Why Your Company Should Work at Play

Why do our organizations tend to be so sober and serious? With how many people at your company would you feel comfortable acting a bit silly or sharing your biggest dreams and boldest ideas? What happens to us, as we journey through adolescence and adulthood that makes us less inclined to play?

Richard Florida was among the first to explicitly point out the link between creativity and economic success in his books on the Creative Class. (He has a fantastic twitter stream which you can follow here.)

My own employment experience tells me that play in the workplace has a huge impact on employee morale and trust levels, as well as customer loyalty (who doesn’t want to be part of something fun?).  Some of my closest friends were originally co-workers at this “playful” company, which has repeat customers who have been around as long as seventy or eighty years.

The other day, I came across this TED Talk from Tim Brown, co-founder of IDEO, on the link between play and creativity. It’s spot-on and full of insights. Please do watch. I’d love to hear your comments.

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My Big Technology Decision

I gave in.  Finally.  I moved my blog to WordPress.

LOGISTICAL SIDE NOTE:  If you read/subscribe to my blog, DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING!  The zapaterismo.com domain and feedburner feed are now both mapped to WordPress, so 99% of you should not have to do a thing.  BUT, if you have issues, please let me know.

I had checked out WordPress several months ago, to see how it differed from Typepad, which I had been using as my blogging platform.  Not only is it far cheaper, but the functionality by and large outpaces what Typepad currently offers.

But as I thought about the decision to move over, I tried not to be swayed solely by the price tag and the fancy bells and whistles.  Instead, trying to practice what I preach to potential HR technology buyers, I thought long and hard about the following:

1. What do I hope to accomplish through blogging? What will this technology enable?

For me, blogging is primarily about two things

1.) Recording my quasi-random thoughts, ideas, and commentary on life, articles, books, etc.

2) Building relationships

Based on that, what features, functions, and other criteria are most critical to me as a buyer?

This led me to:

1.)  Openness and Integration! That is, easy-to-use, built in integration with major content/news providers and social bookmarking sites.  I don’t want to have to log into the blog portal every time I want to post, nor do I want to spend 25% of my blogging time building hyperlinks and embedding images/video.  Along the same lines, I often want to both blog something AND bookmark it, and when I can’t do both simultaneously, I often end up doing only one OR the other, either because of laziness or forgetfulness.

2.) Integration (and built-in Social Networking)! I want to be able to easily share my posts with communities that I’m aware of and actively participate in (e.g., Twitter), as well as with those I don’t even know about yet.  In other words, I want the tool to help me and my ideas find people who might share my interests and thinking.

3.) Integration and Portability!  This was simply table stakes.  I needed to be able to move my posts, domain, and subscribers over with as little effort as possible.  Fortunately, BECAUSE I was using my personal domain and a third-party tool for feeds (Feedburner) this was a non-issue.  Also, both Typepad and WordPress allow you to import and export posts, which made porting content a snap.

Here was my basic analysis:

WordPress facilitates the first two, which were most important to me, much better than Typepad.  While both platforms offer built-in integration with a number of mainstream content sharing and bookmarking sites (e.g., Twitter, Youtube, Flickr, Diigo, etc.), WordPress does two things that Typepad has been slow to adopt:

1.  WordPress makes it much easier to initiate a blog post from anywhere, without having to log into the application, using the PressThis bookmarklet. The pop-up saves the link and allows you to publish immediately or save a draft.

2. WordPress facilitates the process of finding other people and blogs by giving you the ability to do things like subscribe to tags and read random posts from other WordPress users.

So what did I learn? Two very basic lessons:

For one, you can’t thoroughly define your functionality requirements if you don’t know what’s out there.  So focus first and foremost on what you’re trying to accomplish, which you usually can define.  For example, WordPress’s built-in social networking wasn’t something I was looking for because I didn’t know it existed.  But it significantly impacted my decision because it fit with my “what I want to accomplish” criteria.

Secondly, it reiterated my belief in the three I’s –  Integration, Integration, Integration.  No single vendor can give you all the functionality you want within the four walls of their system, ESPECIALLY in our increasingly networked world.  The good ones help you get value out of their application anyway.

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Enterprise Search Analytics and Talent Management

ZDNet wrote up a nice review of Wolfram/Alpha's demo of their new search engine at Harvard recently.

The demo was webcast and a recording can be found here.

What's it mean for HR and talent management?  A lot, I think. One of the next big moves as far as talent management technology goes – a move that has already begun – revolves around the ability to easily identify experts/expertise within the enterprise. It's the confluence of knowledge and talent management via the recongition that PEOPLE and not documents are the primary keepers of knowledge in our companies.

Most vendors are currently approaching this through profile searches, which is valuable but limited in its power and usefulness.

The Wolfram/Alpha search engine on the other hand, and other tools like it, could find some unique applications in our companies as means by which to much more comprehensively aggregate and present expertise to searchers.  Depending on what it is allowed to crawl (Is email off-limits? How about phone conversations?), these tools could become very powerful means for serving up social links and just-in-time knowledge on the proverbial silver platter.

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If you only read one article all week…

…Let it be this one! 

Link to article

Ellen McGirt is an outstanding staff writer for Fast Company, and she has done a wonderful job in this article of making the business rationale for enterprise 2.0 come to life.

