Why HR needs to leverage Enterprise 2.0

When someone asks me how HR can become more strategic (y'know - the same conversation we have been having since the 1990s) these days more and more I find myself thinking that HR should be joining and indeed leading the Enterprise 2.0 conversations.

I believed the same in the early 2000s when the KM conversation was going on - and found HR folks unwilling to engage and own that conversation - with the result that IT departments used a tool-centric approach and vendors marketed hyped up products in the guise of KM and most of the time it failed, with everyone having egg on their faces.

And as I believe Enterprise 2.0 (or social business) is going down the same path for most organizations.

Here are the reasons why I think HR should be a critical member - and lead the Enterprise 2.0 agenda:

1. HR (in the sphere of OD) - has the critical skill to make such changes less painful and with a higher rate of success. Let's face it, change management seen from a tool vendor's point of view is just a "training program" and about process changes. Other business functions really don't have the change management understanding that OD practitioners have. That understanding can be channelised to make "social business" a reality - by thinking about the structural, process, emotional and personal aspects of change.
2. Enterprise 2.0 is both about engaging people with other people (employees, partners, customers) as well as embedding that in the business processes. Typically, HR professionals don't get a chance to influence what happens in the business - but with E2.0 they can - and build their strategic impact. Holy grail, anyone?
3. Enterprise 2.0 will soon be the platform of learning and people to people engagement in the organization and as such will have impact on all aspects of HR work - Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Learning and Development and unless HR leads the conversation it will find itself more and more redundant like IT departments are finding themselves.

So are you a HR leader and are you owning social ?

Using Social Media

I am often stumped by people's questions like "how to use social media"

That's because I didn't have an objective when I started engaging and connecting with people. Those were the social web was a much more innocent and idealistic place

I was a blogger first and then dabbled in Facebook and Twitter. So unlike most of you my friends were people whom I met online and then sometimes met in real life

So here are some of my learnings on using social media - that I can say holds true for companies as well as individuals -

1. Communicate with your heart - passion and interest in whatever you are interested in will carry over to people who are following you. 
2. Connect with people who share your interests. Link to them, share their content, leave your comments

Of course, there are other important stuff like using keywords, crafting an attention grabbing heading, using tags, and pictures. But these 2 points are the most important, IMHO :-)

Cleaving HR into 3 parts

I have often wondering with the paradoxical demands on Human Resources folks why it persists in being a "single" department.

Personally sometimes I feel that Human Resources/ Human Capital/ People Dept - whatever you need to call it - should be cleaved into at least three different groups - and I don't mean the traditional groups of Recruiting, C&B, Training, HRIS and HR Business Partner.

I think HR should be divided into three different parts - being internal versions of the Marketing, Sales and Customer Support groups that are present externally.

Because if you think about it really, HR markets the firm to external candidates and internal employees, sells processes and new policies to the biz leaders and responds to employee queries

So instead of functional division of HR which is great for HR professionals but not so great for the employees - I feel that businesses should divide HR by its purpose - branding, long term or relationship building and help desk

What do you think?

Matching HR process with practice

Often I wonder whether HR folks concentrate too much on process rather than thinking about practice. By practice, I mean the level of maturity of the business and the culture.

Sometimes I feel the easiest things Human Resources folks find is to make policies - sometimes with a little bit of "internet research" but don't bother to check if its suitable to the maturity level of the business.


So what are the parameters that HR people need to look at when launching a new process/policy:

• The complexity of the system compared to the earlier system - Sometimes you can hire a great HR leader to replace a pathetic one - but what often gets forgotten is the level of his/her peers to accept comparatively radical ideas
• The infrastructure to capture data/metrics - It's no use designing a robust performance management process when you don't have systems to capture metrics or have to rely on managers to collate the data
• Structure: Systems need to reflect the current job structures - but often HR processes live in an ideal rather than real world - which ensures that current realities are not reflected in the policies, and therefore is not followed

What do you think? What are the big issues that HR falters in?

Enterprise 2.0 news: JP joins Salesforce

In the course of learning about Enterprise 2.0 I have been fortunate to read and learn from JP (@jobsworth on Twitter) so when I heard that the former Chief Scientist at BT would now move to Salesforce also as chief scientist I am pretty excited

JP is considered to be the philosopher guide of enterprise software thinking deep not just of tools but also what impacts people and work. Be sure to add his blog to your reading list

JP Rangaswami, the former chief scientist at BT, will take the same position at Salesforce.com.

