Talentism

Dashnote Launches: Common Cold Cured

... well, maybe not the common cold. But this is cool all the same.

You may remember me mentioning Dashnote a few times (here and here). Some of you were even included in the beta program (thanks for your feedback). Well Dashnote is ready for prime time and people are starting to use it in many interesting ways. For instance:

Sean Rehder is using Dashnote for distributed web-based support. He distributes a bookmarklet to users of his client’s Salesforce solutions and they use Dashnote to give him feedback on his apps, as well as request support for bugs and enhancement requests.

I have started using Dashnote for group Knowledge Management. I have set up different topics around areas I write about or am interested in, and then distribute the URL for the bookmarklet to people whom I want to include in my “Knowledge Group.” They find cool stuff for me to read on the web and provide their comments (Dashnote calls them “annotations”) through Dashnote.

Here is one that I think will really take off: recruiters have started using Dashnote to streamline their online sourcing. They set up an account, get the bookmarklet, and as they find resumes on the web they can quickly provide their comments about the resume, as well as store all the resumes they find in one convenient place. Some recruiters are even using the Dashnote “Snapper” functionality to clip resumes and forward them to hiring managers with their comments.

It’s all very exciting. I remember sitting down with Dashnote founder Ranjit Padmanabhan back in January envisioning a way to capture and annotate web content (we coined the term "3d Web" to describe it), and now it is a reality (due to the incredible efforts of Ranjit and David  and Dawn).

If you think of other cool ways to use Dashnote, or are using Dashnote for your business, let us know! You can comment on this post, send email to jjhunter at gmail dot com or, even better, drop a comment off at the Dashnote Blog.

That's the Power of Blog: Peter Clayton

A little over a year ago I wrote something called 68 Posts. Whenever someone asks me why I blog I point them to that article. With my recent revelations about the futility of trying to change the world of recruiting, I thought it best to go back and reconnect with some of the rewards I get from this peculiar activity. Reading 68 Posts I was struck by the fact that Peter Clayton reminded me of the power of blogging and I hadn’t thanked him yet. Sorry Peter!

What does existential crisis, blogging and building a network have to do with Peter Clayton? Funny you should ask. Next year I am going to be starting a new blog (about politics, not business or talent) and I decided that I wanted to try podcasting my content rather than just writing. I don’t know how to podcast any more than I know how to flycast, so I set about to learn: how do I get my voice on RSS? Like most people I went to Google and ran a search and started reading. Inevitably I ended up with a long list of questions and realized that I needed a teacher. Where to find one?

Asking someone to be a teacher is not an insignificant request. As many teachers through the years can testify, I am not a very good student. Add to that the fact that I hate to impose on other people and I quickly hit a dead-end. Until I remembered that I had worked for the last two years to provide value to a diverse network of people, and that perhaps I wouldn’t be asking for a favor as much as I would be cashing in some of the trust I had deposited in the global bank of blog. So I put the question to a test and sent an email to Peter Clayton, a person who I greatly respect and frequently listen to, but whom wouldn’t know me from Adam if I ran in front of him and did jumping jacks while shouting out “Talentism!” Given that relative anonymity I had few hopes for success.

Much to my pleasant surprise Peter wrote me back in 5 minutes. He was gracious, offering to talk with me as soon as was mutually convenient. Before I knew it I was on the phone with a guy who probably gets a bazzilion requests for his time, asking him stupid questions like “how do I record my voice anyway?” Peter not only spent considerable time with me, but followed up our conversation with some emails with helpful tidbits and Flash code for embedded MP3 players. What a prince.

If you haven’t listened to Peter’s content you really must drop everything and get over to his site, TotalPicture.com. His content is thought provoking, his expert delivery is crisp and easy on the ears, his topics cogent and his technical wizardry without peer in the recruiting world. I know the last bit of information first-hand because Peter patiently described to me what goes into getting one of his shows up on TotalPicture. We’re not talking about some guy with half a cigarette hanging out of his mouth holding a lapel microphone up to a phone while he does the NY Times crossword puzzle and says “Uh-huh” every couple of seconds. Peter comes from an audio engineering background and so has a wide variety of equipment and mastering techniques that allow him to achieve the well-mixed clarity with his shows that only a professional can deliver.

