Leadership in Hyper-Linked Times

As organizations get more and more linked to external stakeholders, and their people become unofficial spokespeople on social networks like Twitter and Facebook and become marketers whether or not it is their role.

In such times - specially for organizations that are living in this hyper-linked worlds - what are the leadership behaviors that should be adopted.

Not surprisingly, these behaviors are not new. As I mentioned earlier, the tools of web 2.0 promise real organization development, and therefore, the behaviors of leaders must reflect the tenets of OD and these times.

They are:

1. Openness and Transparency - In the web 2.0 world there is little there is hidden, even vague terms of services cannot be changed without people noticing. A leader always has to remember and more importantly live this with the utmost sincerity - both within and externally 
2. Conversation - It is not just about being transparent, leaders should also engage with employees and external stakeholders about what issues they face and if nothing else - they should acknowledge it, and if needed communicate what they are willing to do about it. Of course, sometimes legal and stockmarket requirements can require executives not to make forward looking statements. In earlier non-internet times I reckon this was known simply within the organization as MBWA
3. Content - Leaders must realise that their organizational brand and product brands are what users interpret - and that they cannot control it. Indeed, they must actively work to give it away - understanding that there is nothing so powerful as an idea owned by the users. How can you as a leader encourage content and conversation creation, both within and externally to the organization. 
4. Collaboration - Leaders of hyperlinked organizations know that people and groups cannot do things independently anymore- they have to collaborate with partners, other employees, other stakeholders to create lasting impact. Their own behavior sets the tone for all their employees, so they must be and be seen to be collaborative. 
5. Communities - Leaders understand that people -internally and outside the organization - are part of shared interest groups - around various 'social objects'. For employees that could be "how we use this cool tool to solve problems" to "employees who like football" - and externally it could be "people interested in the benefit our product gives" - and if you're Apple, Google, Lego, Harley-Davidson you could have communities around your product too. As a leader you have to understand the deep universal desire of people to connect around a certain shared passion. Identify what ties in to your objectives, and then understand how to facilitate it - give it sustenance. What are the tribes who you will align with?
6. Collective Intelligence - Leaders know that when communities have conversations and collaborate, new and better ideas get generated. They might be better than the ideas the firm comes up on its own, and there is no shame in admitting it and embracing it. This is the pinnacle of giving up control and becoming part of the community yourself.

The question is - are you ready to make the leap?

Building Employee Engagement leveraging Enterprise 2.0

BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

The Story Until Now
(scenario 3 from here)

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.

When Gautam met Sumit he said “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years – if we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights… my question is how can I help help them to tap their full potential and connect with each other?”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Gautam tells Sumit “You have the right approach, however before jumping into an initiative like this you have to think through certain aspects”

“What are those?” Sumit asked, intrigued.

“The first thing is you have to understand such an initiative will mean disrupting existing power structures – are you sure you want to do that? Will the rest of the management team support this initiative?”

Sumit pondered on Gautam’s question “Maybe not, but I am prepared to push my way through – as this is what will enable us to break to the next level”

“You can’t push an initiative like this Sumit, it has to be owned by all the leadership.. however what you can influence is by leading the way – and influencing others to follow your lead. Let’s assume over all your objective is to increase the engagement of people with the organization and with each other, would that be right?” asked Gautam

“Yes true” agreed Sumit

“You need to build a community that will congregate around areas of work, levels and other areas of interest”

“You mean like a Facebook for the whole group?” Sumit asked.

“Well, it would look like that, and have rich features to encourage people to connect with each other – however there would be features that would encourage a mix of social and business interaction. What would really help this would be the softer aspects of the initiative”

“Such as…?”

“It would encourage people to connect with others, discover people across organizational silos, understand them beyond their roles as individuals – and trigger overall encouragement. It has been proven that having friends is a sign that people will be more engaged at work.”

“Really…?”

“Of course, people like to work in a place that enables them to bring their whole selves at work”

“How do we know that people won’t just goof off? Keep chatting?”

“You’ve got to give them guidelines, Sumit. We can help you in evolving these guidelines. Many large organizations have such guidelines. However, you have to remember that the ‘how we use it’ will become a process when people realise that they have to work with people, not to do things to them. People like you and your senior team will be instrumental in creating that mindset – which is why we’ll have to collaborate with them extensively to make this a success.”