Salesforce.com said Wednesday that Rangaswami will contribute to the company’s product strategy and be an evangelist for cloud computing around the globe. Rangaswami will focus on European customers and preaching real-time collaboration.

Rangaswami is a veteran of multinational companies and his experience at BT should help Salesforce.com garner a larger enterprise footprint. Rangaswami has been a chief information officer as well being a key player in startups. Rangaswami was behind the Ribbit effort at BT.

In a statement, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff said Rangaswami has “the rare talent of being able to see what the future should be, knowing what it takes to get there, and the enthusiasm to make it happen.”

Emotions at Work

Rashmi Bansal makes the case for building "emotional gyms" in today's workplace for HR and business leaders to deal with Emotional Atyachar - moving beyond it

Once upon a time, men came to office, did the work they had to, and went home at 6 o clock in the evening. There, a hot meal and unconditional acceptance (if not necessarily 'love') could always be counted on.

You worked for money and got emotional support at home. But hey, that was then.

Today, there is no guarantee of that hot meal or unconditional anything, coz women are working, or following the daily soaps.

Besides, you don't work just for money. You work for your life to be thrilling, meaningful, and full of tangible achievements. You must be recognised, praised, rewarded, respected, even loved for this act of showing up and doing your work.

When life at home is shitty, you take refuge in your office. Sometimes, that works. You live in a fantasy world where this is your family, and so you cross that lakshmanrekha - and share your secret world.

But let's say life at office is equally shitty. And you don't have a boss or colleagues for emotional support. You escape from home to be trapped in office. You escape from office, only to enter the torture chamber you call 'home'.

There are millions of people out there in this horrible situation. And they simply don't know how to get off this Misery Merry Go Round.

If you're lucky, you have a bipolar mind where no matter what pins and needles are stuck in your heart, your mind continues to function and you are able to 'deliver' at work.

If you can't, well then, at some point your job will be in danger. And then, things will only get worse.

Yes, it's all very depressing but the worst of it is, it's like second hand smoke. An 'innocent bystander' can also get depressed, when he or she becomes exposed to your toxic emotions, constantly.

Your problem thus becomes everyone's problem. The world itself becomes sooty, coughy and grey.

Logotherapy and Meaning at Work

Ever since I blogged about Making Work Meaningful and Professionalism and Love of Work my thoughts have returned to Viktor Frankl's book "Man's Cry For Meaning" and his work on Logotherapy.

Frankl was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp and wikipedia tells us:


It was due to his and others' suffering in these camps that he came to his hallmark conclusion that even in the most absurd, painful and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that therefore even suffering is meaningful. This conclusion served as a strong basis for Frankl's logotherapy. An example of Frankl's idea of finding meaning in the midst of extreme suffering is found in his account of an experience he had while working in the harsh conditions of the Auschwitz concentration camp:

... We stumbled on in the darkness, over big stones and through large puddles, along the one road leading from the camp. The accompanying guards kept shouting at us and driving us with the butts of their rifles. Anyone with very sore feet supported himself on his neighbor's arm. Hardly a word was spoken; the icy wind did not encourage talk. Hiding his mouth behind his upturned collar, the man marching next to me whispered suddenly: "If our wives could see us now! I do hope they are better off in their camps and don't know what is happening to us." That brought thoughts of my own wife to mind. And as we stumbled on for miles, slipping on icy spots, supporting each other time and again, dragging one another up and onward, nothing was said, but we both knew: each of us was thinking of his wife. Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife's image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise.
A thought transfixed me: for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth -- that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way—an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, "The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory...." ^[7]

Another important conclusion for Frankl was:

If a prisoner felt that he could no longer endure the realities of camp life, he found a way out in his mental life– an invaluable opportunity to dwell in the spiritual domain, the one that the SS were unable to destroy. Spiritual life strengthened the prisoner, helped him adapt, and thereby improved his chances of survival.^[8]