TotalPicture’s content is always worth the time, but I especially like it when he hangs out with people I know. Peter is great at putting a guest at ease and asking questions that get to the heart of the recruiting matter. I especially liked his recent conversation with Heather Hamilton.

Peter’s generosity reminded me that blogging is not just about a mission (if, in fact, that is the purpose of your blog, as it is for me). Blogging is about community. About value for value. Though Peter had only a passing acquaintance with me and my name, he knew me through my blogging and guessed (astutely I hope) that it would be worth his time to help me out of my technical befuddlement. That is the power of blog... (so maybe it’s worth it after all….)

Is Digg Wise?

This morning I went over to Digg.com, the godfather of "user powered content aggregation." There I discovered that Digg users had this to say about the content they had powered:

• 889 votes for a picture of a McDonald’s ad on a campus that was based on the premise that since food is more difficult to steal than music, you might as well get your food cheap.
• 530 votes for an article about Terrell Owens, the receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, trying to kill himself (literally this time, not figuratively like all the previous times).
• 313 votes for a rather thoughtless but still provocative rant about America losing it’s standing as the number one economy in the world (apparently our problem is not enough taxes on the middle class – who would have thought?)
• 39 votes for an article about funding for Wallop, a new social networking service (Microsoft’s entry into the “Let’s kill MySpace” market).

I didn't find any articles about Bill Clinton's recent tête-à-tête with Chris Wallace, but I did find a lot of people interested in a girl trying to blow up her SUV with her sweater.

Digg is presently one of the top 20 trafficked website in the world, and its users search far and wide for interesting new content. The Digg user community has spoken loud and clear: silly ads are more important than America’s economic position or the funding of a new business. Why think about the merits of a political argument when you can watch a Jeep go "boom!"? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

Digg is based on a “Wisdom of Crowds” concept. And since I am a big fan of both the logic and the possibilities of that idea, one would think that I am a big fan of Digg. But as my analysis above probably telegraphed.. not so much. When the crowd that I am depending on to tell me what I should read thinks that cheap McDonalds copy is more important than the ability to create jobs in the future I tune out. I am left with the conclusion that the Digg crowd is not that wise, and I don’t just mean that I don’t agree with their preferences.

“The Wisdom of Crowds” was James Surowiecki’s breakthrough book which brought the heretofore mutually-exclusive concepts of "Wisdom" and "Crowds" together in the common lexicon. According to Surowiecki a “Wise” crowd has the following characteristics:

• It is diverse in composition
• The individuals are well informed and have access to the same data sources
• The opinion of one individual doesn’t unduly influence the opinion of others in the crowd
• There is an objective method for aggregating individual input into a group conclusion

When a crowd meets those criteria it is amazingly adept at predicting the future, including what is important and what isn't. When a crowd doesn’t meet those criteria, however, it runs the risk of thinking that McDonalds’ copy is a better use of your time than why somebody would try to kill themselves or why America may be in economic trouble.

So if user powered content is based on the “Wisdom of Crowds” then we have to examine whether the “Crowd” meets the “Wise” standard. In most cases the answer is clearly “no.” Here are just a few of the reasons why:

Want to Reduce Turnover? Turn your Employees into Brand Talent!

It is increasingly difficult to separate the act of finding great talent from the act of keeping great talent. In many ways it is a math problem: there aren’t enough people out there to replace the people you are losing. Reducing voluntary turnover is turning out to not only be the most cost-effective recruiting program you have, but maybe the only option left to you.

