JSB on social media, the cloud and the true purpose of business

John Seeley Brown (JSB) is a leading researcher, educator and writer on topics related to the organizational structures and technology that promote radical innovation. In  today’s HBR article he explains that it’s much easier now for new ideas to come from “the edge,” or outside of the core business. In previous decades it was too expensive to set up the infrastructure to pursue radical business ideas. Today, cloud technology makes it very inexpensive to develop, prototype and pilot them. What’s more, social media can provide the personal relationships at the edge of organizations, that is outside of the core operations they currently depend on for profits and revenue.

I believe that social media will help create an ecosystem of edge organizations and their parent companies. To get a sense of what this might look like, think of IBM’s Jams platform for collaborative innovation. This evolution in the way companies innovate reflects a shift in nothing less than the purpose of the firm. The classical view is that the firm exists to minimize transaction costs. But John Hagel and I suspect that the firm has a new purpose — namely, to promote the development of talents and capabilities and thereby attract and retain the best in the ongoing wars for talent, and at the same time create an entrepreneurial culture that nurtures employees’ questing and connecting dispositions.

The purpose of a business is not narrowly economic, JSB maintains. Rather, it is to foster human creativity and connections. And technology is what makes those human connections possible. .

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The problem with very smart people

Then I read “Teaching Smart People How To Learn,” which argued trenchantly and compellingly that really smart people have the hardest time learning. They are so very smart that they are also very “brittle,” to use Argyris’s descriptor. When something goes wrong, rather than reflect on what they might have done to contribute to the error, they look entirely outside themselves for the causes and blame outside forces — irrational clients, impossible time pressure, lack of adequate resources, shifts beyond their control. Rather than learn from error, they doom themselves to repeat them.
Before reading the article, I would have been inclined to finish that last sentence with “despite being so very smart.” After the article, my conclusion was “because they are so very smart.”

— Roger Martin, Dean, Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto

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How recruiters use social networks to screen candidates

A survey of 300 professional recruiters finds that about two-thirds have hired or rejected a candidate based on what they have seen on social networking sites. Gaining a positive impression of the candidate’s personality and organizational fit is the leading reason for hiring. Seeing that they lied about credentials is the leading reason for rejection. 

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Marissa Mayer's amazing talent network

For the past decade, Mayer, now the CEO of Yahoo, has been the doyen of a collection of some of the most talented young engineers and product managers in all of technology. These are the hand-selected prime talents of an accelerated leadership program at Google called Associate Product Manager.  Via wired.com

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Enterprise Social Collaboration: Building A 'People Cloud' - The BrainYard

Where other enterprise social networks start in sales and marketing, Saba Software starts with people-centric functions.

Social networking is about people, and Saba Software figures it ought to have the inside track on enterprise social networking, because Saba knows people. Or, more specifically, it knows employees—particularly their professional expertise and training needs.

Enterprise vendors are converging on a vision of social networking inside the enterprise from several different directions. Salesforce.com’s starting point for Chatter is enabling salespeople and service and support representatives to talk about customers. Jive Software’s first products were focused on managing external customer communities; its inside the firewall social networks also tend to be biased towards sales and marketing. Cisco and IBM are more likely to frame the conversation in terms of unified communication and collaboration, where social media is just one more means of connecting people in addition to voice video and email. Saba is approaching the market from its base in online training, learning management, talent management, and performance management.

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Want To Keep (And Motivate) Your Best Employees? It’s Not About The Money | Fast Company Anita* was a model employee. As CEO of my previous tech company, I had hired her to take charge of our bookkeeping and administrative affairs. When Anita came aboard, I asked what she wanted in order to feel fulfilled at work. “Harish, I want to do such a great job that you’ll want to pay me a six-figure salary and feel great about it.” This was a bit of a stretch—it was hard for me to conceive of bookkeeping as a six-figure position. After doing the math, I saw how with the right mix of hard work from Anita and better systems, she could indeed earn a justifiable six-figure salary. I wrote a work-incentive plan that had Anita making her target salary after 18 months, if she hit the right benchmarks. “You’ll be worth every penny if you make these goals,” I told her. I gave her a lot of autonomy and leverage to get her work done well. Anita exceeded expectations, and hit every one of her targets within 14 months instead of 18, earning the six-figure salary she richly deserved. A success story, right?

Want To Keep (And Motivate) Your Best Employees? It’s Not About The Money | Fast Company

Anita* was a model employee. As CEO of my previous tech company, I had hired her to take charge of our bookkeeping and administrative affairs. When Anita came aboard, I asked what she wanted in order to feel fulfilled at work. “Harish, I want to do such a great job that you’ll want to pay me a six-figure salary and feel great about it.” This was a bit of a stretch—it was hard for me to conceive of bookkeeping as a six-figure position. After doing the math, I saw how with the right mix of hard work from Anita and better systems, she could indeed earn a justifiable six-figure salary. I wrote a work-incentive plan that had Anita making her target salary after 18 months, if she hit the right benchmarks. “You’ll be worth every penny if you make these goals,” I told her. I gave her a lot of autonomy and leverage to get her work done well. Anita exceeded expectations, and hit every one of her targets within 14 months instead of 18, earning the six-figure salary she richly deserved. A success story, right?