Fueling Effective Team Working using Social Technologies

THE STORY SO FAR
(scenario 2 from here)

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, is concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seem to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the delays are caused by the serial processing nature of the work: a mis-communication in the to-and-fro chain of emails would stop everyone else’s work and cause serious delays.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Gautam reassured Sundar that many organizations shared his dilemma. The nature of our work, especially knowledge work, has dramatically changed while our communication toolkit hasn’t.

“The model for email is offline filing systems,” Gautam explained to Sundar. “The system of Inbox, Outbox, Drafts? They spell the “I do my job, and now the ball is in your court” – There is little sharing of contexts – people don’t really write about the attachments they send or what people have to work along with.

So I’d tell Sundar Raman that what Alacrity Legal Technologies that what they need is for groups to work together in “Shared In The Flow Workspaces” – In The Flow to signify a natural way of working and not something that has to be done externally or in addition to ‘regular work’.

The Governance aspects of such a system would adhere to workflows, have access rules and align to the team roles in the group.

Some of the features that would be needed, and the behaviors that ALT would enable in such shared workspaces are:

• Wikis - these are shared pages which anybody who has access to can add and edit text, images and even video. People can add links to internal and external sites and keep a track of changes made by people. So one can say goodbye to confusing version numbers when more than 2 people are working on the same document.
• Content Repository – This is a shared drive/folder where all relevant files are tagged by the group and it is possible to search them
• Microblogging / Status Updates - helps people keep others informed of what they are working on, what issues they are facing and therefore
• Project Management – Helps people to assign roles, tasks and in calendaring timelines of when they are supposed to get back with work

Using these tools, and understanding how to manage the change process from current ways of working – ALT can make its teams work faster and more effectively.

About 2020 Social

Many people have been asking me what exactly is it that we do at 2020 Social...

• Is it social media marketing?
• Is it digital marketing?
• Is it online PR?
• What exactly is social business strategy?

To answer all your queries, here's a presentation we've put together about our philosophy and what we do. To know more, you can click through to our website :-)

2020 Social Company Profile

View more presentations from 2020 Social.

Innovating and using Social Technologies

Kickstarting an Innovation Mindset in the Organization

THE STORY SO FAR

Listed as scenario one in this blog post

Bedi Electronics has been amongst the top ten firms in the Indian consumer electronics industry over the last twenty years. Its 1200 employees are spread across six plants and twenty sales offices. Over the last two years, it has fallen behind its competitors in terms of product innovation.

Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.

“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

Rahul Bedi is faced with a predicament that a lot of business owners find themselves in. They know that the only way to have a sustained competitive advantage in a world of increased competition is to have an innovation mindset.

However, what is really meant by an innovation mindset?

At 2020 Social, we believe what John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid postulate in their book “The Social Life of Information” – Innovation is a social process.

Getting people to connect together, and helping them engage with each other and converse about their ideas and challenges at work is often the best way to let innovation emerge from the grassroots.

Gaurav explains to Rahul that the people doing the front end job always have ideas about how to do stuff better – what often frustrates them is a systematic process to talk about such issues and a forum for coming to a consensus about the best way to resolve challenges.

When such ideas are implemented they might also need some managerial interventions – so leadership needs to get involved in these conversations and direct the discussions around to what is possible and what can be done, positively reinforcing certain behaviors.

Gaurav suggests that a social community platform for the group with rich profiles, microblogging, a content repository and social voting on ideas would kickstart such a process. Bedi Electronics needs to sharply define the scope so that it designs for the appropriate behaviors. The name of the community would also shape the discussions in the community. A name like “BE Innovative” (Bedi Electronics Innovative) triggers the right thought and behaviors too.

Bedi Electronics needs to identify and co-opt employees who are enthusiasts and early adopters so that they become role models for rest of the front line community – and they need to be recognised by senior leaders. Rahul himself needs to set aside time every day to engage with the innovators and answer queries and nudge the discussions where they should go. Social Voting by the community would give positive psychological rewards to the real innovators – and great ideas could be implemented – across regions and territories – and learnings shared – resulting in different stories, different learnings.

To keep the community going Bedi Electronics needs to continue seeding it with contests, and educational guides. It also needs to getn more senior executives to slowly engage with the community in discussions and ideation.

Twitter and Career Success by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Interesting post by Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter on the parallels between having influence on Twitter and the new competencies for success.

In the 21st century, America is rapidly becoming a society of networks, even within organizations. Maintenance of organizations as structures is less important than assembling resources to get results, even if the assemblage itself is loose and perishable.

Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership — consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more effectives than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to get things done.