As recruiting managers come to this “ah-ha!” moment, they inevitably turn to the option of employee loyalty programs. The idea is simple: if you give the right rewards and say the right things then employees will stay around. It’s just like selling detergent: make it cheaper and sexier and people will overlook that your clothes don’t get clean. Fortunately people value their work experience more than they value their cleaning products, so the average consumer marketing cons aren’t going to work.

Loyalty programs will have decreasing effectiveness because the days of blind commitment to a company are done. In the past a company was an embodiment of a principle: security. Employment was rewarded independent of the value someone contributed, so you could be loyal to a company because they would be loyal to you. No longer. Too many employers view talent as a cog in the economic wheel: less valuable than the money and machinery, more valuable than the lobby décor. Many employees see an employer as an abstraction consisting of institutional shareholders wagging the dog that is management. Whether these perceptions are warranted or not is besides the point: it is the reality of our world. The days of executives taking a hit from Wall Street because they want to keep their employees around is a rare event indeed.

Employee loyalty programs have been a small but key contribution to this tsunami of cynicism. Management credibility is paid in the coin of authenticity, and nothing feels more contrived than an “attaboy!” followed by increased work hours, lousy bosses and decreased wages. Piecemeal changes to the relationship with employees won’t turn this situation around. It really does take a radical new approach.

Google This: I am not having Brad Pitt's Love Child

All those who labor over their blogs either learn or intuit a few simple guidelines about their endeavor:

1. Post frequently.
2. Write stuff that matters to you and your audience.
3. Be consistent in style, presentation and intent.
4. Be fresh and engaging.

This all makes sense. Blogging is supposed to be a conversation, not a diatribe, a community instead of a hermitage. So you gotta keep 'em coming back for more.

After 173 posts comprising over 500 pages of original content (in essence, after writing a book in public) I have learned all those lessons first hand. I can watch my traffic numbers spike and dive as I employ (or forget) those maxims.

But those "guidelines" can also be creativity killers. Having to stay on top of a post every day, or every couple of days, really does me in. People like Sumser and Dubs and Jason are just so damn good at it that it is easy to forget that it is almost super-human to create fresh, interesting and relevant content frequently and consistently.

Today I am going to put up three posts: this one and two others. This one is short and quick and will probably get some traction. The other two are long, drawn-out and boring and will be read only by B-school shut-ins who really don't care but need to look smart in their next Porter class. I should break these two longer posts into little nuggets and be pithy and irreverent, but I really don't have the time, and while I am here and engaged, I want to get all this stuff up and online (and forget about it).

I wouldn't have considered this 4 months ago, but a significant stint of radio silence on my part, coupled with some rigorous analysis of my site traffic, leads me to the conclusion that a significant part of the value that I am adding to the blogosphere (if there is any) is that my articles are crawled and indexed and available when people type in a search on Google (and sometimes Yahoo). It's not as sexy as having a regular readership, and it certainly fails in the area of building a conversation and a community, but at this point being Googled is about the best I can do.

Keywords: sex, Tom Cruise weds Brad Pitt, Britney Spears gives birth to Brad Pitts illegitimate love child, did I say sex yet?, Angelina Jolie, naked

Thanks for reading!

Java Entrepreneur Get's It

 

Java Entrepreneur gets it. And while I don’t always buy into the “best and the brightest” tag line , his “Worst Boss to Work For” is a great read. I am adding this blog to my list. If you are hiring software engineers, you should too.

Recommended Reading: Escape from Cubicle Nation

Check out this blog: Escape from Cubicle Nation

This post is especially great. (Thanks Colin for pointing it out to me!)

I believe that most of Pamela's excellent points are symptoms, not causes, of corporate stupidity. When people are rewarded for conserving capital and are penalized for mazimizing the value of talent then they engage in all the stupid behaviors that Pamela writes about so passionately.

Talentism is an attempt to get people to change the root cause, but pointing out the stupidity of the symptoms is a lot of fun too.

Thanks Pamela!