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Video interviewing platform simplifies recruitment process Recruitment processes can be long and inconvenient for both employer and candidate. Whether it’s trawling through piles of applications or organizing hectic diaries and travel arrangements to schedule interviews, California-based Ovia believe their video interviewing platform offers a solution. READ MORE… via springwise:

Video interviewing platform simplifies recruitment process

Recruitment processes can be long and inconvenient for both employer and candidate. Whether it’s trawling through piles of applications or organizing hectic diaries and travel arrangements to schedule interviews, California-based Ovia believe their video interviewing platform offers a solution. READ MORE…

via springwise:

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Ad Hoc Talent Networks – Neil Perkin

The future of work will be based on much more fluid and short-lived working arrangements, as Neil Perkin points out:

Relentless digitisation and the recession have combined to create an environment in which the value of much of what we have known is depreciating, and which increasingly requires a culture and a pace of innovation that is consistent with start-ups. Organisational value is shifting from protecting knowledge assets, to encouraging knowledge flow. […] New models are springing up that follow a philosophy where access trumps ownership. Assets are increasingly about relationships.

Read about it at the Podio blog.

via stoweboyd:

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CEOs for Cities Announces the Talent Dividend Prize Source: Next American City Cities across the nation are in a brutal race to produce jobs and get people back to work, while slashing municipal budgets to match plunging tax revenues. Every mayor is expected to have a three-point plan that is the magic elixir for economic development, usually headlined by “Attract new industry.” Bagging the buffalo may sound like a good plan. We can all hope for the best. But hope is not a strategy. What ought to headline every local economic development plan is not sexy. It doesn’t generate headlines. No consultant can trademark it. But it is the one strategy that is a sure winner, and it is a strategy that makes not just one city richer but all of America richer. The strategy? Increase college attainment rates. (I told you it wasn’t sexy.) Here’s why it works. It turns out that 58 percent of any city’s success as measured by per capita income can be explained by the percentage of college graduates in its population. (And that’s conservative. Some economists calculate the impact at 80 percent.) Why? Because every one percentage point increase in college attainment is associated with an increase of $763 in per capita income. That’s not just a result of moving a certain number of people over the four-year college finish line, but of shifting the entire education distribution curve forward. Increasing college attainment rates isn’t easy. But it is easier than we think. It turns out that millions of Americans started college. They raised their hands and said, “I want to go to college.” They got in to college. They paid for classes. They earned college credits. They just didn’t finish. And finishing is what counts. Amazingly, even in this lousy economy, Americans with college degrees have an unemployment rate that is almost half the rate of those who attended but did not complete college. The median annual salary for a college graduate is $20,000 more a year than someone who started college but didn’t finish. So the financial impact finishing college has on families and on cities is significant. That’s why CEOs for Cities, with the support of the Kresge Foundation and Lumina Foundation for Education, is launching a $1 million prize competition today to drive increased degree attainment in America’s major metro areas.  The Talent Dividend Prize will be awarded to the metropolitan area with the greatest increase in the number of post-secondary degrees granted per capita over a four-year period.  via smartercities:

CEOs for Cities Announces the Talent Dividend Prize

Source: Next American City

Cities across the nation are in a brutal race to produce jobs and get people back to work, while slashing municipal budgets to match plunging tax revenues.

Every mayor is expected to have a three-point plan that is the magic elixir for economic development, usually headlined by “Attract new industry.”

Bagging the buffalo may sound like a good plan. We can all hope for the best. But hope is not a strategy.

What ought to headline every local economic development plan is not sexy. It doesn’t generate headlines. No consultant can trademark it. But it is the one strategy that is a sure winner, and it is a strategy that makes not just one city richer but all of America richer.

The strategy? Increase college attainment rates.

(I told you it wasn’t sexy.)

Here’s why it works. It turns out that 58 percent of any city’s success as measured by per capita income can be explained by the percentage of college graduates in its population. (And that’s conservative. Some economists calculate the impact at 80 percent.)

Why? Because every one percentage point increase in college attainment is associated with an increase of $763 in per capita income. That’s not just a result of moving a certain number of people over the four-year college finish line, but of shifting the entire education distribution curve forward.

Increasing college attainment rates isn’t easy. But it is easier than we think. It turns out that millions of Americans started college. They raised their hands and said, “I want to go to college.” They got in to college. They paid for classes. They earned college credits. They just didn’t finish.

And finishing is what counts.

Amazingly, even in this lousy economy, Americans with college degrees have an unemployment rate that is almost half the rate of those who attended but did not complete college. The median annual salary for a college graduate is $20,000 more a year than someone who started college but didn’t finish. So the financial impact finishing college has on families and on cities is significant.

That’s why CEOs for Cities, with the support of the Kresge Foundation and Lumina Foundation for Education, is launching a $1 million prize competition today to drive increased degree attainment in America’s major metro areas. 

The Talent Dividend Prize will be awarded to the metropolitan area with the greatest increase in the number of post-secondary degrees granted per capita over a four-year period. 

via smartercities:

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