding. One of them, in particular, started off by a fellow IBMer from IBM Taiwan has generated such amount of traffic, interactions, ratings and conversations that it was a little bit of a mini-jam on its own! Main subject covered? Something as exciting, as complex and as tough as changing our core values that have been guiding IBM over the course of the last few decades. Talking about bold moves, about a meaningful impact, about an open dialogue with a purpose to make a difference! Absolutely brilliant! Something that, still today, a few days after it finished, gives me chills and makes me proud of working for the company I have been working for over the last 16 years. No, don’t worry, this is not going to be one of those cheesy kool-aid blog posts where I praise the good things about what my company does for a living. Those of you who know me too well know that’s never being my kind of thing and I won’t start it now. We also have got things that don’t work. Everyone does. That’s what makes coming to work exciting and energising every day, that we are presented with an opportunity to change those and keep improving experiences over the course of time. What I wanted to talk about today on this blog post though is about something that goes very much along those lines. It’s about the open dialogue. If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you would know how at the beginning of the year I put together a blog post where I was talking about something that, three months later, I am now even more convinced than what I was back then to carry on with it. Regardless. And that is that shift away from Social Business into Open Business. Plenty of people would venture to confirm that my employer, IBM, is a successfully Socially Integrated Enterprise, and they might be right. I think we still have got plenty of room for improvement and a fascinating journey to complete, but we are getting there. But at the same time, and this is what really excites me, IBM is also making the move, a huge one, by the way!, into becoming an Open Business. How? Well, with small steps, but building further along from there. Slow, steady, but with a firm attitude that there is no way back, and that’s what excites me big time. Why? More than anything else because of things like the Client Experience Jam we just experienced in the last few days. Yes, I know some of you are going to say how open can a large firm be, when one of the most massive online events ever held by the company has only been available for internal employees and not for everyone else (customers, business partners, analysts, competitors and other industry thought leaders). Well, becoming more open needs to start somewhere and when you are not too comfortable, just like when Social Business first came about, it’s better start where you feel you could make up for a big impact: start by opening up internal conversations, get people comfortable interacting with one another, without not necessarily knowing each other, so that they get the gist of it, before they can move on. And then when things will be all right, that’s when you would already venture into the rest of the world. And that’s just what we have been experiencing with that Client Experience Jam. That is, opening up from the inside out one step at a time! No need to rush. We are here for the long run. Always have been, even with Social Business. It’s been quite an exhilarating and exciting experience. The Jam, that is. One that I am hoping to be able to talk about over the course of time, once we start seeing some of the various different insights and outcomes that came out of the event itself. The biggest challenge starts now though, that is, gathering all of that data, analyse it, make some sense out of it, come up with some pretty defining initiatives and continue helping the firm evolve accordingly based on that employee open feedback and direct dialogue. Yes, indeed, that is the most exciting phase of the Jam, more than anything else because there is nothing more important and critical towards employee engagement that once you collect, out there in the open, plenty of input from your knowledge workforce on what works AND what doesn’t work, the least you can do as a business is come back with ideas and initiatives you plan to put together as a result of the online event to address plenty of the issues at play. Now, that is employee engagement, when you not only embark on a massive online exercise of active learning, but at the same time of active doing. On the Jam itself, in one of those moments of inspiration that you know come up every now and then I quoted that transformation as "Doing Is Believing!" and I am now more convinced than ever that is all what it is all about: not only learn by doing, but do what you believe in, i.e. in those ideas you keep throwing out there on the table for others to make them better, to work with you, to collaborative, to eventually co-create something better, something that would have such a significant impact that will change the industry for good! Now, will my company be capable of doing that? Well, we will have to wait and see. Like I said, Phase II of the event just launched and over the course of the next few weeks I will be sharing some additional insights over how far have we moved further on with plenty of the ideas that flourished during the course of the event. For now I guess you may be wondering what were some of the various different ideas that I put together around that Client Experience Jam event that took place last week, right? Well, in an exercise of openness and transparency from my side, I thought perhaps about putting the titles of those ideas over here with a brief note of what was discussed from the thousands of interactions I got throughout the whole event. Yes, thousands!, so it’s going to be a bit challenging, but I can give it a try. So here we go: Exceeding Client’s Expectation by Going the Extra Mile (23 Ratings - 28 Replies) Talking about going the extra mile to delight clients, to ensure everyone understands there is a shift towards becoming more customer centric than vendor centric.  Investing Your Time in Business Schools (32 Ratings - 66 Replies) Reflecting on one of my favourite activities that I get to carry out, which is essentially be immersed into the trends of thought of the next generation of the workplace: the younger ones.  Leaving a Legacy Behind … PhD Students (60 Ratings - 56 Replies) A bit of a follow-up from the one above, but this one with a direct impact on helping college students work through their PhD thesis understanding there is always a "Yes!" for an answer, because, you never know, they may as well become your manager tomorrow!  Work Smarter, Not Necessarily Harder (53 Ratings - 48 Replies) Where we explored how social networking tools and having the right IT infrastructure can surely have a huge impact in terms of adoption, enablement, collaboration and knowledge sharing.   Great Managers Lead, They Don’t Manage (502 Ratings - 1075 Replies) Tremendously powerful conversation on redefining Management and Leadership for the 21st century, and along the lines of Servant Leadership, that I talked about not long ago on this other blog post.  Is IBM Ready to Become an Open Business? (42 Ratings - 125 Replies) Yes, see? I told you! The intent is there. The small steps have already been taken on moving further along into Openness and Transparency. I am hoping to develop further along on this one as we move forward in time, but judging from the interactions I had in this thread alone, yes, openness will become more the rule, than an exception. It may take time, but it will eventually get there!  Believing in Your Ideas: Life Without eMail (863 Ratings - 867 Replies) And, finally, of course, I just couldn’t help thinking about bringing up the one idea that has changed my life for the last 5 years (Yes!! 5 years! We just crossed the 5th anniversary and very soon I will be sharing a much long overdue blog entry on the topic with some surprises coming along! Stay tuned!). Of course "A World Without eMail" did have a rather significant impact, which at some point it brought a good big smile into my face when I realise that, finally, 5 years later, the world, my world, is at long last, catching up! As an example, the deck I put together some time last year on this topic, and which I am hoping to share it out there, outside of the firewall, pretty soon, once I go through a final update and a bit of sanitation, has been downloaded over 3,000 times! Just internally. Double yay, I know!   Like I said, those were my own ideas that I submitted into the event. Remember, it was an internal, IBM employees only, event, so those links would work for those fellow IBMers who would still want to go through the conversations, since the Jam is now open again in read only mode, but there have been thousands and thousands of other ideas submitted by fellow IBM colleagues. This is just a glimpse of what actually happened. A couple of other words to describe it? Massive and overwhelming, and equally exciting! At this point in time, I just wanted to reflect on the fact that those companies that may not be that open to listening to their employees sharing rather candid, honest and authentic feedback, even behind the company’s firewall, don’t know what they are missing in venturing to transform their own organisation and make it a better place. I have got no doubts whatsoever that the Client Experience Jam IBM hosted last week will have such kind of impact. Even more, I would venture to state that those who actively participated in the event would no longer be the same. I know I won’t. For once, I am incredibly excited to be given a huge unique opportunity to not only have a voice, an opinion, a perspective, but to do it in a venue where open, honest, transparent and direct dialogue has been not only encouraged but very much practiced throughout the whole of last week! Now, when was the last time your company opened up to such brutal method of living an Open Business?

If you would remember, a few months back, I put together this blog post on "Why Do I Share My Knowledge?", where I reflected on the main reasons as to why I’m so keen myself on sharing my knowledge across out there openly and in a more or less transparent manner. I guess that’s what Open Business is all about. Whether for Learning, Helping Others, or Leaving a Legacy Behind. The interesting thing though is that perhaps the main reason why I have been sharing more of my knowledge over the course of the years, is because, deep inside, I am still a child. We all are, after all. It’s just that for a good number of decades we may have neglected our childish nature of sharing for the sake of sharing. And that’s perhaps what has gotten us into trouble in the first place. Again, when was the last time that you behave like a kid when shared something?  I know it may all sound a bit too cryptic and eclectic when talking about those references around childhood, but I just couldn’t help thinking about dropping by over here today to share what’s perhaps one of the most inspiring video clips you will be watching this year and I would strongly encourage everyone to go out there and spend nearly two minutes to go through it to see what I mean.  As you may recall I’m currently on the road, in Prague, to be more precise, on the last leg of this business trip, having a wonderful time visiting the city and doing plenty of good work around Social / Open Business and "A World Without eMail". Yet, in between here and there I am still having a bit of time to catch up with what’s happening in my various different social networks, and then serendipity does its magic, once again, and hits me badly! In a wonderful way…  Lately, my good friend Chris Brogan, has been doing some phenomenal sharing of great, relevant and insightful content over at Google Plus on how these digital tools are helping transform not only our businesses, but also our personal lives. One of those posts though is special, actually, rather special. It contains a link to that short YouTube video clip that I mentioned above and that I’m sure it’s going to give you shivers through your spine as you get to watch it. Why? Well, essentially, because it will remind you of what we were like when we were kids… And why a good number of us are still kids today. Instead of me telling you what I mean with all of that, I am going to stop here for a minute and encourage you all to watch the video and judge for yourselves… Whoah! There you have it! Right there! What do you say to that? I bet very few comments can be added other than acknowledging that perhaps we have gone all the way wrong in our perceptions and expectations around the whole concept of Sharing. That Sharing Experiment is a whole proof we can do better at the workplace when sharing our knowledge across. And I know what you may be thinking … Those kids are already a bit too old and they probably have been taught, and educated, by their parents what sharing is all about without asking anything in return. And probably you are right!  But then again, where does that live us, adult knowledge workers, in terms, specially, of how we collaborate and share our knowledge in the workplace? Where did we go wrong with our childhood education and learning, or even our very own human nature as kids, where we seemed to have acquired the right skills yet, when entering the corporate world, we looked like we have left that behind and instead keep protecting and hoarding our knowledge, fighting with one another, still strongly believing that "Knowledge is power". Really? Well, I hope not! Look at what this bunch of kids are showing us above, on the video clip. Essentially, that human beings are social animals who share unconditionally with fellow humans what we know, what we treasure, what we are truly passionate about, what we care for, i.e. the well being of fellow humans, without asking for anything in return…  Thus as I keep reflecting on everything that I have learned on this long business trip, attending and presenting at multiple conference events, talking and interacting with customers, and learning from other thought leaders, and that I will be blogging about it shortly as well, I know, for sure, that for me to succeed in the large corporate environment there is a single thing that I would need to keep getting very good at, and which it looks a lot easier than what most people may well think about: Let the child inside me come out and show the way on what sharing is all about…  I am hoping that you would do the very same thing. After all, there is nothing to lose, but a lot to win altogether, don’t you think? 

Now that I am, once again, back home, after another round of business trips, I just couldn’t help reflecting on the fact that, lately, over the course of the last few months, perhaps couple of years, we seem to be going from extreme negatives to extreme positives and back. Somehow it’s starting to feel like being on a non-stop roller-coaster, and although I quite enjoy those rides, I am not too sure it’s something I would want to do on a permanent basis. Specially, getting exposed to extreme negatives. They can be just so much energy draining altogether, it’s probably not even worth it focusing too much on them. Yes, I know, I, too, have been missing the Inspiring Video of the Week series of posts over here in this blog, so I’m hoping to bring them back, once again, and perhaps with such enticing and rather optimistic message as The Future Is Ours.  No, don’t worry, nothing serious about my own persona or those around me for that matter. I am all right. In fact, I’m doing really well, specially, on the final week before I will be sharing some further details on that previous blog post where I talked about Who Moved My Cheese? and where to next. It’s just that the whole world has gone really weird and for no apparent reason. And that’s where the extreme negatives keep flourishing all over the place, distracting us all from what we should really be focusing on at this point in time: make the world a better place. Not for you, not for me, not for any of us, but for our future generations to come… That’s why, when I bumped into The Future Is Ours (A beautifully inspiring and thought-provoking short video clip of a bit over two minutes), I just couldn’t help thinking that it wouldn’t hurt us to have some sort of reminders, every now and then, that allow us to keep that focus intact on what our purpose and potential meaning truly are, never mind those distractions that we seem to keep bumping into more often than not.  Thus I thought that since I am now back from my last round of business trips and in order to get things going again with my blogging mojo, it would be a perfect opportunity to kick things off with a blog entry on the Inspiring Video of the Week and this time around, since it’s been a while, to actually share a bonus one as well! And I think I may have just bumped into the right, quality materials for today.  Michael Marantz quotes: "Imagine the future as a movie, consider this a trailer to that movie" as an introduction to this short video clip. I know most people out there reading this entry would probably say that it’s far too optimistic and perhaps utopian, but then again, I learned, a long while ago, to come back with why not? What’s stopping us from reaching out our highest potential, that is, "pushing humanity forward"? Probably nothing else than just us. So why not go ahead and do it? How? Well, here’s some inspiration to get in the mood:  The Future is Ours from Michael Marantz on Vimeo. Yes, I know, I need that, too! Well, here’s the bonus track. When you are done watching through that video clip take a look into this other one, of just under two minutes, on "Social Media Changes Everything", which is just as powerful as the previous one, more than anything else, because it shows and demonstrates what has been crippling us all in the past and that we are finally breaking loose from it with the emergence of social technologies: "Knowledge / Information is power" is now shifting into "Information now finds its own flow":   And if we are talking about the Social Web as a Flow, as my good friend Stowe Boyd would say, we are just getting started… See? That’s why every now and then I keep longing for inspirational video clips like the two I shared above, so I can get over from the extreme negatives, even if is it hard for a short while and continue to work really hard for those extreme positives that make everything worth while. Yes, I know, I could probably summarise it with these two different sentences spread around on the first video clip: "Let yourself be overwhelmed… Never stop dreaming" Why not?