This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has the best network wins."

Go ahead read the full article - and you can follow Rosabeth Moss Kanter on Twitter too

How can firms leverage social technologies internally? 3 Scenarios

Originally posted at the 2020 Social blog

Gaurav and Gautam collaboratively wrote this blog post on a wiki. This is the first in the series of blog posts where we will explore how social technologies, when used effectively within the organization, can create significant business value for Indian firms.




A TYPICAL CONVERSATION

Ever since I joined 2020 Social three weeks back, we have had several interesting conversations with Indian firms of all shapes and sizes on how to use social technologies within the workplace.
The typical conversation starts when someone fills the “Ask Us How” form on our website: “I am excited by the possibilities of using social technologies within our company and want to explore what these technologies can really help us with.”

During initial discussions, it becomes clear that the client faces a business problem, but she is not able to make the connection between how “the business being social” will help her solve her problem.

In the first post in this series, we have outlined three typical business problems several Indian firms are struggling with. In the next three posts, written over the next week, we will share scenarios for how social technologies can be a part of the solution.

SCENARIO 1: PRODUCT INNOVATION

Bedi Electronics has been amongst the top ten firms in the Indian consumer electronics industry over the last twenty years. Its 1200 employees are spread across six plants and twenty sales offices. Over the last two years, it has fallen behind its competitors in terms of product innovation.

Rahul Bedi, the 28 year old scion of the family, has recently taken over as the Chief Marketing Officer of the business. Rahul knows that his 250 frontline sales officers have the pulse of the market. However, Rahul gets to meet them infrequently, in annual sales conferences and monthly market visits. They share interesting product ideas with them during one-to-one interactions, but he doesn’t know how to validate them with other sales officers and build on them.

“I wish I knew how to learn about consumer preferences from my frontline sales officers,” Rahul said to Gaurav, “help them build upon each others’ ideas. If we can revitalize our product innovation process, Bedi Electronics will regain its strength in the market.”

SCENARIO 2: TEAM EFFECTIVENESS

Alacrity Legal Technologies is a new Legal Process Outsourcing firm which focuses on a complex method of helping law firms in the US get their litigation issues outsourced to India. On each of these teams it needs the various groups of people to work together so that case materials and lawyer’s notes for clients to work on before the start of the day. Hence teams of law researchers, Indian lawyers and US client managers need to work together to get fast turnaround times.

Sundar Raman, the 43 year old CEO of the firm, was concerned at the high levels of customer complaints – the key theme being that ALT teams always seemed to be missing their deadlines. Sundar decided to dig deeper and found that the reason why this was happening was that the nature of serial processing that the work required meant that a delay in emailing (due to whatever reason) would impact the final output by a large extent.

Sundar instinctively knew that a way for people to work on documents together without necessarily emailing versions back and forth would speed up the deliverables.

“But I don’t know what that toolkit looks like,” Sundar told Gautam, “and I don’t know if it’s even possible to change the work habits of seasoned paralegals and lawyers.”

SCENARIO 3: BUILDING AN ENGAGED WORKFORCE

Over the last two decades LMN Corp has grown from a family owned business to a professionally run conglomerate with diverse interests in shipping, mining, IT, telecom and media. Growth has been robust as the diversifications have paid off.

Sumit Bangia, the 50 year old COO of the company, has been an old LMN hand. Over the last few years, Sumit has become increasingly concerned with the increasing turnover of younger workers. Sumit’s trusted HR Head, 35 year old Shalini Taneja, found out from exit interviews that recent recruits felt disconnected from the conglomerate and felt that they didn’t know how they fit into the big picture.

Sumit and Shalini decided that the key to retaining young recruits was to build an open organizational culture where young recruits could connect with each other and older mentors across levels and functions. It was also important that they felt empowered and encouraged to bring their whole self to work.
When Gautam met Sumit and Shalini, Sumit explained his dilemma: “I don’t think we need more increments and higher salaries or better designations to motivate our people. We’ve hired some great people over the last few years. If we can just make them connect with each other and discover their strengths and then get out of their way, I am sure they will take us to great heights.”

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Now that the stage is set in all the three scenarios, you must be wondering: what happens next? Find out in our next three posts.

Building Open Organizations

Organizations are primarily communities first – and profit making machines later believed Arie de Geus in the 1970s , however now businesses need to be social communities to survive and thrive.

We at 2020 Social believe that businesses will move to the next level of growth not by doing the same things that they were doing but by embracing some of the biggest trends that are shaping today's culture.