Frankl's concentration camp experiences thus shaped both his therapeutic approach and philosophical outlook, as reflected in his seminal publications. He often said that even within the narrow boundaries of the concentration camps he found only two races of men to exist: decent and unprincipled ones. These were to be found in all classes, ethnicities, and groups.^[9] Following this line of thinking, he once recommended that the Statue of Liberty on the East coast of the US be complemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West coast, and there are reportedly plans to construct such a statue.^[10]
Frankl's approach is often considered to be amongst the broad category that comprises existentialists.^[11] Frankl, "who has devoted his career to a study of an existential approach to therapy, has apparently concluded that the lack of meaning is the paramount existential stress. To him, existential neurosis is synonymous with a crisis of meaninglessness".^[12]
He is thought to have coined the term Sunday Neurosis referring to a form of depression resulting from an awareness in some people of the emptiness of their lives once the working week is over.^[13][14] This arises from an existential vacuum, which Frankl distinguished from existential neurosis.^[15]

Related articles

• Book Review: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (imperfecthappiness.wordpress.com)

Abhijit Bhaduri on Talent Management

Abhijit Bhaduri talks about Preparing Talent for Tomorrow's Challenges in Knowledge@ Wharton

One of the ways in which we are going expand is to go with a localized talent pool in some markets, which means we are going to have to work very hard to assimilate people into the Wipro way of working and yet draw on the advantage of what you get when you get a lot of people coming in from the outside.

The second [aspect] is in the technology as it is emerging. There is a fair bit of change that happens because we work with a variety of partners [and] a variety of clients. How do we get people to keep their technical skills completely up-to-date? [We have] a huge engine which works on increasing the technical competency of people at all levels. We have a huge focus on developing project management skills because that is the crux of what we do. We have looked at creating a multifunction, multi-geography, and multi-business approach towards developing our leaders. One of the ways in which the leader's role is going to change is to work with a multi-generational workforce, and that's not a skill that is taught in most places. How do you work with people who are substantially younger or older than you? That is going to determine success or failure, because as we are getting into different markets, the profile of the workforce is very, very different.

The Top 25 HR Digital Influencers for 2010

Am proud to be listed at the 6th rank in the HR Examiner top 25 HR Digital Influencers for 2010.



The influencers project is part of a series that John Sumser is doing both at a personal level as well as with a digital algorithm. He already profiled me in the top 100 influencers in HR at number 60 after a long telephonic interview.

Here's what John has written about the list:

The HRExaminer Influence Project has two components. The digital research uses algorithms to discover and validate the influence of people who are actively engaged in online discussions of HR. The analog component of the project involves an interview process. We’re talking to 450 people in hour long interviews in order to identify the 100 most influential folks in HR in the real world.

The theory is that the two lists will start to blur over the next couple of years. It really is getting harder and harder to function in the HR industry without a vibrant public presence in social media. Every single person on our digital lists has a blog and a facebook account. Most use Twitter, LinkedIn and some other form of social tool.

Today, on what is more or less the first anniversary of the digital project, we’re releasing the 2010 version of the Top 25 influencers in HR. The change is dramatic. Many of the people who were prominent in our analysis a year ago have reduced their output, shifted their focus or changed their jobs. They fell off of the list, replaced by new voices with the ability to sustain routine publishing.

It’s been a blustery year in HR.

With the winds shifting towards measurable results and away from the legacy emphasis on process control, many people left the field and or changed jobs. The longer that cloud (or SaaS) technology is around, the less likely it is that HR folks will work in the trenches of administrivia.

The profession is changing.

So is the way people use social media. Last year’s Top 25 Influencers in HR were often early adopters who developed their audiences because they had proficiency with the technology. They may not have had quite as much substance as the new group.

Communities in the center of KM, Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

My blogging friend @billives blogged about my ex-HP colleague @StanGarfield on Communities of Practice during KM World on how to facilitate communities
Personally I think communities form around "identities" or what @gapingvoid calls "social objects" and the more deep the identities - the richer the communities.
Here are Stan's 10 steps to community management