This is it! The moment of truth! The wait is over. The long hiatus of silence is now a thing of the past. The soul-searching period is finished and dealt with. It is, at long last, official and I am now ready to announce it to the world! As you may remember from a previous blog post, I mentioned how late last year someone decided to move my cheese and how that turned around into becoming a very good opportunity for me to make the move into the next big thing. It’s been a rather interesting and exhilarating experience how an extreme negative of a 20 minute long conversation can be turned around into an extreme positive with another 20 minute long one. Both of those having taken place within a couple of weeks in between. Both extremes are always disruptive enough to make you question your entire career and what you would want to do with your work / personal life next. Yes, I know you all know what I mean… that kind of change. The truly mind-blowing one. The one that, once you strike it, you know there is no turning point. No way back at all anymore. It’s just there to stay and become part of you and you become part of it. For better or for worse. Well, I have just gone through one of those. I know that some of you folks may be wondering about what happened back in January about who moved my cheese and why was I so relatively quiet on social networks for a good few weeks, right? There was a reason for it, after all. A reason for which I am still trying to come to terms with and that I will be blogging about in its due time, whenever I feel I am ready to share it across. In short, it’s the one that provoked the extended period of silence on the Social Web and which concluded with me deciding to *not* stand till, do nothing and wait for the pay-check at the end of the month and succumb to everything that I have never believed in, in the first place. I am not that kind of person. Don’t think I ever will be. So sorry if you thought I was, but I am afraid I am not. I eventually decided to find my new cheese in an attempt to move further on in my professional career. Yes, I know what you are thinking, there is a whole lot more than I could probably talk about around what eventually happened, but I am starting to think that it’s probably no longer even worth it. In fact, it may have happened because of a good reason: my time was well overdue and it was just the perfect chance for me to move on. And serendipity, as you all know, works in various mysterious and magic ways, so after having looked both inside and outside of the firewall, I am now pleased to announce I have got a new job. Indeed, still at IBM (My current employer for the last 16 years… and counting…), and already fully immersed in it for the last couple of weeks, which is also why it’s taking me a bit of time to blog about it, as I first needed to adjust the massive learning curve, but still doing what I love doing: keep challenging the status quo of how certain things work in the business world in an effort to become much more open, transparent and sustainable. Indeed, an openly Socially Integrated Enterprise. That is right, like I said above, a couple of weeks ago, my new reporting manager, Barb Mathers (IBM Director of Workplace and Collaboration Solutions), announced, of course, in no other way than through our internal social networking platform, IBM Connections, the following exciting piece of news: "BIG NEWS! I am thrilled to announce that Luis Suarez is joining my team as Lead Social Business Enabler for w3 and www Connections. Luis will be driving the successful adoption of Connections across IBM, in support of our Workplace of the Future goals of transforming the way employees work in a globally integrated enterprise. Luis will be an excellent champion for the CIO office as he helps to communicate our direction of becoming a truly social business and what it takes to get there. Welcome aboard, Luis!!!" [Emphasis mine} A dream job, without any doubt!, another one, that just came true. I could probably say that back in the day, when I was first getting involved with social networking tools, back in 2001, I knew, deep inside, that, at some point in time, I would be ending up doing this kind of job. And 12 years later that dream came true. Yes, I know, probably a bit too long, perhaps, right? Well, I guess that's what patience, resilience and perseverance can do for you (Along with having plenty of good fun along the way doing a bunch of other interesting projects and initiatives as well and working with an amazing group of talented and rather smart fellow colleagues, too!). They keep saying that those who are patient enough to wait for it will eventually end up achieving it and I guess that is what just happened two weeks ago! I am incredibly excited and truly honoured to be filling in this new position. Thrilled that I will have an opportunity to continue doing what I love doing, i.e. exploring that whole brave new world of Open Business in the context of helping my employer become a Socially Integrated Enterprise. I realise that, for most people out there, it would probably mean the very same thing I have been doing all along in the last 6 years, but there are a few differences... As a starting point, I will no longer be working within the IBM Software Group as a Social Business Evangelist for fellow senior technical leaders and subject matter experts, which is the work I have been doing now for a bit over a year. Instead, I will be joining the Global IBM CIO Organisation as Lead Social Business Enabler for w3 and www Connections, our Enterprise Social Software platform (Internal and external), with the main goal, vision and mission of continuing to help facilitate the adoption / adaption of IBM and fellow colleagues in our journey to become a successful social / open business. Yes, indeed, I will be doing lots and lots more work on enablement, adoption, education, facilitation, adaptation, consultancy, and so forth around accelerating our very own social / open business transformation. As most of you know already, IBM is one of the many Enterprise Social Software vendors out there, perhaps one of the most competitive ones, too (I will leave that to you to decide…), but, at the same time, long time ago, we decided that, instead of blocking the use of these social technologies, and in order to help improve the way we collaborate and share our knowledge, both inside and outside of the firewall, we were going to, instead, drink our own champagne and become a showcase of that social business transformation a good number of other firms have embarked on already over the course of the last few years. And that is the journey that we started back in 2001 and that since 2005 it's gone through a good number of tipping points, some of which I have already blogged about in the past. Well, I guess this will be the next one, at least, for yours truly, because that announcement that Barb mentioned above already is the most popular microblog post shared internally already from the very beginning, which has me even more excited and incredibly humbled, because, in a way, it's confirming it was the right move when I started conversations about it a couple of months back. And even more so from the perspective that my new management line knew that, when they were hiring me, they weren't just hiring Luis Suarez (That weird, strange guy who lives in Gran Canaria, and who doesn't use corporate email to do his work any longer, that social business evangelist who works leading by example on what social / open is all about) but my entire global network, both internal and external! That's how this new hyperconnected, networked business world works nowadays ... But what I do feel really excited about is that my new management line also walks the talk, they do lead by example in this brave new social / open business world. They do live one of my favourite mantras as of late, that is, "Doing is believing!", so when I was first offered the job I just didn't have to think much to accept it, right on the spot, on February 12th, in New York City, at a Starbucks coffee shop, near the IBM building in 590 Madison. [Yes, I don't know why, but NYC does manage to have a special place in my heart over the course of the years. It already did back in 2008 when I first announced there publicly to the world I was starting the movement of Thinking Outside the Inbox. And it still has it 5 years later when I landed in this dream job!] I am sure over the course of time I will be introducing you to them all, my management line, that is, so that you all get to start knowing who I will be working with. It’s going to be quite good fun, I can guarantee you that! I know that at this point in time you may be wondering about what my job role and responsibilities would be like and everything, right? Not to worry, I will be sharing all those in an upcoming blog post, but perhaps for one I will detail the main task / activity I will be working on from here onwards: Help facilicate and accelerate the adoption / adaptation of Social Business at IBM (Both internally and externally) through our strategic enterprise social software solution, IBM Connections. Like I said, more to come in an upcoming blog post, but that’s it for now! That is the reason why I have been relatively quiet in the last couple of months while I was adjusting to this brave new adventure I have been so much looking forward to. Yes, your suspicions were absolutely right, too! There is a whole lot more than I could tell and share over here and that’s my intention as well over the course of the next few months when I will be blogging about the very same themes I have been blogging all along over the course of the last 8 years around Social / Open Business, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Online Communities and Learning, but at the same time I also feel this blog will turn itself into an open and transparent window as to what it is like being in the role that I am, narrating my work, working out loud, by sharing how that fascinating journey moves along, i.e. the challenges, the opportunities, the really cool things, the not so cool ones, what I learn along the way and whatever else that comes up in my mind… I guess this blog will turn itself into what the original concept of blogging was all about: a (my) personal Social Web journal… For now, time for me to move on and delighted to come back again, in full force, to the Social Web and really looking forward to keep up with the conversations and additional dialogue around Social / Open Business with all of you folks now that I am back in business with just one final token of sincere appreciation and gratitude for sticking around this long and for your patience and genuine interest (Yes, you all know who you are!) and for making it possible for me to bring into reality my next dream job: keep leading the Open Business (r)Evolution. Thanks ever so much and let’s do it! Let the good fun continue! Bring it on!

Now that the word is out there, and since I have been in the new job for a couple of weeks already, I guess it’s a good time to reflect on what does the Lead Social Business Enabler for IBM’s w3 and www Connections do on a daily basis in terms of my job role and responsibilities. As a starting point, the novelty effect has been huge altogether, because in these first two weeks I have been in the IBM CIO Organisation there has been a growing trend that I am finding it quite fascinating, and rather intriguing, and, perhaps, somewhat rewarding, although totally unexpected: everyone seems to want to have a piece of me now, or, better said, everyone wants to grab my attention for one activity or another, whether it’s related to my day to day job, or not. Something that, funny enough, did not happen in the past, even though I have always been rather visible all along. Looks like the new job may have triggered a new, fresh interest in Social / Open Business for fellow colleagues, specially, when they are no longer pondering about the Why or the What but diving right into the How. And that is a good thing, that’s one of the many reasons why I got hired into this position in the first place: help Social / Open become the new fabric of how fellow knowledge workers get work done by becoming part of their collaboration DNA. But I am sure at this point in time you are probably wondering about what does that mean exactly, right? Well, this is the blog post that will try to detail somewhat what my job role and responsibilities are in the new gig. It’d be the first time that I share publicly (Even outside of the firewall) what I will be measured upon in terms of my overall performance at the end of the year, what we call at IBM our Personal Business Commitment, but in that exercise of openness and transparency I am hoping it will help folks out there get a bit of clarity in terms of where my main focus areas will be. Over the course of time I am hoping to be able to share plenty more about each and everyone of those responsibilities and how they are working out over the course of the time. And perhaps expand even further on the wider implications of some of those tasks.  So, for now, perhaps an initial introduction that I am sure would be good enough to help everyone understand what I will be involved with in the next few months (years), more than anything else because last week Friday I was doing an internal keynote talking about Social Business and Adoption in Madrid and the host didn’t know exactly how to present or introduce me (jokingly). Understandably so, since hardly anyone knows what I will be doing from here onwards. Thus I thought to help out with that clarity I would go ahead and share it over here. That way I can reference it much easier over the course of time, while at the same time it will help serve me as a good reminder for myself of what my main focus areas should be like, instead of jumping from initiative to initiative that may be, or may be not, related to my core tasks. So, without much further ado, here you have got the tasks and activities I will be heavily involved with in the new job:  Overall Global Social Adoption & Enablement Lead: essentially, meaning that I’ll be leading the overall effort to transform the way employees work using social software as the core part of their work. Drive enablement to increase successful adoption, leveraging the models established in the past by both BlueIQ and CommunityBuilders: meaning, basically, not to reinvent the wheel and leverage the huge mindset that both of those efforts, i.e. community driven social adoption initiatives through BlueIQ Ambassadors and CommunityBuilders have done over the course of the last 6 years and which, as of late, were a bit dormant. Time to wake them up and get down to work! Support the specific goals of driving social adoption through the Innovation & Values Team 9 project of Expertise Locator and Client Collaboration Hub: where finding experts in an organisation of over 450k employees along with collaborating more effectively with customers and business partners outside the firewall have become two of the major use cases to help Social / Open Business blend with the day to day business operations, getting one step closer towards considering social networking just that: netWORKING. Expand Outside CIO Interaction & Engagement: with a couple of efforts that I am truly excited about myself, because both of them do help out accomplish a common vision: build on the ecosystem around Social Business. To name:  - Create and consolidate a Social Board of Advisors to help improve the feedback mechanism for our very own Enterprise Social Software Solutions. - Establish an open source Connections social community for sharing extensions and customisations to Connections itself resulting in having the best of both worlds coming together: 2.0 practitioners and developers being part of the same ecosystem. And, finally, evangelise our use of Social / Open both inside and outside of IBM, through client briefings, internal / external meetings, public speaking events, and various other social networking activities out there on the Social Web. I know, this is the one task that most of you out there would be familiar with all along, since I have been doing that for a few years now. Perhaps the twist though is that over the course of time I’m planning on writing about the usual themes I have written over here all along, but also share additional insights on how this new job role moves along in terms of what I learn, what I am working on, the challenges, the opportunities, the lessons learned, the mindset, the overall mission of showcasing IBM’s own journey into becoming a Socially Integrated Enterprise. That’s why, after the short hiatus I went through in the last couple of weeks, I am back now with my Big Three hoping to dive back into the Social Web to keep the conversations and the dialogue going…  And that’s it! Those are essentially the main tasks and activities that I will be working on over the course of the next few months. Yes, I am excited, as you can imagine. Very much so! More than anything else, because of what I wrote down in a previous blog post in terms of why I took this job a few weeks back: "keep challenging the status quo of how certain things work in the business world in an effort to become much more open, transparent and sustainable. Indeed, an openly Socially Integrated Enterprise."  There have been a whole bunch of other interesting and rather intriguing things that I have noticed as well in the last two weeks that I will be talking about and reflecting on over here, like the massive hard reset / reboot I have gone through with living "A World Without eMail", taking me back to February 2008, but then again that would be another story for an upcoming blog post… 