Some of these trends that are having an impact on the workplace are:

1. 
   
   Speed of decision making: As external change on organizations comes faster and faster, and as organizations get flatter and flatter – decisions are expected from the front line level which directly interact with customers, be they sales or customer support people. However often they don't have access to information that they need to really do it well.
   
   
   
2. 
   
   Transparency: As society and government opens up – employees are expecting similar transparency within their organizations – and when organizations are seen as secretive and opaque they lose either their employees energy and commitment – or at risk of losing the employees themselves to competition
   
   
   
3. 
   
   Collaboration: As organizations move to more and more knowledge based work, the output that groups of people working together achieve is exponential to what people can do individually. However, collaboration does not happen in a vacuum. It starts with people's willingness to collaborate aided by the way work is structured, processes are defined and the tools that are available to help people connect and work together with others
   
   
   
4. 
   
   Sharing: Today's youth has grown up with social networks where sharing information and pictures is the key to connecting and relating to others. It combines expression and relatedness – considered by many to be the two fundamental human drivers. To really engage with and to leverage the strengths of these younger employees - who are India's post-liberalisation generation – they would have to enable these aspects in the workplace too.
   
   
   

People Power, says Cisco, is key to Success

Amazing post by Cisco's VP of Enterprise. Go read the full article. Some excerpts

For most companies, people represent an untapped asset – a resource that becomes especially important for companies that must grow their business without adding personnel.

This means that corporations must design a cognitive stimulus plan based on employee contributions, and business must embrace some admittedly unusual notions about how, where and when work occurs, and how employees collaborate. Some of these notions recently arrived from the Web 2.0, social networking realm.

It is time, though, to recognize that community is at the heart of teaming and teaming is at the heart of workplace collaboration. And collaboration is where we find innovation and operational excellence, by tapping into knowledge at the source: from one functional group to another; from one business unit to another; and from one company to another – as partners in a distributed valued chain.

Finally, management needs to view collaborative social networking differently. As Morten T. Hansen notes, in his excellent new book, Collaboration, they must oversee the adoption process and change culture to achieve positive results.

To some degree, every aspect of information technology is in transition: cloud, virtualization, collaboration, and consumerization. CEOs want more and CFOs want to spend less. I could go on and on with challenges for the CIO. But what about the people who actually use all this technology, day after day, to get their jobs done? What are they telling us about how they want to work?

The millennials, the largest presence in the workforce, are already “black belts” in virtual communications and collaboration.

It's raining jobs?

So says this rather extra positive report in the Economic Times:

Global consultancy firms Accenture, Deloitte, banks StanChart and Barclays and Indian IT giant Infosys all have announced hiring plans that would see the creation of at least 13,000 jobs in India by the end of next year.

Personally, I think a news item about 13000 jobs being added is not in any sense of the term flooded. Specially since the unemployment rate in India is still around 7%.

Gender Parity in the workplace

Interesting discussion about gender disparity in the Indian workplace. The funny thing is, in the large unorganized sector which accounts for more than 90% of the workforce, the Indian woman is present - and their strength is being leveraged by self-help groups and other civil action bodies. Maybe it's time for corporate India to take some pointers from them?

Excerpts from the article:

Women indeed seem to be getting to that goal of parity at least in the huge organisations headed by Ms Nooyi & Ms Kochar. Ms Nooyi revealed that 30% of PepsiCo’s global workforce are women, and Ms Kochhar noted that 26% of ICICI’s 40,000 employees are women, 80% of them below 30 years of age and for whom ICICI has provisions for maternity and child rearing leave.

Mr Ghosn said that in 1995 Nissan had 1% women in the workforce and today it has risen to 5% women working in all verticals.” But Mr Seth persisted in averring that equality had to be taken in totality, with womens’ contribution and impact being judged not only by their presence and experience in the workplace.

But who says the road to gender parity is smooth anywhere? When a woman employee at PepsiCo asked for six months leave to take care of her ailing mother, Ms Nooyi had to come up with a creative solution. “When we distributed her work to other employees,” recounted Ms Nooyi, “they resented it.” And when Mr Ghosn contended that there should be paternity leave for male employees even as he echoed the need for more women in workforce, Ms Nooyi snapped, “Provided they actually stay at home and take care of the child!”

And here's some related news: India slips a notch on gender index.

Find and know your experts using social tools

Interesting article in the WSJ how social technologies can help tap into and be aware of an organization's expertise systems.