Two things that stood out to me in reading this article - 

1. The very explicit recognition that getting companies to successfully use web 2.0 in an enterprise setting requires a great deal of consulting support.  The cultural/organizational and business process changes needed are enormous, and Cisco is not shy about that fact that they are positioning themselves to capitalize on that need by using their own company as a testing ground. Watch out IBM and Accenture! 
2. Similarly, it's difficult to make the business case for web 2.0 right now (and will be increasingly difficult as the recession deepens) because we collectively lack a compelling success story. People hardly know what web 2.0 technologies are capable of, let alone how to derive value from them. Cisco can no doubt speak to the gains they've made over the last seven years and the journey that has brought them this far. Telling that story publicly could be critical to broadening adoption of web 2.0 in the future (in much the same way GE's six sigma story gave birth to a trend).

There is a lot of great stuff in here that ties in to HR more traditionally, as well, but I'll let you discover that for yourself.

As a closing comment, I'll just say that, from the standpoint of talent management more narrowly, I see this Cisco example as a great counter to the more traditional approach to managing talent that most HR technologies today are built to support.  The distinction is one of helping management identify talent versus enabling people to find one another so that knowledge/capability can be leveraged as needed.  While the first may always be necessary and more comfortable for some organizations, the latter will be a requisite step in truly harnessing the potential of the knowledge worker.

Fun stuff!  Enjoy the article.

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Shift Happens

A friend of mine who teaches journalism at Harvard posted this video on Facebook the other day (a great testimony to the truths found in the video itself).  I found it so compelling I wanted to share it with the rest of you.

My favorite line…

“If MySpace were a country… it would be the eight largest in the world.”

If what’s happening on the internet is any indication of the world to come, there is no doubt that our companies are falling way behind.

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A much needed distraction

I just about fell over the other day when I realized it had been nearly three weeks since I last posted. I haven't neglected the blog this badly since probably Christmas. But that also means that I was due for my bi-annual break from writing.

Anyhow, I have a few posts teed up now, and so you should be seeing more from me shortly, despite a crazy work and home life and, as of yesterday, a broken finger.

In the meantime, the Memorial Day holiday weekend offered a much needed distraction from the world of talent management that initially came in the form of the movie, "Who Killed the Electric Car?"

While I have little stake in knowing who is the guilty party, the movie was eye-opening for me in terms of understanding just how viable and almost ideal electric cars are as an alternative source of mobility. 

In fact, considering the outlook on the price of oil and the fact that real and affordable alternatives are several years out, the movie inspired me to look into converting my own car to electric. After watching the youtube video of one EV (electric vehicle) convert permanently removing the gas tank from his car, my wife was sold on the idea and a book was on the way.  I'll be sure to let you know if/when I pursue it seriously.

In the meantime, enjoy this video testimony to a life sans fossil fuels.

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Innovating at the Bottom of the Pyramid

I want to extend a hat tip to Jon Ingham for picking up on this fabulous article from C.K. Prahalad.

Prahalad is a Professor of Corporate Strategy at the Ross School of Business at the Univ of Michigan.  He, along with Gary Hamel, is responsible for the concept of Core Competence, and independently he has authored a number of articles and a book revolving around how to serve the poorest of the world’s poor while still making a handsome profit. 

It’s inspiring work – who wouldn’t want to make lots of money and change the world for the better in the process?! – and it’s great business sense considering the sheer numbers and aggregate spending power of that vastly underserved demographic.

Please take a read.   Article

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Fun web 2.0 findings

Some interesting and fun new web 2.0 apps worth checking out.

Flock – The web browser for the uber-connected.  Look for this to surpass IE, Firefox, and others among the most plugged-in generations. The functionality is quite impressive for someone who spends ridiculous amounts of time online, browsing, sharing, and blogging.  I’ve thought about switching myself.

Jumpcut – Taking video sharing to the next level. Think GarageBand for video.

Pipes – For those of us who want our content served up on a silver platter, this nice Yahoo tool allows us to build custom feeds.  Wonderful concept but still too complex for the lay person to use.

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The Potential of Open Source Learning

Now I’m really reaching back (2006!!), but I’m having a wonderful time exploring the TED Talks series and this one is just way too compelling to not share. It’s a bit long, but Richard Baraniuk has conceived something truly valuable and unique with Connexions.  Ultimately much more powerful than a $100 laptop and absolutely in tune with the challenges and controversies surrounding socioeconomic development initiatives.

As he notes, MIT is doing some wonderful things in this area, as well, with MIT OpenCourseWare.  I’m currently taking one of Eric Von Hippel’s (who, by the way, also offers a plethora of free materials on his own site) courses, complete with recorded lectures.

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Wild Predictions of Future Acquisitions

With Web 2.0 and social networking being all the rage, you’re starting to see more vendors like SuccessFactors and Taleo beginning to use their platforms for building corporate social networks.

I say this a bit cynically, but I do think it makes great sense and I see enormous value in turning HR platforms into collaboration applications. 

After all, employee data tables and internal resumes (including competencies, skills, experiences, etc) essentially provide the same content that you would be asked to offer upon opening a Facebook or MySpace account, so HR systems are already halfway there. 

Plus, by morphing a mundane and static HR system into something much more dynamic and valuable on an everyday basis, you drive greater adoption (a huge challenge for HR technology vendors) and make the application a whole lot stickier.  And there are some awesome potential derivative benefits (in violent agreement with Jason Corsello here). 

All in all, a great strategy .

Again, vendors that have already adopted web 2.0 tactics have a clear head start here.  But what about those that that haven’t?  Might companies like Pringo provide tempting bait?

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