A couple of years back, Giovanni Rodriguez put together a guest blog post over a ReadWriteWeb on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 Adoption: Does It Have To Be So Hard? and it’s rather interesting to see how almost three years later the challenge seems to be there still, alive and kicking: Social / Open Business Adoption is hard. Well, it should well be. If not, what is the point? What’s the challenge? Where is your vision? Where is the business value? What are your goals? Think of it, if social / open business adoption would have been really easy most of us would have gotten pretty much bored right from the start and would have moved elsewhere already. Whether we like it or not, we, social / open business evangelists live on the laggards, the critics, the skeptics. They are the ones who keep feeding us with their negativity, who make us stronger by putting up a good fight, the ones who makes us think whether what we do is worth while or not. In short, they are the ones who will make your adoption efforts a real success or just another IT project failure. So what can we do to channel through all of that extra energy they have? Should we ignore them? Should we help them? Should we focus elsewhere? Social Business Adoption, if anything, needs to be inclusive, at least, make it a personal choice for people to dive into, or not, and help them make up their own mind. Earlier on this year, at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit event in Paris, there were plenty of reservations from both social business evangelists and practitioners, in general, about the whole aspect around adoption of social technologies. Apparently, plenty of people have got issues with key concepts like drive, adoption or even social for that matter, amongst several others. And while being asked about it, I mentioned how if people have got issues with words like adoption, we may as well end up raising up the game and instead perhaps switch to what is really all about: Adaptation. My good friend, the always rather insightful and smart Ana Silva, captured this shift rather nicely at her #e20s highlights blog post. Worth while a read for sure. That you have got issues with Social then switch over to Open (Business). That you don’t feel comfortable with Drive then go back to basics of what online interactions have been all about over the last couple of decades: (online) facilitation. And so forth. The idea in here is that by building further up on your adoption strategies the only thing you are doing is making yourself stronger by the day in your arguments and counter-arguments, so that when the time comes you can face the laggards, the critics and the skeptics and have a good chance of helping inspire and model new behaviours, a new mindset, even for them.  I have been doing work as a social computing evangelist for over 12 years and if there is anything that I have learned over the course of that time is that adoption / adaptation is a rather tough sell. It’s hard work. It’s lots of hard work. It’s actually pretty tough breaking up people’s habits, specially, the bad ones, because they are the ones that are most ingrained into how people get their day to day work done. No-one said that enticing those new behaviours into openness, publicly and transparency through social technologies would be a piece of cake. Yet, it’s the most rewarding of activities you can embark on as a social business evangelist, more than anything else because for as long as there is resistance / reluctance about it all, you will still have a job to do.  That’s essentially the role of the social / open business evangelist, that is, to make ourselves redundant and make our job roles obsolete, so that by the time that happens we would be ready to make the move into the next thing, whatever that may well be, while businesses become truly socially integrated enterprises. That’s why I have always felt that my mission is to make myself redundant. All along. To work my way into helping my fellow colleagues understand what social / open business is all about. To help them adapt to a new way of doing business, where open knowledge sharing and collaboration become the norm and where practitioners, instead of hoarding and protecting their knowledge, working in their own little silos, fighting with one another, they would eventually be caring and helping each other in a truly open and collaborative manner, where instead of stabbing each other to see who will get their bonuses, they would showcase, instead, enough empathy to care not only for themselves, but also for those around them: their networks. And, as you can imagine, it’s not easy. It was never meant to be easy. Like I said, it’s actually quite tough, but, goodness, is it worth while all along? It surely is! It’s what would allow each and everyone of us, social / open evangelists, to grow in our skills, our experiences, our know-how, our collective intelligence and knowledge shared. See? We thrive on that negativity. We get bigger and bigger every time we get exposed to their negativity and reluctance to open up. We keep developing a whole bunch of various different strategies that, eventually, would help tame down every single one of your negative responses, to the point where you eventually might run out of steam yourself. Like I said, we truly thrive on that negativity.  The thing is that things weren’t always like that. I remember the time when, back in the day, there was lots of excitement about Social Business. Yes, I am talking about those first, second or third waves of early adopters who understand what a game changing Social Business is all about. I have seen it with plenty of the customers I get to talk to, as well as my fellow colleagues. It’s what a bunch of us have been calling the Post One Year Challenge. Essentially, the initial enthusiasm in terms of adoption would last you probably for about a year or 18 months before the good fun starts. Yes, indeed, before the laggards, the critics and the skeptics start noticing they are the only ones left on their own little boats.  And that’s just the time when we need to be the strongest. When we need to be the most resilient, perseverant, perhaps somewhat stubborn, and fully committed, of social / open evangelists out there than ever before, so that we can prepare a good number of arguments and counter-arguments to face those critics. Constructive criticism, dissent and critical thinking (Worth while reading this superb blog post by one of my favourite thinkers at the moment, Anne Marie McEwan) are essential traits to a healthy corporate environment where you can keep challenging the status quo of how certain things have been running, where you are always looking for room for improvement on how you work and interact with others. In short, where you engage in really passionate conversations that help you question everything you have done in the past. That’s both your growing and learning paths. That’s all along what will keep you going for years to no end!  And that’s essentially what I have been experiencing over the course of the last couple of weeks in the new job that I have moved into within the IBM CIO Organisation. During that time I have been exposed to plenty of fellow colleagues, laggards, critics and skeptics mainly, who know plenty of what we have been doing over the course of the last decade in terms of accelerating our own pace into becoming a socially integrated enterprise, but they still haven’t jumped into the bandwagon, because they feel there isn’t anything in it for them, never mind how little they have tried it all out in the first place. The interesting thing from these occurrences and conversations is that over the course of that time I have grown bigger, much bigger, in terms of building my own strategies around social / open business adaptation, to the point where in the last couple of days I have been involved in some rather extensive discussions on the topic at hand and I am still feeling like I am just getting started. Like I mentioned above, I realised a while ago, perhaps a couple of years back, how I keep feeding myself from people’s negativity and aversion towards embracing Open Business. The more reluctance I get exposed to, the bigger I get and I am finding it really fascinating how that growth has accelerated tremendously in the last two weeks. Knowledge and experiences around living social that I thought I didn’t have anymore are coming back in full force and with first hands-on experience, walking the talk, that I can relate across using one of the most powerful means of transferring knowledge: telling stories.  Plenty of people keep asking me and wondering where do I get the energy from, the enthusiasm and the passion for it all, to keep pushing and challenging folks back in a healthy, constructive, but perhaps provocative manner altogether and I keep telling everyone that, to me, it’s something you build over the course of the years through three basic key traits: resilience, perseverance, and, above all, patience. Lots of patience that will always try to help you understand the other side, their point of view, their business pain points, their productivity black holes, and what not, so that you can eventually come back in full force with plenty of ideas, stories, experiences, know-how AND your networks to help amplify the conversation and help them overcome each and everyone of their issues. After 12 years of doing that I’m sure you may all be wondering whether I am getting tired of it all and start thinking about moving on, or not. Well, the reality is that I feel I am just only now getting started with it. Time and time again I have been working with a whole bunch of really smart, insightful and rather talented group of evangelists, but right now, in this new job, I feel we have all just been giving a new mission: keep feeding on that negative feedback shared across by those who can’t, nor won’t, adapt to a new way of working, and try to turn it all into something positive. Something they can relate to, something they can touch, feel and experience themselves. Something that has now become one of my core activities as a Lead Social Business Enabler: help provoke their own heartfelt business transformation. Not mine, but theirs. Game ON!