Communities should be independent of organizational structure. They should be based on the content.
Two – Communities are different from organizations and teams. People are assigned to a team. Communities are better with self–selection for joining and remaining.
Third – Communities are people and not tools. You should not start with tech features. A platform is not a community. Readers of the same blog are not a community but that might be a byproduct.
Fourth – Communities should be voluntary. The passion of members should be what drives a community. You should make the community appealing to get members and not assign them to it.
Fifth – Communities should span boundaries. They should not be for a particular group likes Sales or IT. There is a lot of cross-functional or cross-geography learning that would be missed then. Diverse views help communities.
Sixth – You should minimize redundancy in communities. Consolidation helps to avoid confusion by potential members. It also reduces the possibility of not getting a critical mass. Reducing redundancy also enables more cross-boundary sharing.
Seven - Communities need a critical amass. You need at least 50 and likely 100. Usually ten percent are very active so you can get sufficient level of activity with 100 people.
Eight – Avoid having too narrow of scope for the community. Too much focus can lead to not enough members. Stan advises people to start broad and narrow if necessary. Or start as part of broader community and spin off if needed.
Nine – Communities need to be active. Community leaders need to do work, often in the “spare time” at their regular work. This means that the leader needs a passion for the topics so he or she will spend this extra time. There needs to be energy to get things going.
Ten – Use TARGETs to manage communities. TARGET includes: Types, activities, requirements, goals, expectations, and tools. Each of these issues needs to addressed and explained to prospective members. Tools are necessary, but the least important component, so they are placed last.

Related articles

• New report proves lack of community management "a huge missed opportunity for brands" (freshnetworks.com)
• Organizational Culture and Enterprise 2.0 (gautamblogs.com)

DNA Story on Facebook's Email/Messaging platform

Image via CrunchBaseI got quoted in this DNA Bangalore story on what we expected from Facebook's Messaging platform. This quote was taken 6 hrs before Mark Zuckerberg actually made the announcement and unveiled the platform.

Here's the quote

Why should you be excited?
This is a potential game-changing development, possibly at a par with Gmail’s launch. Gmail, apart from its matchless usability, is after all just another web-based e-mail service. If Facebook (FB) e-mail lets me import contacts from FB — keeping the hierarchy of contacts intact — it is a huge thing. People could use FB e-mail exclusively for their social network.
—Gautam Ghosh, blogger on workplace and social media issues

Check out the stories post the launch:

Related articles

• Facebook moves into multi-platform messaging (v3.co.uk)
• Facebook's messaging: Rise of the IM generation (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• What Facebook Messages is not (theglobeandmail.com)

Organizational Culture and Enterprise 2.0

Image via Wikipedia
I recently read a quote "First we shape our tools, then they shape us"




So is the case with organizations. Every tool/technology/structure process that gets implemented impacts the organization in ways that usually wasn't the original intent.



We saw the way Quality, ERP, KM, Email were all implemented and how they have impacted organizations.

So why would Enterprise 2.0 tools be any different?



Collaboration or Community or Employee Content Creation would happen in organizations that have a culture that already encourage such behavior. However if an organization has a culture steeped in command-control-compliance mindset, then a tool that gets implemented will be ignored or actively subverted.

So if you're a Enterprise 2.0 advocate in a traditional organization that is implementing "social tools" without thinking through it - you need to tell leaders:

1. The benefit of the movement to social collaboration will be apparent in the long term 
2. They will need to be role models to embrace social within the enterprise
3. People spending time on the tools won't be considered to be "goofing off"
4. Early Adopters would be recognized and acknowledged to enable them to be role models

What else would you suggest?

Facebook and HR - Free Speech?

Image via CrunchBase

Trish at hrringleader.com has an interesting post about how a firm fired an employee over a Facebook posting. I think these are areas that organizations need to tread carefully and educate employees on the accepted norms of behavior when writing anything about work, organizations etc on social media.
Does your organization have a progressive HR policy about how to deal with employees' social media behavior?
Here's the blog post:
Fired Over FaceBook Posting? It Can Happen to You

The New York Times ran an interesting article this week about an employee who was fired because of something she posted on her FaceBook page. An emergency medical technician at American Medical Response of Connecticut was told she had violated the company policy that prevents employees from depicting the company on social media sites. Additionally, it is thrown in that this was one reason for her termination and alluded that there were other reasons as well. According to the post, this is “the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements.”
Without knowledge of what the other reasons for the termination were, and if we had a case where the disparaging remarks were the only issue, should this company have fired the employee? Let’s assume that the company did a few steps before terminating. Here are a few questions I’d like answered:
* Did they use progressive discipline with the employee?
* Was this the first time the employee violated a policy?
* Is this policy violation serious enough to have termination as a consequence?
I think the bigger question for us and our organizations is, are we doing all we can to educate employees about using social media in a way that promotes professionalism? We’re not there yet. Many instances like this can be avoided first and foremost if the supervisor is open to feedback on a daily basis. Additionally, if the organization gives employees an outlet to let leadership know if there are issues brewing. And, while a majority of employees do not use social media as a platform to bash colleagues, I would recommend that for those few who do, education and discussion should be a major component of dealing with the issue before termination is used.