A New Tag Line

You may notice that this blog's tag line has changed. It used to be "Business, talent, technology and the American Way" (or something like that). The phrase certainly stated the topics I covered, but didn't give me any warm fuzzies about just why I was engaged in tilting at these particular windmills.

At the same time that I was thinking about this, I was working on the book about Brand Talent with Dave Lefkow. When you write a book you hope that editors and publishers will magically appear out of nowhere, swinging huge bags of cash around and begging you to publish with them. Then you figure out that the authors are the ones coughing up the cash and doing the begging, so you start to go out and pitch your idea. As part of that you go around and ask people whom you respect, and who used to respect you before you ask them to spend their time shilling for you, to write nice things about you and your idea.

It's an interesting exercise. I don't know about you, but asking people to put aside their busy lives so that they can talk about how great I am is right up there with public flatulence in quiet places for uncomfortable situations that call attention to yourself.

One of the people whom I asked replied with something that really struck home. This person asked me to keep their identity private because they work with a large organization that would have to review what they wrote if it was publicly attributed. Or maybe they just didn't want anyone to know we are friends. After the flatulence comment I can understand their point of view.

Jazy Thinking - Part 3

Today we will examine the last and final statement from Jazy regarding "Three Measures of your Company's Health": Cash Flow.

Jazy likes cash flow instead of basic P&L metrics because “all your other profit-and-loss numbers, like net income, have some art to them.. they’ve been messaged through the accounting process, which is filled with assumptions.”

It's certainly refreshing to see a top executive admit that most of today's modern accounting techniques are turning up to be ever more useless. As I said here:

'P&L' is an accounting concept, not an economic model. Many accounting tricks can be played to arrive at a predetermined profit target. Profit is therefore a temporary lagging indicator of an organization’s ability to manage its finances in such a way as to record the highest possible number for the quarter. Many organizations record profits but don’t return value above their cost of capital.

So cash flow is better than standard P&L metrics, but is it the best financial measure a company's health?

A company exists to return value to its investors. When a company has been in business a long time and is in a relatively static industry then cash flow is a good short-hand for the value they are creating. But fewer and fewer companies are in the enviable position of being valued for how much money they mint. Instead, companies are increasingly measured by whether they have some new concept or widget which will make a lot of cash in the future, but is doing nothing but costing money right now. Innovation is a process of taking something that is valuable today (time, money, natural resources, attention) and turning it into something that will be much more valuable tomorrow (products and services that can be replicated easily and sold at a profit to what it really cost to create them).

In those cases, cash flow is a lousy measure of your company's health. For instance, would you rather be a Microsoft shareholder today (a company that has great cash flow) or a Google shareholder six years ago (a company that, at that time, had almost no cash flow). A share of stock in Google six years ago is much more valuable than a share in Microsoft today, even though one company generates a lot of cash and the other didn't.

More and more companies (and analysts) are coming to realize that the P&L and cash flow statement suffer from the same basic problem: they don't tell you how much the company is really worth. Cash flow can tell you how healthy the company is right now, but that health can go away fast. A company with a really strong balance sheet, on the other hand, probably has a stronger position for the future.

Some Jazy Thinking - Part 2

Yesterday we examined why Jack and Suzy Welch's (or, as I call them, "Jazy") admonition to survey your employees to determine their engagement wasn't the best possible way to establish just how committed your employees are. (The column I referred to yesterday is premium content, so I can't provide a link.)

Jazy says that the second important measure of your company's health is Customer Satisfaction. They explain that you have to meet customers in order to know how they feel about your products / services / people. Good advice. Then Jazy say’s “And don’t leave without finding out if each customer would recommend your products or services.” Even better advice. But the best advice of all would be “Get evidence that your customers like you, as all the meetings and glad-handing is meaningless in absence of evidence about how your customers really feel."

How do you do that? Glad you asked. You look for heat. You want hot customers, not cold ones, and you want customers that show you the love. Here is a method I have used before to determine both the health of an individual customer relationship and, even more importantly, the overall health of all of your customer relationships.