I cannot believe that, in just a few minutes from now, I will be celebrating the first month anniversary in my new job as the Lead Social Business Enabler at IBM and I hardly did notice how fast and furious it’s gone by. Goodness! One full month already?!? Where did April go? Even more important, what have I been up to during that time? Well, time for an update that I will try to summarise briefly with these few key words to then perhaps expand further along a single key point that has been my major learning throughout the first month on the job: culture clash, hard reset (Or even a Reboot) from last 5 years of living social, octopus effect, Organisation Change Management (a.k.a. OCM), execute, and, finally, meetings galore. But here is my favourite one from them all: a real blast!  Yes, indeed, I have now been one full month in the new job and I can tell you that it’s been quite a culture clash the one I have experienced in these first four weeks. And I know that for most folks out there it’s going to sound like a little bit strange. I mean, how can you go through a culture clash in your new job when you are still working at IBM? Well, that’s what I thought, too! And yet, moving away from the Software Group into the CIO Organisation is like two separate worlds altogether. The challenges, as well as the opportunities, are just so different, yet so rewarding. Back in the Software Group the main hat I was holding was always along the lines of that one from a Social Business Evangelist. Within the CIO Org. though, it’s more like let’s get down to business AND do some work on helping facilitate the adaption of fellow colleagues to both Social / Open Business. The hard reset (Or reboot even) comes from the perspective where my mantra of Living "A World Without eMail" has just gone 5 years back in time. Not so much because of the amount of emails I have received from my immediate team(s), but actually because of the good increase of email traffic I have been receiving from colleagues outside the CIO organisation. Go and figure this one out, but going from 15 emails per week to 23 per week, which is what I am currently averaging, is not one of the things I expected to happen. But then again, I am looking into it as a new exciting opportunity. How? Well, since it seems that not many people know I have given up on corporate email over 5 years ago, it’s time for me to start things up again, continue to walk the talk in showcasing how it is possible to live a work life without email, but this time around with an additional 5 years more of experience. Not to worry, I will be reflecting plenty more on this one in an upcoming blog post that I am already working on after I share the yearly progress report from last year, which will come along with a couple of lovely surprises to celebrate that 5th anniversary of #lawwe. About the Octopus Effect. That’s something that I came up with on the first week and a half on the new job. I guess I was not expecting it to happen, at least, this soon, but the incredible excitement around the new role and responsibilities as Lead Social Business Enabler from a good bunch of people both from my social network(s) and all over the place for that matter has meant that all along I have been feeling like an octopus, as in everyone wants to have a little piece of me, whether it’s attention, support, advice, consultancy and what not, and therefore everyone wants to have a tentacle or two without not giving me much breathing space to do anything else. At the beginning I thought it was all due to that novelty effect of being new into the job, but I guess that after one full month gone by, it’s more the excitement of seeing me going back to my roots as an internal social / open business evangelist that keeps dragging people around asking for help and for support. Except that now I’m not longer an evangelist per se. And you will see why shortly…  Here’s the most interesting piece though. Organisation Change Management. That’s what both Social / Open Business seem to be all about, apparently. I guess those of us, social evangelists, have never seen it before, at least, so far, but OCM seems to be at the heart of provoking that open business transformation everyone keeps talking about, but very few may have seen it happening. On my day to day job I am starting to see how OCM is taking over everything and I literally meant that: everything. As I am getting more and more involved with it though it’s starting to make sense, after all, it’s all about how you manage and facilitate change to take place. The interesting thing though would be to figure out whether OCM would eventually manage to help commoditise and industrialise Social / Open Business in a corporate environment. I, for one, would not want to see that happening, but this is something that I will have to come along and play with it as I keep iterating more and more on it over the course of time. So I am sure you will be seeing plenty of this one soon enough!  Remember when I was mentioning earlier on how I am starting to feel I’m no longer a social / open business evangelist, at least, in its purest of senses? Yes, that’s right. That’s how I feel at the moment. So you may be wondering, if you are no longer a social / open evangelist, what are you then? Well, I am what I would call an executor. That’s right. I have now moved from being an evangelist into execute mode, meaning that I am spending a whole lot more time helping others adjust their learning curves, adapting to new behaviours, new ways of doing work, inspiring a new mindset altogether realising that my good old days of an evangelist are gone. And, somehow I have noticed it doesn’t bother me. In fact, the way I look into it is how I have been all along doing those very same tasks already, except that they were done in a minor scale, while nowadays it’s a massive one. To the point that it’s starting to explain why I’m slightly quieter on the external Social Web.  Will it change me for good to the point where I may not come out of the firewall in a good while? Hummm, I don’t think so. I am sensing I need to have these escapes into the outside world to give me a different perspective, a valid touchpoint  to confirm whether I am on the right track or not, and while I recognise that my external social presence may suffer to some degree, I guess I will just need to re-consider my involvement and participation in the Social Web out there and become a whole lot more focused on what I want to learn and contribute to helping others, rather than just "being out there" trying to keep up with what’s happening throughout the various social spaces. Not to worry, I will be expanding further on with regards to this one, since I think that the new job role is going to help re-shape, once again, how I would want to participate in social networks out there outside of the firewall. There will be a need for some re-adjustments, although I don’t know at this point how much and how far or for what purpose. We will have to wait and see about that one… And, finally, the one you all folks have been waiting for all along and which has been my main key learning this first month on the new job. Meetings galore. Yes, I know what you are all thinking at the time I am writing this. I’m starting a movement, a new movement. Actually, I am not. It’s been already there for a good few months, so perhaps I will just join it. My good friend Kevin Jones coined, not long ago, "A World Without Meetings" (#lawwm), following the same moniker from "A World Without eMail" and I am thinking he was just right!  Game is ON!  In the last couple of weeks, and not going to consider the last three days since I have been away celebrating some bank holidays, I have gone from 10 to 15 hours of meetings, weekly, which is not too bad, rather doable, to 30 to 35 hours of meetings per week, which I am finding it’s a lot!, considering that vast majority of knowledge workers, myself included, are just hired to work 40 hours per week. Now, since I am new on the job I decided to go along with them to figure out what they were all about and to confirm whether I could then go back and challenge each and everyone of them, in a rather constructive and helpful manner, of course, and instead of hosting them in real time, provoke the conversation on whether that meeting, or this other one, or that other one, could be moved to offline social networking tools to carry out the work in an asynchronous way.  So now that initial influx of meetings has gone through, I am going to consolidate an idea I have been toying with for a couple of years now, but that I’m starting to become more serious about: restrict the amount of time that I am spending on meetings per day to eventually not do more than 4 hours of meetings or conference calls. And use the rest of the time to just get work done. It’s going to be a rather interesting experiment, although I am hoping over the course of time it may also become a movement, just like #lawwe is. We shall see…  One thing that I know, for sure, though is that I’ll need to do something that I never thought I would be doing while working in a corporate environment: protect my own working time from being abused left and right. Don’t take me wrong, I quite enjoy meeting up with my colleagues and extended fellow IBM teams across the board, real-time meetings can be very effective if conducted and done rather well. However, they are also very much time consuming, since it’s always rather tough to do multitasking. But if there is anything that I have learned in the last couple of weeks is that if you don’t protect your own working time, it will get abused left and right by others, which means you will be spending plenty of extra works hours out of your own private time to then get the job done. Something that I am not sure I would be willing to go for, since the last thing I would want to it would be having to go through a significant impact on my private, quality time.  That’s why I quite enjoyed the recent article published by Jeff Weiner under the rather suggestive title of "The Importance of Scheduling Nothing", where he is proposing to create "buffers" of between 90 minutes to two hours in your day to day workload, so that you don’t get stuck in back-to-back meetings throughout the whole day and can therefore get your work done, whatever that may well be, whether tactical or strategic. With perhaps this quote as my favourite one from the entire piece:  "Above all else, the most important reason to schedule buffers is to just catch your breath. There is no faster way to feel as though your day is not your own, and that you are no longer in control, than scheduling meetings back to back from the minute you arrive at the office until the moment you leave. I’ve felt the effects of this and seen it with colleagues. Not only is it not fun to feel this way, it’s not sustainable." [Emphasis mine] That’s why I have decided, from now onwards, to start working my way around putting buffers throughout my whole day. Even if I don’t mark them in my calendar to eventually make them happen. And thinking I’m going to start with it in a rather aggressive method, because, if I don’t, I sense I won’t get away with it. So instead of putting buffers of 90 minutes to 2 hours, I am going to start with those buffers to make up for up to 4 hours per day. Anything else that comes afterwards, in terms of meetings, will have to rather be rescheduled for another day, or, even better, carried out offline through social technologies. And dedicate that buffer time gained for doing my real job, as well as having thinking time. That rather important task we seem to have forgotten more and more within the corporate world.  Back in the day, at IBM, we used to have what we called Think Friday! which were periods of time, during Friday afternoons, where we could catch our breaths with the rest of the world, do plenty of thinking on the side, and whatever other work related tasks that didn’t involve going through meetings. And that worked really well, in fact, it is still there. Alive and kicking, but I am thinking that with "The Importance of Scheduling Nothing" I am just about to take things into a new level. Because that Think Friday all of a sudden has turned itself into Think Weekday. Thus we will have to wait and see how things will progress further. I may be able to go ahead and create a number of reports to see whether I would be able to manage it and make it happen, that is, to keep my meetings galore to just 4 hours each day. It surely is going to be rather interesting and intriguing from the perspective of whether my (extended) teams would be willing to play along as well in terms of experiencing the many benefits of working offline through social collaboration tools. I will keep folks in the know as we move forward…  For now, that’s it! That’s what my first month has been pretty much like as Lead Social Business Enabler at IBM. There are a few other things that I would want to bring forward and share some additional insights about, but that would be the time for another blog post. For now, Game is ON!  Let’s live "A World Without Meetings". [Fancy joining me along the way, please?]

In a work context, I have always been fascinated by transparency. And, lately, even more about radical transparency. I have always believed that if we would have been, all along, a whole lot more transparent in what we do in the corporate business world, the vast majority of the problems that we are currently suffering from, including what I still think is at the #1 spot, Employee Engagement, all of these troubles would be a thing of the past. Yet, they keep lingering around, because, after all, and, in general, we are not too open, nor transparent enough. And it shows. Over the course of the years I have blogged about this topic a good number of times and in the last few weeks, as I am starting to settle in the new job, I have come to the conclusion that it’s going to be that very same openness and transparency the ones that are going to dictate pretty much whether I’ll be successful,  or not, in my efforts to help facilitate the adaptation of fellow knowledge workers to the main Open Business principles. Goodness. I love that challenge.  Indeed, I have always felt that unless you are dealing with rather sensitive, private, confidential, work related information (HR, Legal, Copyright, IP Assets, Financial data, etc.), and even then I would question the vast majority of that data to remain opaque, there is no reason for knowledge workers out there to continue to protect and hoard their knowledge, but, instead, they should share it along freely. All along, I have been using the argument that, as a subject matter expert, of my own domain(s), I am always more than keen to go ahead and help out others around me. No questions asked. You know, if I can help, why wouldn’t I want to do that? It’s the least I could do eventually, i.e. to help others become more awesome at what they do, because in doing so I realise fully that I am helping them become more powerful. Now, as a result of that, since a large chunk of those knowledge workers may well be in my / your network(s), if they become more powerful, you become more powerful.  Remember, long gone are the days where you were alone in your own little cubicle, your own little silo, minding your own business, fighting everyone out there, so you could just get ahead of everyone that could get in between you and your quarterly / yearly bonus. Nowadays though it’s becoming more and more apparent how hyperconnected, networked and interconnected we all are, after all. So instead of fighting and competing with one another, there is a huge shift happening, instead, where we are starting to care (and show more empathy) for one another. And all of that thanks to rubbing our virtual shoulders on each other using social technologies to build further up on our own social capital skills: Trust. Indeed, that’s what it is all about. Not much about how much you trust people, but eventually how much they trust you, for who you are, what you do and how you could help them out without asking for much in return.  It’s all about the givers. It’s always been about the givers.  The thing that interests me the most in terms of radical transparency is that aspect of how different it actually is from Social Business, or from Social for that matter. See? You can be extremely social, over-sharing and making heavy use of these social networking tools for business, but if you don’t share much about what you do, about who you talk to, about your daily tasks, activities and to-dos, about your own frustrations that are stopping you from growing further in your work, about what interests you that relates to your motivations, etc. etc. and instead you just keep sharing along about what other people do, about what you are having for lunch, or that upcoming business trip where you only mention the city you are travelling to, you are just bringing forward the very same good old habits we have become really good at over the last 30 to 50 years. For you, knowledge still is power.  Now, don’t take me wrong, I quite enjoy it when people share those social tidbits, more than anything else, because they are critical towards increasing your own social capital, but from there to essentially keep everything you do hidden away is not doing you any favours in terms of generating strong trustworthy bonds with those who you work the closest with. It’s like I have been saying all along: how can I help you further along, if I don’t know what you are working on?  Last time I checked, I didn’t have telepathic powers (Although I wish I would have them!), so by you not opening up enough in terms of what you do, what you are working on and who you are collaborating with, you are not helping your network(s) help you. In fact, you have just become a barrier. And that’s the whole point behind Open Business and radical transparency. Yes, of course, transparency has got limits and I am sure we all know what they are. But from that to working in a 100% obscure environment, there is a whole grey area in there, waiting to be explored by everyone. And that includes management and executives, for that matter. Take this one good example from one of my good friends in the space of Social Business and Collaboration, Oscar Berg, who just recently put together this very insightful and rather inspiring blog post on My 7 Work Mantras, where, thanks to item #6 from the list, he ended up with some pretty amazing visualisations done by folks in Oscar’s networks:    @anadatagirl thanks Ana! Since my mantra #6 is to share everything that can be shared, it was time to share my mantras — Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) April 23, 2013 Or take a look into this other rather insightful blog post by another good friend of mine, Gautam Ghosh, where he is encouraging HR and organisations, in general, for that matter, to accept the new normal: Transparency is here to stay, by demand, not just because of your customers and business partners are asking and demanding it more and more often, but also because your own employees are starting to place those very same demands on transparency upon your own org. Not you as an individual, but the overall organisation itself.  Finally, there are plenty of rather insightful blog posts, articles and other relevant writings and info-graphics around openness and transparency and the impact they are having within the corporate world. See this other one, one of my all time favourites, from the always insightful Rachel Happe, as another example. Feel free to share as well, in the comments, what other ones you have enjoyed the most or that have provided you with additional food for thought on the topic. I would love to read plenty more on this topic.  However, and for now, I would want to finish off this blog post with a rather intriguing, thought provoking and incredibly refreshing YouTube video clip, from Thomas Frey, posted originally in May 2008 (Yes, 5 years ago people were already posted some really amazing content out there on the Social Web!) on this very same topic of Radical Transparency and which has served me as inspiration for the various different blog posts that I am planning on sharing across over here to detail plenty more what my job role is all about as an exercise to continue walking the talk, leading by example, on what has been, to me, one of the main core mantras from over the course of the years in terms of realising an Open Business: narrate your work, working out loud, to facilitate observable work. Now, apply that to a business context, i.e. your day to day work… and get ready, please!  Because it’s coming … 

Information isn't owned by an individual but by a community. Jane Bozarth is right in her post on Who Owns Information?Here's a fantastic video to prove it:I love the concluding lines that say 'In the past you were what you owned', 'Today you are what you share'.What do you all think?