To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that's a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts' knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.

But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.

Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts' "softer" qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn't easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.

Activities and interactions that occur in blogs, wikis and social networks naturally provide the cues that are missing from current expertise-search systems. A search engine that mines internal blogs, for example, where workers post updates and field queries about their work, will help searchers judge for themselves who is an expert in a given field. Wiki sites, because they involve collaborative work, will suggest not only how much each contributor knows, but also how eager they are to share that knowledge and how well they work with others.

While I agree with the premise - let us agree that social tools won't just enable adoption - specially if the organization has treated external social networking with a different standard (i.e. by banning access and firewalling them :-)

Adoption of tools will also be slow in organizations where automation is being viewed as something to be suspicious of, or if it entails duplication of work and effort.

The other aspect is - not all experts would like to write about their expertise or might not have the skills needed to cultivate readership or networks.

What does one do then?

RiseSmart CEO Sanjay Sathe on the new direction

I've already interviewed Sanjay Sathe once last year, and that was at a time when RiseSmart was trying to establish its own JobConcierge service for senior management.

RiseSmart is now trying to establish an outplacement service too.

When it recently got $ 4.6 million in VC funding it seemed like a good time to catch up with Sanjay again and to understand what is in the future for RiseSmart.

Here are Sanjay's answers to some questions I sent to him via email:

1. What is RiseSmart planning to do with the latest VC funding?

At this point we’ve proven the business model of our outplacement solution, RiseSmart Transition Concierge, and it’s time to grow market share. So we’re going to expand our sales team while continuing to invest in operations and client service.

It’s really been remarkable that we’ve been able to walk into Fortune 500 companies and win their outplacement business away from longtime, and in some cases deeply entrenched, incumbents.  We’ve done it time and again.  This reinforces our belief in our vision — that our way of doing outplacement will become the dominant model in the future.  If we use the investment from Norwest Venture Partners and Storm Ventures wisely, we’ll be well on our way to making this vision a reality.

2. How is the new strategic direction being received by existing clients?

Nothing has changed for existing clients of our consumer service, RiseSmart Job Concierge.  What’s changed is our marketing strategy.  When we launched, we planned to build a B2C offering to compete with TheLadders — and we believe our service is a better value than TheLadders.  But TheLadders is spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, and the consumer market in general is crowded, so the investment required to cut through the clutter and build a brand is high.

With RiseSmart Transition Concierge, on the other hand, we are dealing with a smaller universe of prospective clients and the noise level is a lot lower.  Corporate clients are hearing the facts and connecting with our message.  As a result, we’re bringing thousands of jobseekers into our system much more cost-effectively than by trying to reach them individually through a broad-based ad campaign.  And because satisfaction levels have been very high among users, we can count on reaching new B2C customers through word of mouth.

3. What are the biggest challenges that a firm like RiseSmart faces?

Any upstart company faces challenges in going up against the big players and old guard.  Outplacement is a $3 plus billion industry, so the entrenched players have a lot to protect; they have been enjoying very nice margins for a long time.  Now, we are threatening to permanently reduce the cost structure of the industry, and they don’t like it.  We expect them to throw the kitchen sink at us from a sales and marketing perspective as we continue to win away their clients.  But we enjoy a good challenge.

4. What other players in the industry are you watching very closely - and with respect :-) ?

We watch the traditional players like Right Management and Lee Hecht Harrison closely — and we do respect them for all they’ve accomplished.  They built this industry.  We’re just ready to take the baton and move things forward.  We expect our competitors to adapt and to begin offering services similar to ours — but we’re confident they won’t be able to do it as well, and certainly not at our price point.

5. What should job seekers do to land jobs of their choice?

The most important thing is to use your time wisely.  You had a routine in your job that filled your days — and now that is gone, like a rug pulled out from under you.  How do you fill all those hours?

What you shouldn’t do is sit in front of your computer searching different job boards for hours at a time.  It’s a time filler that can make you feel productive, but it’s not a good use of your time.  This is particularly true because job boards are notoriously inefficient — how many times have you searched for “executive” jobs and wound up reading job descriptions for executive assistants, for example?

That’s why our Job Concierge service — which is not only our B2C offering but also the core of Transition Concierge — is so valuable.  We do the online searching for you so you can focus on tasks that are more important, like leveraging social networks, sharpening your resume, crafting custom cover letters, and networking at industry and professional events.  This is the smarter route to finding a new job.