Related articles

• For Employees, Facebook Counts as Free Speech (mashable.com)
• Free Speech on Facebook an Employee Right, Federal Agency Says (readwriteweb.com)
• Is Talking Bad About the Boss on Facebook Grounds for Termination? (webpronews.com)
• Company Social Media Policies Challenged (socialmediatoday.com)
• Don't Overreact To Case Over Employee Being Fired for Badmouthing her Boss on Facebook (blogs.forbes.com)

Professionalism and Love of Work

Image by conskeptical via Flickr
When my friend @dhanvada tweeted that "A professional is a person who can do his/her best work even when he/she does not feel like it" that it brought to my notice what about my last post was bothering me so much.


When we talk about beauty in work we talk about being an artist- no matter whether you are number crunching or selling or managing back-end operations- and an artist is an amateur.


The root of the word amateur comes from the Latin (I think) word for "love"

So the dichotomy between being someone who loves his work and someone who is professional is that people can rely on the professional almost all the time.


However, and this is my submission - when an amateur does the work he/she loves then you can compare that with the best professional's work and say "This has soul in it. Heart. Beauty"

Unfortunately modern corporations don't see an ROI in "love of work" - and yet we know when we see it in elegant designs of computing devices by Apple, in the clean user interface of Google, in the thoughtful tools that Ideo designs, the in joyful movies that Pixar makes.


Because sometimes the search for ROI hides the opportunity to be great. To soar and to touch the sky.

But I know you'll remind me of the story of Icarus. Didn't he lose his wings and fall to the ground?

Yes he did. But for a brief time he reached higher than any human before him ever had.

Success is transient. Beauty and Art even more so. But the love of doing that lasts a lifetime.

And for that reason I want to be an Icarus.

Making Work Meaningful

Image by Larry Tomlinson via FlickrLots of people think that unless you are pursuing your passions you are wasting your life. However they never stop to explain that pursuing your passions is not enough to be successful. Pursuing your passions needs a lot of skills that being an entrepreneur calls for - like reframing skills, discovering or creating a market, and marketing and sales skills.


No wonder many of us don't choose the freelance or entrepreneurial route. And in cases like mine, choose it, explore it, and head back to the corporate world, which for all its imperfections enables you to do one thing and do that well.


If that is the case, why are so many of us unhappy at work?

Well the reasons are as varied as there are employees, and depends on what we expect from our jobs. Is it the need for achievement or affiliation or power as McClelland postulated?


Personally I think every human being wants to be part of something larger than himself or herself. An organization should look at goals that excite even the most world weary cynic and say "I am part of something meaningful. Something larger. Something beautiful"

I think it was Umair Haque who wrote that things that excite human beings like meaning, sense, love, beauty and passion are deliberately stripped and removed from the modern corporate in the single minded pursuit of profit without "purpose and passion"


Look at the workplace near you? Do you hire human beings or "human resources" or "human capital" or "talent" ? What we (and I am guilty as charged too) all try to do is seek conformance of people - hoping they just get their brains or hands to work and keep those pesky emotions away.

Unfortunately, unless you want to emotionally passionately change the world - you cannot see meaning in boring power points and excel sheets.


Until then corporate work for the majority of people will continue to be boring and drab unless you can start to see meaning in your own work and make sense and inject it with beauty and passion.

Have you done so? Are you an artist amongst plodders?

Tell me your story.

Related articles

• Joy on the Job (psychologytoday.com)

Sexual Harassment in the Knowledge Workplace

Image via Wikipedia
I was stunned to read this report in the Hindustan Times one day.

A pioneering survey by the NGO Centre for Transforming India has found evidence of rampant sexual harassment of women employees even in the classy, knowledge-driven environs of the Indian information technology and information technology-enabled services (IT/ITES) industries. It also reveals that

though most IT/ITES companies have some sort of mechanism for dealing with such offences, large numbers of women employees are unaware of them and the guidelines too are not strictly followed. 