There have been a lot of people who, over the course of the last few months, have been asking me whatever happened to that initiative I started a while ago around ditching corporate email (Under the moniker "A World Without eMail"), since things seem to have been a bit quiet over here in this blog for a little while on that very same subject. Did I give up on giving up on corporate email? Did I get tired of it and moved back to email? Was the experiment a total failure? Did I get tired of it and move on to something else? What happened? Well, nothing and a lot! The movement is still alive and kicking. It’s now more popular than ever and it’s still going as strong as ever, if not more! To the point where it’s now evolved into what will be the next stage and my new focus area: Life Without eMail. A couple of months back I was talking about this with one of my fellow IBM colleagues, and very good friend, Rawn Shah, and while brainstorming on something that I am hoping to be able to share very soon (Which I am sure plenty of folks out there have been waiting for it for a while!), we thought it was time for me to help the movement evolve into something much more exciting: going personal. Indeed, instead of focusing on the whole world, which may have been a bit too ambitious and perhaps over demanding on everyone as in too large to cover, I am switching gears and instead adopt a new mantra towards it: Life Without eMail.  Why? Well, mainly because if there is anything that I have learned over the course of time, and, specially, in the last couple of years, is that the world doesn’t use email. People do. So if someone would want to free their life up of the email yoke it’s got to start with people. We are the ones who should, and need!, to break that chain. The (corporate) world is not going to do it. It’s just far too comfortable keeping up the status quo of abuse, political and bullying games just as it is. It’s a matter of divide and conquer. And so far email is winning, at least, according to some folks, although I reserve the right to disagree with those statements, specially, when we start separating email as a content repository from email as an alert / notification system (BACN anyone?). Either way, that’s why I feel it’s probably a good time to move on to the next challenge. To design a new kind of work, a new mindset of work habits that would inspire each and everyone of us to become much more collaborative and keen on sharing our knowledge out there openly through digital tools, whatever those may well be. So, instead of just focusing on the world itself, it’s time to focus on the people, the knowledge (Web) workers, to help them free themselves up from what may have been stopping their passion to pursue something bigger, much bigger, for themselves. That is why from this year onwards I will be talking about going personal with Life Without eMail.  It’s no coincidence either, really. Because those of you folks who may have been following this blog for a while would realise now how, a couple of months ago, we just went through the 5th year anniversary since I first started "Thinking Outside the Inbox", then how it evolved into "A World Without eMail" and how it all comes back to basics, eventually: that is, live a successful, purposeful, effective and rather productive work life without depending so much on corporate email. Indeed, I can’t believe it either myself that February 15th 2013 marked the 5th year anniversary of an initiative for which a large chunk of people thought I would be fired from my current work within two weeks, thinking I was just plain crazy, and, instead, here I am, 5 years on and having a real blast with it.  Of course, there have been plenty of obstacles along the way, and there are still plenty of them ahead of us, but, if there is anything that I have learned in the last year, since my last progress report update, and even more so in the last few months, is that this movement is now unstoppable. And that’s why I thought it would be a good time to put together this blog entry where I could reflect on what has happened since the last update I published over here, where we are moving forward and what surprises do I have reserved for you folks, because I do have a couple of them… But let’s start with the beginning. First, let me assure you that although this article is going to be a bit long (Remember, it’s a yearly update hehe), it is not going to be as massive as the last one I put together by the beginning of last year. This time around I am just going to focus on giving you folks an update on what’s happened in the last 12 months, then share some further details on a new experiment I have conducted last year that I am sure you would all enjoy learning some more about it and after all of that we will go through the surprises I have got prepared for you. So, let’s begin…    A World Without eMail - Year 5 - Progress Report If you remember, in the last blog entry on the topic I mentioned, for the previous year, how the average of incoming emails I had over the course of the whole year was down to 16 emails per week, which is roughly about 2 emails per day. So, as you can see, I wasn’t capable of killing email per se as most folks have been saying all along, specially, when I am being introduced at a public speaking event. However, if I look into what I used to have before I started this initiative there has been a decrease of up to 98% of the total volume of inbound email, which I guess it’s just not too shabby when thinking about how 5 years ago I received a total amount of 1647 incoming emails and last year only 798.  No, that’s right. eMail is not dead and it’s far from being dead, despite what some other folks may have been claiming all along. This is something that I have been saying all along myself, too! eMail still has got its place in the corporate world. More specifically in three different contexts or, as I call them, use cases. To name: Universal Identifier (For whenever you need to sign up for a new service) Calendaring and Scheduling of events in your agenda (Most of those meetings, appointments seem to come through email still). 1:1 Confidential, sensitive exchanges (HR, Legal, Financial matters would be prime examples for this use case. Notice how I mention 1:1 and not 1:many confidential emails, by the way, more than anything else, because as soon as you include more than one person it’s no longer confidential. You never know where it will go next and who may leak the information across) However, beyond those three use cases, there isn’t an excuse anymore to move the vast majority of our interactions into more open social, collaborative, knowledge sharing spaces: digital tools. And this is when it is getting really exciting, because, despite the various different reports that indicate how email use has gone sky high through the roof, here I am to confirm how not only the number of incoming emails for yours truly has remained steady, but it actually decreased for the 5th consecutive year, ending up at barely 15 per week. Yes, barley 15 per week and if it weren’t for a couple of weeks where that traffic experimented a certain peak I would have been on 14 emails received per week! Too funny, as an anecdote, that one of those weeks was the very same one that 5 years ago it also triggered the giving up on corporate email by yours truly!  Here’s the full report of the entire year, where you can see the maximum number of emails received for one day, and the minimum. And right next to it, you will see as well the comparison with the previous 3 years, so you can have a look into the overall trend from that 4 year period. If you would want to check out the entire progress report into more detail from all of those years go to this link and you will find it there:    Not too bad, I guess, for an initiative that most people thought it was going to be dead within the first two weeks, don’t you think? 5 years on and a Life Without eMail is now a reality. And it can only get better …    Social Networking tools *do* make you ever so much more productive Over the course of the last 5 years one of the main comments I have been getting all along from those folks who may have been exposed to this movement has been along the lines of how as interesting as it has been moving my work interactions from email into social networking tools, it seems as if the only thing I did was swap from one tool for another. Still the same result. Well, not really. Here is why… You may have seen that particular piece of research that McKinsey did in 2011 where it mentioned some fascinating insights on our corporate work habits confirming how the average time that most knowledge workers spend just processing email is roughly around 650 hours per year. Yes, I know it may not sound too much, but that’s actually nearly 3 months out of the year people spend it processing email. Now, if you add up the month of vacation approx., we end up with nearly 4 months out of the whole year being spent just working through emails, because you do check out your mailbox while you are away on vacation as well, right? So earlier on last year I decided to do a little experiment where I would try to measure the time I spend on internal social networkings tools to get my work done and see how that would compare to the time spent doing email. If I would have just switched from one tool into another set of digital tools it would show pretty much the same time spent, right? Well, wrong!  Most of you folks out there know how much of a big fan I am of the pomodoro technique, which I have blogged about a couple of times already. Last year I decided to ruthlessly measure the time I would spend in internal social networking tools in chunks of 25 minute long pomodoros and see how many of those I would accumulate over the course of months. And now that the year has gone by it’s time to share the stunning results.  Over the course of 2012 I have spent 683 pomodoros of 25 minutes each to not only keep up with what was happening around me through social technologies, but at the same time to get my day to day work done. So that means I have spent 17.075 minutes working my way through these digital tools, that is, 284.5 hours approximately. Eventually, resulting in 35.5 days or, in other words, 5 weeks. Yes!, not even a month and a half!! Who would have thought about that, right? But it gets even better… Because it also means it could save people even more time to do other more productive tasks. These statistics are just from myself, a power user of social networking tools with no scientific method in place. A social computing evangelist at heart. Someone who lives these digital tools, walking the talk, learning by doing. Perhaps the atypical social networker, because that’s where I have moved all of my work related interactions to a great extent. As an example, in our internal social networking platform, IBM Connections, the average number of connections / contacts fellow IBMers have is roughly around 40 people, approx. For me, I’m currently coming close to 3,280 folks, so you can imagine how my internal networks do not represent the normal and why I strongly believe that those productivity gains in time saved using social tools could be even bigger for vast majority of knowledge workers out there.  Thus what does that all mean? Well, essentially, that next to all of the perks and various benefits I have been sharing around becoming more open, more public, collaborative, flexible, autonomous, transparent,  agile, and more responsible for how I work I can now add up that living social / open has made me more than two times as productive as whatever I was 5 years ago! And believe me, this is something that I really appreciate, because, like for everyone else, work does never decrease, but it is always on the increase, so knowing that I have remained over twice as productive over the course of the years, no matter what, has been a splendid and surprising new finding that has made me realised the whole initiative since I got it started 5 years ago with it has been more than worthwhile. But what do you think yourself? Would you be able to relate to this new experiment yourself as well? Specially, if you have started already that journey of reducing your dependency on email, is it something you can confirm yourself, having experienced similar results, although perhaps not at the same scale as what I have done and described above myself so far? Do you feel it’s a realistic conclusion altogether? I am not claiming it’s a rather scientific experiment, since it isn’t, but I’m starting to think that it could well prove accurate enough to confirm the ever significant impact of social technologies in the corporate world.  The one thing that I do know now is that relying more and more on social networking tools for business to carry out my day to day work does make me much more productive and effective than whatever email claimed to be in the past. And that’s a good thing! Finally, the living proof is there! It’s all about working smarter, not necessarily harder. All along. It’s all about making it personal and making it work for you, just like I did for myself. And therefore the new moniker kicking in from now onwards…   Life Without eMail - The Community, The Movement So, "where to next then?", you may be wondering by now, right? Well, certainly, I am not going to stop here. Like I said, there is no way back anymore, but onwards! The movement is alive and kicking and we are going to take it into the next level with a couple of surprises I have got for you folks for sticking around following this initiative all along and for being so incredibly supportive over the course of time and for sharing along with me this fascinating journey. Hello and welcome to the Life Without eMail community. The Movement. Last year’s progress report, you would remember, was rather massive, more than anything else, because I decided to summarise one whole year of progress with a substantial amount of interesting and relevant links about the impact of social networking tools on helping us reduce our dependency on email by a large margin. I talked as well about other companies attempting to do the same, as well as sharing plenty of interesting and relevant links on good practices on using social tools, or fine tuning the email experience to get the most out of it.  Well, this year I am not going to do that. I still have got a bunch of top-notch resources, but instead of sharing them over here in this blog post I decided to eventually gather them all, and over the course of time, share them over at my Scoop.it account  that I am in the process of feeding it, as we speak, and where I will continue to add those links over time, so from here onwards you would be able to keep up to date with all of those relevant links I may bump into that would cover this topic of "Life Without eMail" from other people interested in the topic, or writing / talking about it, as well as including articles I may write myself, interviews I may conduct or public speaking events I may well do, so you could have them all in a single place. Starting already today!  But the main surprise is another one I have got prepared for you folks. Plenty of people have been asking me over the course of the years whether there would be a central place where those #lawwe and social networking enthusiasts could gather together to share their own experiences, hints and tips, their know-how, lessons learned, and whatever other activities where they (we) could all learn from one another. And time and time again I have been telling folks there wasn’t a specific space. Till today.  Indeed, along with Prof. Paul Jones, Paul Lancaster and Alan Hamilton, all really good friends and folks who have already embarked on freeing themselves up from the corporate / organisational email yoke as well, we have decided to put together a community space where we could hang out with other folks interested in this movement and help share our very own experiences, know-how, and plenty of practical hints and tips on what it is like having ditched work email for good. The original idea, and due credit, of course, is going to go to Alan Hamilton, who suggested to me some time last year to put together a community space where we could hang out. And while we couldn’t get it sorted out back then, too much going on, as usual, I guess it’s never too late, eh? So thanks ever so much, Alan, for triggering the thought of having an online community for us to get together! And after much discussion and looking around for some really good solutions that may be available out there, we have all agreed to create this particular community space over in Google Plus Communities. So here’s the link to it:  Google Plus Community - Life Without eMail We hope you would find the time to come and join us in the community, where all of us, me included, will be sharing plenty of our own experiences, as I mentioned above, on how to reduce our inbox clutter while we keep sharing some additional insights on what’s happening in the space of social networking, Social Business and, of course, Open Business and how they keep disrupting the corporate email driven world as we know it. Still today. Our main purpose is to help out knowledge workers become more open, transparent and collaborative through digital tools vs. just keep dragging along through an excessive and perhaps unnecessary abuse of our email habits. I can surely guarantee you it’s going to be a fun ride!  So much so, that if you are really willing and committed to give it a try yourself we will be sharing with you some initial tips by which we can guarantee you that within the first 5 weeks, since you start, you would be able to see your incoming email volume getting reduced by over 80% and without hardly any effort, just applying some methodology I have developed over the course of time and which I am sure you would be able to follow with no problem since it isn’t rocket science, really, but just the trigger to break the chain and to, finally, have that rather rewarding and fulfilling sensation of owning your work, perhaps for the first time in a while!  Will you join us? Remember, 80% reduction of incoming email in just 5 weeks! Here is the link again to the community to get you going and thanks ever so much, once again, for the continued support, for sticking around and for having made these 5 years quite an interesting, inspiring, exciting and rather refreshing time!  Onwards into a Life Without eMail! [In my next article on this topic, I will be writing about a rather interesting twist that I have gone through this year so far. A hard reset. A reboot from everything that I have done in the last 5 years… But that would be the story for another post soon enough…]

Finally, we have a community in India exclusively for Instructional Designers. A great initiative by Ram, Rupa and some other Instructional Designers, to bring together this community and collectively function as an organized body. The ID Community had their first successful meetup at Bangalore last month. You can join their community in LinkedIn to learn about their activities. They have also published a list of FAQs for people who want to be part of the community.I think this is a much needed initative in India and I hope many of you join them and make this initiative a success. I wish them the best of luck!

Summer time is usually one of the busiest times of the year for me in terms of extra curricular work related activities. I know that this may sound a bit weird, but it’s actually rather accurate. While most folks keep enjoying their summer vacation, or a relatively quieter time anyway, my busyness increases a notch or two! And it’s actually quite fine. I have been enjoying it for a good few years already, more than anything else, because of a particular activity that helps me advance forward and take a good peek into what the workplace of the future would be like in the next 10 to 15 years, where I am hoping I’ll still be employed by then. And what activity would that one be? -you may be wondering, right? Well, engaging with the next breed of Leaders: (young) students working through their PhDs thesis on Social Business or Org. Change Management, amongst several others subjects… Indeed, it all started around 2006 and 2007 when all of a sudden I began to notice how plenty of PhD students were contacting me, through whatever the means, asking for help, advice, coaching, interviews and what not, because of the research they were doing around Social Business. Most of them found me through Google.com (Yes, I know, I am the one who doesn’t bite other people!), mainly landing into this blog. Before I knew it, I was approached by them asking me whether I would be willing to help them out with their PhD thesis. And that continued to repeat itself over the course of the years.  In fact, and most folks may not know this, but one of the sources of inspiration as to why I kicked off the Life Without eMail movement, over 5 years ago, was eventually from my interactions with those younger generations and how they live AND work through a different set of collaboration and knowledge sharing tools. Never mind their different mindset and behaviours. Yes, I know what you are going to say… I, too, don’t believe much on the digital divide or the generations divide, however, they do have something special in terms of how they get work done. For instance, throughout all of these years I have been working with hundreds of students I never, ever, exchanged a single email with them and yet not only did we get work done, but for some of them, those who decided to come and join IBM afterwards, they eventually did so and they are now my colleagues. And very soon, I am 100% certain of that, they might be rather my boss, my executive or, who knows, even my next CEO.  I know that in times where we are busier than ever at work, all of us for that matter, where time and work pressures are massive for everyone and where we are asked to keep delivering more and more with less and less, it’s surprising for most folks why I keep saying Yes! to that activity when in reality most knowledge workers out there in the corporate world would kindly decline helping out with the argument they are just too busy. Goodness, they don’t know it just yet, but right there, they are closing down the door to find out plenty more what the workplace of the future is going to be like. Starting today. Even more, they are closing down the door to find out what their next leaders would be like for their own work, how they are going to re-define the workplace through those social technologies, networks and communities, and with one particularly interesting aspect, that those potential new leaders who live and thrive on building strong personal trustworthy relationships, when they get there they usually tend to remember who helped them out when they were starting up and who didn’t. Yes, that’s how the hyperconnected, networked business world will start operating in the near future, if not today already altogether.  Are you ready? I surely hope so, because if there is anything that I have learned throughout the years interacting with those younger generations, both inside and outside of IBM, is that they are not going to wait. Not for you, not for me. Not for everyone else for that matter. It’s how they live. It’s how they operate. And that’s what I really find fascinating, because it’s through those networked interactions that one gets to learn how if you decide to be part of the pack, you are more than welcome. If you decide instead to do your own thing, that’s fine, they will move on without you. It’s just like when senior subject matter experts decide to cling together to their ivory tower related mantra of "Knowledge is power" and they refuse to share their expertise. I keep telling them how long would you think it’s going to take a group of younger folks to recreate their knowledge just good enough to get by and rebuild from there? It’s rather interesting how these wonderfully different working styles collide and clash with one another in an attempt to come up with something better, because there is always something better.  Thus here we go with the question again. Do you think you are ready to face that side of the corporate knowledge workforce, that I read somewhere that by 2020 they will be about 75% of the active working population? Yes, 75%. Well, if not, just yet, allow me to share a couple of resources that I am sure you will find rather interesting at best. The first one is this blog post by Frederic Gonzalo under the suggestive title "Social Media Defined by Kids" where he reflects on a short video clip where a bunch of young kids (That generation that will probably be part of the active workplace between 2020 and 2025 approx.) talks about what they themselves understand about Social Media. Very nice, witty, smart, fun, and insightful video on its own:  Did you notice the remark about email? If not, watch it again; it’s worth it. Yes, indeed, that’s the kind of knowledge workforce that’s just already entering the workplace already today, except that by the time they themselves join the acceleration and pace of the adaptation to social technologies will probably be complete. Vast majority of those generations and working styles will have adapted by then. The workplace will be ready for them by them.  In the mean time though, let me share with you all one other resource that I think would fit in perfectly in terms of where we are today within the corporate world, in terms of having multiple generations and working styles at play. It’s a presentation put together by my good friend Professor Paul Jones who I had the great pleasure of co-sharing the remote stage (Along with Robert Shaw from ATOS) through a webinar, organised by IORG, where we talked about Information Overload and what it is like living in a world without email. I would encourage you all to take a look into slides #9 and #10 to get a taste of what’s coming (If not already there!) and, even better, if you can spare 51 minutes you can actually go through the entire recording of the event, which I am going to embed over here, in case you may want to hit Play right away (See embedded code at the end of this blog entry):  If you would just want to jump ahead and listen to Paul himself delivering those slides that he used, fast forward to minute 25, 16 seconds, and watch it through from there onwards. Very inspiring to see how the very same trends that the world of Academia are experiencing are also starting to become more palpable within the corporate world. That’s what I meant earlier on about the impact of social networking tools for business along with the younger generations and, perhaps, why I would want to add a final piece of advice for knowledge workers out there: next time a PhD student approaches you to help them with their thesis, remember that very very soon they may end up being your boss, your executive, or, even your new CEO. Thus choose wisely   [Oh, and if you would want to read through another interesting discussion on a similar topic, i.e. younger generations and their education in today's more complex world than ever, have a look into "I Will Not Let An Exam Result Decide My Fate"]

Or, to put it in other words, automation of your social networking presence. That worrying topic has been in my mind for quite a while, and, lately, even more so, specially, seeing how plenty of people continue to automate, even further along, their online digital footprints with the argument, amongst several others, that they have got to do it, because they just can’t find the time anymore to make it happen in a natural, authentic, self-driven manner. Yes, it happens. Yes, it’s a topic that worries me, because we are then running the risk of commoditising our very own online presence(s). And what for? Is it worth it? Probably not. Have we forgotten that with social networking for business we are all in it for the long run? Versus just the quick win of a few hundred followers or a quick sell through that automated post? Where did we leave behind the social business transformation? For a good couple of years this is a topic that has started to concern me more and more, since I have begun to notice how plenty of times when you start engaging through online social networking tools, specially, on the Social Web, you bump into a whole bunch of interesting posts with relevant links, only to respond back, with the hope of starting off, or following, a conversation, and then to find out that no-one is at the other end, after all. In fact, they have all left and they have just got bots / machines doing the work for them. Pretty much like we have been doing with email for a good few years. And just like we commoditised email back in the day, it’s starting to look like we are commoditising social networking for business along the very same lines.  Where did we go wrong? Why do we have to keep up with that constant urge towards busyness (and bursting online activity) vs. pause, reflection and adding relevant value where it may apply into the overall conversation? Haven’t we learned from the recent past? I mean, haven’t we learned that social networking tools are just not another marketing channel, but purely a conversation amongst peers on a common interest and with a strong urge to connect further along? Have we forgotten how for a conversation to take place out there in digital channels both parties need to be present and for real, like the authentic you and your thoughts, versus just another bot doing the work for you? And that if one of the two parties is not there, for whatever the reason, there is nothing wrong with that? It’s part of your overall digital footprint that we seem to keep forgetting about time and time again, but both providing value and being silent are two sides of the same coin, that is, you, that we all take and accept gladly. Thus why do we keep it up? It’s just unsustainable, rather insane and perhaps a bit tad disappointing that whenever you decide to participate in online conversations because you feel  that people are there sharing along, you find out they left the building long while ago!  I am surely glad I am not the only one thinking about this relevant and important topic, specially, from the perspective that once we may have industrialised social networking I suspect it will be just too late to revert back. Mike Allton shares similar reflections on a rather interesting article under the suggestive heading of "How to Destroy Your Social Media Credibility through Automation". An article that I can certainly recommend and which keeps reminding me as well how silly such automation can well be for a specific brand (And that includes your own personal brand for that matter) when you have got an automated digital presence and all of a sudden a global event (Specially, if it is an extreme negative) changes the whole game on what you have been trying to share out there, and portrait, when you are gone, but that everyone else can see the true, harsh reality: it’s no longer the authentic you and your messages, but those of a bot which schedules posts to show up on whatever the frequency. Now, this has also been a topic that has been in my mind over the last few weeks, specially, when I moved into a new job inside IBM that has provoked a shift of focus from external interactions into internal ones mainly. During all of this time I have been thinking hard about what I would want to do, whether I would want to automate part of my digital external footprint, or just disappear into thin air with that new focus area of behind the firewall interactions. It’s not an easy one, for sure, because in most cases people expect you to be out there, and, if you aren’t, things aren’t going to be the same anymore. It’s starting to look like if you are not out there, online, sharing along, whatever that may well be, you are no longer worth it, because you won’t be showing up in their streams as often as you are doing nowadays. Have you ever felt that feeling of abandonment? It will come. In fact, that’s the main reason why I feel most knowledge workers have automated their own online social media presences; that is, to show they are still there, even just for the sake of it (never mind the value), even though they are not.   Is that what I want to do with my own digital footprint? To sacrifice it and automate it in such a way that whenever I would share something it would no longer be me, the real me? I know how this issue may not concern plenty of people out there about their own digital footprint, but it does concern me. Last thing that I would want to do is to lose that authenticity and honesty in terms of being you behind your online digital tools’ presence. I am actually thinking that at that point, I may as well just go dormant  and stop sharing altogether.  Thus while reflecting further along on this topic, I actually realised that I may not need to do anything that drastic altogether or, even, automate my way out of being an active 2.0 practitioner, specially, in the Social Web. And in this particular case it’s interesting to see how the clue was provided to me by one particular social software tool that most folks still keep being rather keen on terminating it. Yes, of course, I am talking about blogging. I am talking about how blogging helps every knowledge worker out there to realise that in terms of social networking for business, we are all in it for the long run! And, as such, it’s ok, it’s actually, advisable, to take time off. To go for periods of silence where things happen around you, but that people still know you are there, even if remote. To go for that relatively short, or long, hiatus, where things take another course, where the focus shifts elsewhere because the job requires it to a certain extent.  The important thing is to always come back. To help people understand that while you may have been quiet sharing along those insights, opinions, conversations and what not, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are not reading or learning from them, along the way as a lurker. That’s what blogging is wonderful about. It allows you to have pause, to reflect on what really matters, and to shape up your own online digital footprint sharing what you feel provides the most business value in your interactions. Blogging lives on a different pace altogether and while this year, later on in December, I will be celebrating my 10th year blogging anniversary, I guess I still feel I’m just learning so much from that writing experience of one’s opinions and reflections that there is always something new out there. So much so that I am sure you may have noticed how I have become a little bit quieter, more than usual, in one of my Big Three social networking tools for business: Twitter, while I have kept up with the online interactions and exchange for the other two (IBM Connections and Google Plus). The blog is different, because it’s an integral part of me, it’s an extension of my brain, my thoughts, my experiences, my know-how, my digital self-being and, as such, it will always be there. However, just like some times in the recent past, I may take a few days off from blogging, I know I’ll always be coming back to it. And I am starting to think that this may well be the very same approach I will adopt for other social networking tools, where I will become a whole lot more focused, purposeful and meaningful on how I interact thinking that while keeping up a presence out there may well be rather good, I think I am going in for the long run, for sharing in smaller portions part of what’s in my mind at the time, but ensuring that it is me the one sharing it and not whatever the bot in place.  That’s part of the dialogue, the authenticity, and the brutal honesty to share across that while I am fully aware I will not be able to keep up with the same pace of interactions held online, externally, outside the firewall, like I have been doing in the last few years, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people can’t no longer find me. I’m there. I will be there. It’s just that I am thinking I’ll be focusing more on pausing, reading and reflecting on what other folks share across, and keep quiet myself unless I have got something really useful and valuable to share out there.  I guess you could call it an attempt to redefine your own online digital footprint and personal brand, when things at work take a radical shift towards behind the firewall interactions. Perhaps that’s indeed what I have been thinking about. And in terms of the choice I would go for that I feel would represent me better I am thinking that I prefer to go silent and learn from others reading along than to automate an online presence that I know won’t be fair to anyone out there anymore, including me, since you are probably going to expect me and yet I won’t be there. Well, I will be. But in a different shape. I will be reacting, I will be conversing and participating, but with pause, challenging myself on how I can keep up adding value, versus adding unnecessary noise and pollution to already existing digital channels that I am sure we all have been having enough with lately.  Thus if you see me going quiet for a relative period of time, don’t worry, I am not gone, I am not hiding, I am not giving up on my external social presence just like that. I am just listening and learning, from the lurker side of things, knowing that what I’m after is having that opportunity to continue build and nurture those personal online business relationships, but without industrialising it all, nevertheless still keeping up with that same authenticity, openness, transparency and engagement that I always thought was the best part of social networking tools. It’s just that this time around it’s becoming a whole lot more focused and on target of what I would want to do: keeping up with the learning curve of the networks I am part of by amplifying what I think provides value vs. just adding more unnecessary irrelevancy. I think I’m going to spare you all having to go through that. Something tells me that, in the long term, we will all be much better off … What do you think? Think automation of your own online digital presence has had a significant impact that you would want to share along with us? Has it helped you? Has it damaged the health and trust of your social networks? I would love to learn more what you think in the comments, please… Thanks for taking the time to share your experiences. As usual, they are *greatly* appreciated.