See the numbers here It says that 88% of women have faced harassment by male colleagues and 50% have faced extreme harassment.  82% of incidents happened outside office premises and a majority said (72%) that the perpetrators were superiors. An overwhelming number (91%) did not report it due to fear of being victimised.



Such statistics are mind numbing and I am flabbergasted that organizations are still not recognizing that not making female employees safe and secure would hurt their competitiveness in the long term.

What do you think organizations should do to make women feel safer and ways to eradicate this menace?



Leave your comments and ideas below.

Related articles

• Cabinet clears Sexual Harassment Bill (ibnlive.in.com)

Thoughts on Enterprise 2.0 and the Social Intranet

Image by Ed Yourdon via FlickrWhat is the difference between Enterprise 2.0 and a "social" intranet? While E2.0 vendors might beg to differ on functionality here is the big difference according to me:

1.  In enterprise 2.0 the tools enable employee to employee communication, awareness and collaboration
2. In the "social intranet" while employees do form communities, the primary focus is on the organization to employee communication customised by the "social" data shared by the employee.

Two aspects of collaboration:

• Enable collaboration in the process of making decisions - which is what some social business tools enable
• Enable serendipitous discovery of people with shared interests and help people to connect and engage with each other

Obviously the "ROI" argument is easier for the first case - but somehow I suspect the payoff and impact of the second case can be higher and more disruptive

Unfortunately for organizations that seek to keep a control on the conversations, they will choose the "social intranet" over collaboration, as they are scared of the network and people to people connections.

On a different note, it's always surprising to me that the decision of an organization to embrace "social" is taken by a single person :)

Related articles

• The Inextricable Link Between Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 (thesocialorganization.com)
• Enterprise 2.0 Adoption: What Your People Don't Know Will Hurt You (allyis.com)
• Who should be in charge of Enterprise 2.0? (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• Weekly Poll: What "Enterprise 2.0" Technologies Are You Using Anyway? (readwriteweb.com)

The Need For Synthesis

We've all heard of Business Analysis and roles called "Analysts". However, as many of the people who have influenced me have said - Analysis is great, but what you need to think beyond is the ability to synthesize.



@Marcio_saito pointed me to his great post on synthesis and I just had to share it with you. In it he says:

 To innovate, create new business, develop new products, you need to detected patterns, look forward and synthesize the future. To increase the organizational capacity to innovate, you need to leverage good synthesis - or “analysis of the future” (I love the research firm IDC tagline).

So here are some thoughts I offer:

1. If you have no time nor interest in directly participating in the analysis, ignore the numbers and focus on the rationale. In my corporate career, I’ve seen too many decisions being driven by bogus cited statistics off a PowerPoint presentation.
2. Most of us have strong innate synthesizing skills. If you want to leverage that human characteristic, expose data at the point where it is needed, trust and empower people whenever possible. Afraid people will be confused or misled by incomplete or noisy data? Look at how good regular people are filtering the extreme product reviews at Amazon.com. Look at the vision test above.
3. Hire people with good analytical skills to look at the aggregation of data. Be honest and transparent when using the results of the analysis. If your intention is to start the spreadsheet from the bottom line, skip all the analysis crap. Real-time KPI dashboards are good because they inhibit “what-if” spreadsheet manipulations.
4. If all you are going to give people is decomposed tasks and personal MBO goals, they don't need “strong analytical skills”. Stop asking for what you don't need or, better, start offering holistic views of problems, data and the freedom to act outside the corporate boxes they are in.
5. If you are a successful business leader, it is probably because of you have above-average synthesizing skills. Remove the line about strong analytical skills from your resume.

Trust and Engagement

Have been musing recently on organizational trust and engagement.What builds trust between an employer? How does trust impact engagement? Does engagement lead to more trust or is it like a spiral?

Thoughts so far:

1. The relationship between an employer and employee is an unequal one. The employer is traditionally in a more powerful position - and therefore needs to build trust first.
2. Trust between two parties is built by meeting commitments. Being credible in deeds is key to starting building trust.
3. Going above and beyond the "letter of the contract" by both parties is integral to differentiate between a "professional/transactional" relationship and a relationship on trust.
4. Engaging others in your decision making process - effectively giving up control -helps in achieving the highest level of trust.

What do you think?