Wikis in plain English, another very good resource I found thanks to Frank Bradley. The video explains the use of a wiki in a very simple day to day real-life scenario.I'm currently working on how we can use the wiki in my team to leverage on and share product knowledge. We have a sizable team that is distributed across various locations, and I think it would be valuable if my team members could use the wiki and the forum to share knowledge across this globally distributed team. At the current stage, there are just a couple of designated people who update process and standards information on the wiki, and the knowledge there is limited only to these topics. The challenges I see though are:- Having people change their working style and go looking for information on the wiki or post queries into the forum. Currently, people are not used to visiting these sites as part of their day's work.- Deciding what kind of knowledge will benefit others, besides what we document and create for our customers, so as not to duplicate information.- Having people to be proactive enough to participate and share what they know. Currently, people seem to believe that only some folks should go out and update the wiki and they will just refer to it when needed.- Keeping information current at all times as when the product release date nears, people would be swamped with work and only be focused on finishing up their document/courses and closing all bugs.Generating Participation?Some points I gathered from Control and Community: A Case Study of Enterprise Wiki Usage are:Build a critical mass of contributors. Since the contributors are employed by the enterprise, it is possible to make the Wiki part of people’s responsibilities. At CorVu we found this to be imperative. Unlike a public Wiki (where there are many people who contribute huge amounts of time as a hobby), in a work context (where everyone is probably too busy already), this isn’t going to happen. So write it into job descriptions. Get managers to send emails to their staff saying that one hour a week should be spent writing up their knowledge on the Wiki. Arrange a seminar on how to use the system. Use the company newsletter to promote the value of the project.Build a critical mass of topics. To be used, the site must be useful. To generate traffic to the site, make the most frequently required information available on the Wiki first, and make the Wiki the only source for that information. In CorVu’s case, for example, one significant page stored the latest product release information. When any software version was moved from internal QA to Beta, or from Beta to General Release, this page was updated. Once people learn that the Wiki contains a lot of useful information they will look there for answers to start with rather than wasting someone else’s time by phoning or emailing questions.Send links rather than information. Set an expectation that when anyone is asked for some detailed information, the response should be a link to a Wiki page. If the information has not yet been Wiki-ized, don’t type a lengthy answer in an email; instead, spend an extra minute typing it into a Wiki page.Provide recognition and rewards. As with most Wikis, the best way to encourage participation in the long term is to ensure that the efforts of the contributors are valued. This is easier in team and enterprise Wikis than in public Wikis because the contributors are known. Wiki pages can indicate explicitly who the primary authors were. There can also be rewards within the enterprise beyond the boundaries of the Wiki. For instance, some employees may have components of their annual review linked to their involvement in Wikis.Please suggest what would be the ideal steps to have people adopt these social learning tools as part an parcel of their daily job.

Lately, I have been thinking quite a bit around the topic of Social / Open Business Transformation. Something completely different to what we may have experienced so far in the last three to four years on living social for the sake of social, which is perhaps what we pretty much keep seeing today all over the place. Instead, I keep pondering about how we can transform and redefine the way we do business through our day to day workflow(s) and if there is an idea that keeps coming back stronger by the day is that one of perhaps facilitating the transition from document-centric collaboration into a people-centric one. Essentially, making the successful transition from content is king to people AND their conversations are king. This whole reflection was triggered, once more, when earlier on today I bumped into this rather intriguing and refreshing article by Conor Neill under the heading "Amazon Staff Meetings: "No PowerPoint"" where it comments how Amazon apparently no longer advocates for PowerPoint-led meetings and instead they require people to read memos, while present at the meetings, as an opportunity to elaborate deeper thoughts and perhaps a bit more involvement from the meeting attendees themselves while going through a specific set of agenda items. Somehow I still feel that I’m missing something on that approach to transform how we work through the meetings we held till I eventually remembered this brilliant article by Aleh Cherp where he states what I think is the main problem with that document-centric computing we all seem to be very good at. To quote:  "Les Posen, a psychologist and the author of Presentation Magic recently hosted on MPU Episode 111 explained this point very well. He said that the presentations are becoming a de-personalized knowledge transfer tool, supposed to be used without seeing or listening to the presenter. Such presentations can be sent around so that even other people can speak to the same ‘powerpoints’. People become unnecessary. ‘Powerpoints’ become omnipresent and omnipotent. This is where the frontline of the battle is, not whether to choose Mac or PC but whether to respect your topic and your audience so highly as not to leave them to the mercy of power points." [Emphasis mine] How spot on! What a superb observation! Nothing more to add, really. This is exactly the point where plenty of our document-centric social collaboration keeps failing to deliver, time and time again, in terms of helping us out provoke that social / open business transformation we are all embarked on and where people are right at the centre of the equation, and very much needed, still. Apparently, it’s not happening, because we all keep being engaged on the influx of exchanging attachments, presentations, documents, spreadsheets, etc. that been sent around through either traditional tools like *cough* email *cough* or Instant Messaging or, even worse, through social file sharing services.  As such, it looks like we are ignoring people, but, most worrying, we are ignoring their conversations and their rapid, free access to information in order to make better decisions, without having to handle additional frictions. Have you measured the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours we spend every year just processing attachments or shared documents, when, for instance, we could have used that precious time for something much more relevant and insightful? Don’t worry, I know it’s just too mind-boggling to even think about that, but you know what I mean. Yes, indeed, "The root of suffering is attachment" - The Buddha, as my good friend, Prof. Paul Jones wonderfully stated a few days back. Now, imagine this, imagine that use case scenario where we obviously have the need to generate a specific piece of content and to share it with others. Imagine that instead of just trapping that knowledge inside a document-based format, which is always going to be tougher to process and digest accordingly, we actually decide to set it up out there, free from any restrictions or unnecessary frictions, through the use of social software tools like blogs, wikis, forums, activities, social bookmarks, and what not. Imagine if instead of being stuck trying to open up a document, you have its contents readily available on that one single pager (Or maybe two) and you would just need to do a single click, and you are there.  Imagine that. Just for a minute, and while you keep elaborating further up on that thought, let me tell you what would happen: people-centric computing (Or collaboration around and amongst people, for that matter). Indeed, people, all of a sudden, become the centre of attention. Specially, the conversations they are entertaining with other collaborators around that specific piece of content stored on a Web site (a blog post, a link, a wiki page, an activity) where all of a sudden knowledge transfer accelerates tremendously, where frictions are non-existent and where everyone participating from that set of interactions are on the same page. When was the last time that you had that happening around a document itself without wondering who may have the latest copy, or how many duplicates are out there, or who should be updating what content in that document based on the feedback scattered all over the place?  This is actually one of the many reasons why about two years ago I decided to declare war on document-centric computing, specially, for public speaking events when the output was going to be trapped in a file. Why should we? Why can’t we just elaborate on our thoughts through all of these powerful social collaboration tools that have got almost no friction in terms of helping accelerate our decision making process by not just having the right information at the right time, but also with the right audiences, i.e. your peers (colleagues, customers, or business partners) engaging on some meaningful conversations to get our work done.  Right there I was reminded about this brilliant quote from David Whyte, shared across by John Kellden over in Google Plus, which I thought was just right on the money, once again:  "You do not have a conversation to get work done; the conversation is the work" And in our social / open business transformation, that’s perhaps the main problem that we have in terms of why we may not have moved from Social into Open, from Social into Work, from Social documents into People.  Fortunately, this one is an easy one to address. At least, I think so. People keep saying that practitioners who would want to shine and thrive around Social / Open Business need to put together a good bunch of relevant and insightful use cases that would help them progress further with that transformation. Well, next time that you are required, or requested to trap your own knowledge into a file, think about it twice. Think about how perhaps you could achieve that very same goal through the use of a blog post, or a microblog entry, or a wiki page, or just an activity. Whatever. Just think that next time that someone asks you to document something, you may as well come back stating that, instead, you want to have a conversation about a post you shared online in your favourite social networking space for business.  Chances are that, right there, without you not knowing, you may have just gotten started with your own Social / Open Business Transformation. One that would affect not just your day to day work interactions, but also those from those knowledge workers around you. And that’s when things would get really interesting, because we would then finally be able to confirm that that transformation happens through our very own behaviours and mindset, which is what open business is all about. The technology, finally, will become what it should have been all along: an enabler to facilitate conversations amongst knowledge workers to get that activity, that ask, done in a timely and effective manner. That doesn’t seem to be that difficult, don’t you think? Thus what are you waiting for to put together that blog post or that other wiki page? 

I've found a lot of useful blogs on what constitutes audience analysis and the whys and hows of audience analysis. So, I choose not to repeat these points as they have been well explained. What I will do instead is look at it from a bigger perspective and drill down to how it relates to the rest of the process of developing a course.At a high level, audience analysis needs to be done for any product or service that you create or provide. Let's say you make a product. In order for the product to be successful, you would have to:Ensure that the product is simple and easy to use, like limits the user to have to fill just one page with customer information and submit, and the system takes care of the rest.Simplifies and accurately addresses a problem that a user has, like helps a user to effectively take and manage orders.The question is, how would you do any of the above? The answer; by knowing the user who is your audience!Reinforcing why audience analysis?Any requirement for either training, documentation or even the creation of a product is driven by audiences. If audiences demand something, only then do you plan to initiate the creation of a product or plan to provide a service. That is why these days we make customer-centric processes, user-centric user interfaces and learner-centric courses. It is simple logic actually; if one cannot use your product, it wont sell; if you don't provide requisite training and documentation, people won't be able to use the product properly, and hence won't buy it; if your product is functionality heavy and has fantastic features, but the interface is too complex, again people won't buy it! Like it or not, users drive needs; so you need to know your audience and perform audience analysis.Knowing your audience?Knowing your audience means you should know who the prospective users of your product or service are and what tasks they typically perform. I am developing a social networking tool for people in general, or, I'm designing a social networking tool to help connect professionals within my organization. In each case, the choice of the features I provide would be customized to each kind of audience. In the former case, I may provide a lot of personal information sharing options like, photos, blogs, game applications, etc. In the latter case, I may not provide photo sharing, but idea and knowledge sharing within the organization, professional groups, providing recommendations/appreciation for work done, etc. Though the overall concept of connecting with people would be the same, there would be specific customizations that would address personal or professional requirements in each case. To summarize you need to know:Who is the audience?What tasks they perform as part of their job?What skills do they need to posses? Prior Knowledge?If an individual has to use your product, what are the basic skills they need to posses? In our example, they may need to be familiar with browsing and using internet applications on a given platform like Windows, Mac, etc.What skills the audience needs to posses?Their prior knowledge of using similar tools?Audience demographics? It is important to know the age group and background of the audience; is your audience an adult, a teenager or a child? Knowing the target age group that your audience falls into, is an important piece of information that drives many requirements like, your user interface, the contents of your product/tool, or even the level complexity.Working conditions?Working conditions that the audience is subject to like if he works in shifts or the hardware and software the audience typically uses. If your audience is a system administrator, he would typically work in shifts and have access to the servers in the organization, etc. This information helps you know what your assumptions could be; like a system administrator would know the basics of installing and configuring servers, and also be familiar with concepts related to servers like clustering, etc.Target devices used?The devices from which your product, service, course or documentation be accessed like computers, handhelds, etc. This helps you plan your delivery mode and technology to use to develop your product or service.Audience Level?Additionally, it helps to know if your audience is a beginner or an expert in using similar products or services.Developing your course?Coming back to developing a course, it is only after you collect and analyze the information that you can come to your list of tasks. For example, you now know the following things about your learner:Here's a sample template you can use.So, you can now make a list of the tasks that you need to teach:- Installing and configuring the ABC product.- Authenticating and authorizing users using ABC product.- Managing user credentials.- Controlling access to devices and hardware.There's your task list and now and you can now begin your task analysis. That's another topic I will cover. Till then please let me know your comments on this post.

I am not too sure whether meetings lower our IQ or whether they make us all more stupid, as my good friend Stowe Boyd reflected on a recent blog post, but I can certainly confirm they do take a toll on your own productivity. Specially, when those meetings are not set up by you, but by everyone else, and therefore making you lose the control, once again, in terms of one of the most precious things all of us, knowledge workers, have that we don’t seem to treasure well enough: Time. Attention management, indeed, is the new currency and it looks like meetings want to keep having that special place in our day to day workload in terms of grabbing most of it: our attention, that is. But perhaps enough is enough. Just like 5 years ago I started challenging the status quo of corporate email with the "A World Without eMail" movement, I think this week it’s a good time to start its follow-up: Life Without Meetings.  I still haven’t settled up on picking up the hashtag I will be using from here onwards to identify the movement (More than happy to read suggestions in the comments, please!), but I am certainly more than willing to getting started with this new initiative, in terms of wanting to improve my own productivity by what appears to be, right now, my biggest time sink while at work: meetings, specially remote meetings. And here is the funny thing. You may be thinking that one of the disadvantages of having moved into this new job as Lead Social Business Enabler at IBM is that I basically spend far too much time meeting up with my new team. Well, that’s not really accurate.  I do meet up with my team, don’t take me wrong, and I enjoy those meetings since they only happen a couple of times here and there per week. In fact, if I were to count the hours I spend on those team meetings it would be probably about 5 to 7 hours per week, which doesn’t sound too bad if I consider the 40 hours of work. Indeed, the issue is not the meetings I have with my immediate team colleagues, but the meetings provoked by everyone else. Specially, from other teams, in other organisations and business units, in other projects with their own agenda, never minding your own. And in this case that is when I do have an issue, because, amongst several other things, they are inconsiderate enough to not be aware of your own work, your own agenda, time, availability and willingness to participate in their projects.  My good friend Euan Semple pretty much nailed it on what the main issue is in a recent tweet that he shared across:    I never use those meeting invite thingies because having a diary full of things that other people are in control of fills me with horror! — Euan Semple (@euan) April 18, 2013 If you notice, there are plenty of similarities with some of the various different issues that I have highlighted over the last few years in terms of how we keep abusing email through our bad habits and behaviours in a successful effort to try to kill each other’s productivity. Well, apparently, the same thing happens with meetings. Or, perhaps not.  When I was in my previous project I used to average about 10 to 15 hours of meetings per week. Nowadays I am doing between 25 to 30 hours of meetings. About 5 to 7 hours of those are dedicated to team meetings and the rest are remote ones solicited by other teams that want to abuse and take advantage of my reduced attention management span to sneak in. And over the last couple of weeks I am starting to think that the main reason why knowledge workers seem to have an obsession with hosting meetings (Specially, back to back, or what I have learned to call very descriptively as meetings galore) is not that necessarily down to work, but perhaps to a couple of other reasons:  If you are in the office, meetings are usually put together because you want to see people face to face and play the corresponding political, empowerment and bullying games that you have been taught about really well over the course of time.  If you are working remotely, like from your home office, or at a customer site, or while travelling, the main reason why people host those remote meetings is because (I know I am going to be very blunt and rather bold on this one, so bear with me) people feel lonely at work, isolated, disengaged with what happens "at the office", distrusted, disempowered because they are just not there and therefore they provoke those meetings so they can have a good chance at disrupting that and show that they, too, count! Of course, they do. We all do. But there are different ways of showing and demonstrating that. And perhaps meetings are not the best option anymore. We, human beings, have been stuck in meetings for thousands of years I would think and if you come to consider the huge amount of time we have wasted over the course of time for those meetings, think now about the possibilities and the potential of what we would have done with all of that extra time.  There have been several attempts to try and fix the way we host and conduct meetings in an effort to make them effective. I am sure you, too, may have got your own hints and tips on how to make them work, and I would love to read some more about it in the comments, so feel free to share your best tips. Lately, I am playing myself with a couple of options: creating buffers, participate in meetings no longer than 30 minutes and be ruthless in terms of how many meetings I can participate in during the course of a working day. In my case I set that threshold in 4 hours of meetings per day. Maximum (with the odd exception here and there, of course).  But, apparently, that doesn’t seem to work very well, because I still spend between 25 to 30 hours of meetings per week. Last week, for instance, 26.75 hours were just spent on conference calls participating and hosting meetings. Not good enough, I am afraid. And not good enough not because the meetings may have been rather helpful and useful overall, which they were, but more from the perspective that vast majority of them did *not* need to take place, since we could carry out the work offline and rather effectively.  And this is where I am going to jump in and kick off that movement of "Life Without Meetings". Because all along I have felt that the vast majority of meetings wouldn’t need to take place if knowledge workers would make a much more effective use of social networking tools for business. You know, All Hands Meetings, Cadence Calls, Weekly Team Meetings, Status Project Reports, Monthly Calls and what not can eventually be conducted and rather effectively through various different social technologies.  Never mind as well how by shifting gears and moving the interactions of those meetings into social networking tools we would have the opportunity to get rid of the two main reasons I mentioned above as to why we are so obsessed with hosting meetings at the moment. You see? We don’t need so show up at meetings to play those political, empowerment and bullying games. We have got work to do. By relying (heavily) on social software tools, if anything, we would never have that strong feeling of being isolated, or ignored, or neglected, as remote employees. Quite the opposite. If there is anything that social networking shines and thrives at is helping us all stay connected, regardless of where we may well be in the world. And that’s the main reason why I am now ready to kick off this particular initiative where over the course of time I have decided to strive for that goal of seeing the number of meetings I participate in go down to those levels of 10 to 15 hours per week. If I can hit 10 or less, even better. But we have got to get started somewhere, don’t you think? And that’s why from here onwards, and every now and then, depending on the frequency, I will be blogging about different techniques knowledge workers can put in practice to reduce the amount of time they spend in meetings, so that they can carry on with their work. And perhaps I’ll kick things off with a bold statement in terms of sharing with everyone what meetings, to me, should be all about, whether face to face or remote ones: decision making. Anything else, it’s just a waste of time, resources and precious talent that could be working on something much more interesting, relevant, purposeful and meaningful altogether.  So, there! I said it. If you come to think about it, we have spent already a huge amount of time on theorising how we could improve the way we host, both online remote meetings and face to face ones. Everyone seems to have an opinion, or an infographic, as to how to make them better. And that’s just a wonderful thing. I guess what we would need to do next, eventually, is acknowledge that it’s a good time now for action to start re-thinking how we would want to keep hosting and conducting meetings in an effective manner, instead of thinking they are one of most poignant productivity drains within the corporate world. We already know that. Let’s move on. It’s time to roll up our sleeves, get down to work and change the way we get work done through meetings by realising that work does *not* happen when we meet. So how much time do we want to keep wasting away drifting our attention to them instead of figuring out perhaps different ways, methods, techniques of how social / open business tools can help us re-gain our productivity back.  In the recent past, we have already done it for email, so there is no reason, perhaps not even an excuse anymore, why we couldn’t do the same thing for meetings and shape them up the way we would want them to by asking perhaps the first initial key question: What’s the purpose of the meeting? How are you planning on achieving that purpose, and, most importantly, can social technologies help achieve the same goals? Because if they do, there is no need to conduct that meeting any longer. We would then have to redefine again the true meaning of meetings, because the current one is already obsolete, and utterly broken, to match today’s complex collaborative and open knowledge sharing working environment. So, we better get our hands dirty and get down to business. It’s time for us all, knowledge workers, to take back responsibility, buckle up and own them again, as Seth Godin brilliantly quoted not long ago:  "Somewhere along the way, meetings changed into events where we wait for someone to take responsibility (while everyone else dives for cover). How would you do it differently if the building were burning down? Because it is." That’s it! Finally, an Open Business without meetings. I am game! … And you?

Social learning is known by many names - social learning, collaborative learning or informal learning. For many years we considered formal training to be the only way to make people learn. Formal training required people to be present all at one location. As technologies evolved, people could remotely hear and speak to a teacher in a classroom from any location. But these options were still quite expensive. Then elearning came by and we had people making loads of self-paced courses. Somehow even this seemed insufficient after some time and people started exploring blended-learning strategies. There was a need to provide more support and information to people on-the-job. As people kept looking for new ways of teaching and learning they realized that that learning happens in other ways too. You learn when you speak to like-minded people and people sharing similar interests and professions.During this time social networking tools came by and people found new ways of connecting with each other. Meeting and connecting with people was made so easy! Then Wikipedia emerged, discussion groups and forums were largely being used to share information and resolve on-the-job problems. Google became the largest learning resource due to its super-fast search capabilities. It was observed that when people were desperately searching for solutions and more information on subjects, they proactively searched the Internet and found all relevant resources and learned more about their subject of interest and also resolved problems with the knowledge gained.Social networking tools gave people opportunities to connect with people sharing similar interests and professions. Groups of people sharing common interests or a profession irrespective of their geographical location are termed as communities. Now, it was possible to discuss and share knowledge and learn a lot more from the other person's experiences. This process of proactively searching for information and shaping it into a form that makes sense for a situation is termed as informal learning or personal knowledge management (PKM). So, the best ways today of learning beyond what you receive from formal training is to reach out to others and learn from their experiences to solve real-world day-to-day problems. Experienced professionals today don't need spoon-feeding but quick solutions to problems. They are self-directed learners and are motivated to define their own learning paths and manage their learning resources using social bookmarking tools and advanced search engines. We can leverage on social networking tools to drive social learning in our organizations. Using social learning will help people grow in their domain knowledge, problem-solving abilities and make the process of communication much faster. People will be able to create best practices, learn from sharing experiences and not waste time trying to reinvent the wheel. Eventually, it will help improve their productivity at work. The goals social learning tries to achieve are:Connect people who share a common interest and provide a platform to share ideas and experiences.Serve as a knowledge base for searching solutions to problems that people have already faced.Sharing knowledge about specific domains among a large groups who are distributed in geographically different locations. Give learners the flexibility to learn in their own means, define their own learning path and choose resources that will help them learn more.Keep learners constantly motivated as they share and exchange information and get recognized for their knowledge and contribution to the community.It is also important to know that it takes a while to adopt and change your working style and use social learning as part of your regular job. Also, understanding the mental process of learning in case of social learning is an interesting study and the article on when we should collaborate on the Anecdote site is really an interesting read. Following this you may have more questions on implementing collaborative learning in organizations and measuring the benefits of social learning.