Developer outsources his job to China, wastes time on internet

Here's a whacky Saturday post. You know, these companies that outsource their work to other countries where they can get the job done at a cheaper rate?

A developer said "If they can do it, why can't I?"

So he outsourced his own job to China where they worked for $50,000 per year while he collected a salary of several hundred thousand dollars per year in the US.

Here's the story.

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The #SocialHR vendors emerging from India

English: topographic map of India (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Two years ago, I curated this list of Indian Enterprise 2.0 vendors and tools.

Increasingly I am coming across a lot of specific Social HR tools and thought I'd curate some of them here. If you know of any more vendors like this, do let me know.

The list is alphabetical in nature.

1. eMee -part of the Persistent Systems group, eMee is a product and services vendor providing gamification for employee onboarding, learning and engagement. Here's a review by HR/recruiting analyst John Sumser.
2. Greenclouds - A social recruiting app that offers a social job listing and an online application form also.
3. IDfy - Getting people to build credible online identities that they can use to apply for jobs. Freemium model. Helps organizations in background checks.
4. MindTickle - A gamified social learning and onboarding platform.
5. MyParichay - leverages social media to distribute jobs and create a career portal presence for employers on Facebook.
6. RippleHire - A gamified social referral and recruiting platform.
7. Triggero - Started off as a social recognition platform, now building in other features and becoming a full fledged social intranet offering
8. Wisestep - A recruiting platform that leverages social media to distribute jobs and track and reward  referrals too.
9. Wiztango - A social learning platform. While the founders are of Indian origin and based out of India, they seem to have a sizable presence in India too.
10. ZALP: A social media referral tool for recruitment

Know of any more? Leave the URL in the comments below and I'll research them and add to the list above.

Dell joins IBM to help clients become #socbiz

English: Dell Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

IBM and Dell have both been lauded for their ability to become "social businesses" listening to conversations on the social web, integrating social internally, unleashing the collective power of their employees, partners to build their brand advocacy and also to use social to deliver customer support.

However between the two organizations, IBM already had a "social" tool and services in the "IBM Connections" toolkit and therefore what it was becoming a social business, it was also selling the tools and services to move them along the same lines.

Dell in December announced that it would start a consulting services for honing customer listening, engagement and response operations. Its consulting offerings include:

• Best practice seminars on building a command center, gaining executive buy-in and support, launching a training program and other topics related to social media monitoring (SMM) 
• Design, build and operate a social listening command center 
• Listening and insight outsourcing using Dell’s command center and consultants Strategy advisory services.

Dell's example shows how an innovator who builds a new competence can leverage that for revenue by offering it as a service to the laggards.

Investing in people - literally! The rise of "me-funding"

I was going through Rohit Bhargava's presentation on 15 marketing trends in 2013, and this one caught my attention.

It's called "me-funding"

What’s the trend? Crowdfunding evolves beyond films or budding entrepreneurs to offer anyone the opportunity to seek “me-funding” to do anything from taking a life-changing trip to funding a college education. 

Wow! Imagine that!

And there are examples of such initiatives.

There's Upstart.com - allows anyone to invest in the future potential of an up and coming student. The platform not only allows for financial donations, but also encourages donors to offer mentorship as part of their support – and funds the entire process with a promise to pay back this support in real dollars when the funded youth begin to realize their potential (and make real money).

Then there's GoFundMe - You don’t need to start a business or create a monumental work of art to change your life. This site is filled with simple pleas from families and friends to do something small to help the important people in their lives. Examples include a 15 year old girl who wants to travel to Guatemala to work with underprivileged children and a daughter trying to raise money to send her mom on vacation. Together the site has built up one of the biggest collections of real people’s dreams on the web

 takeashine.org and givecollege.com - The spiraling costs of higher education are causing many to rethink the necessity of a traditional college education. For those who are still deciding to pursue a degree, the costs of college may not entirely be covered by financial aid. As a result, and host of new sites on the web allow anyone to raise money to crowdfund their own education. This ranges from costs of tuition to other college related payments.

Soon we'll see more and more of such examples - and I think large organizations should actually start funding individuals and groups who are pursuing their dreams and having a social impact, like in India we have Mahindra's Spark the Rise which is giving funding money to deserving social entrepreneurs.

What do you think?

Social and Business #socbiz - Emergent Mental Models

A segment of a social network (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We are on the cusp of a change that is slowly going to change organizations as we know them. And as the quote goes "If you find change difficult you are going to find irrelevance even less"

Came across this fascinating article in Forbes on just how different a "social CXO" is from a traditional CXO, and therefore the unlearning that needs to be done if their organizations is immense.

As the author +Joel York says:

While clean, systematic internal processes provide the control CXO’s need to manage efficiently, they are not the real world. The real world outside the corporate firewall where customers, partners and investors live is a messy, personal one. Harnessing the chaotic power of the organic conversations and processes that criss-cross the company social network and directing it toward a relevant business goal is the fundamental Social CXO challenge.

While this true, I also feel that the very purpose of organizations and the way they add value is undergoing a massive shift. The focus from shareholders to stakeholders is already reshaping corporate agendas, but the social era will make "social good" one of the central corporate goals. As this HBR article asks "Can companies both do well and do good?" 

As +JP Rangaswami writes in his blog posts, we are perhaps going back to a simpler time, when personal relationships were central to conduct business, expect now with scale "The plural of personal is social" and the social customer, like the social citizen, is a radically different person than the traditional customer and citizen. And yes, I will add the social employee and the social candidate to that mix too.

As someone tweeted yesterday "Social doesn't change your company culture, it exposes it", so forget about hiding behind the corporate firewall, secrets will be shared, communities will be formed around social objects

So in this age - where IP and stocks will not be the key differentiators between companies, we will see the companies that will create value by enabling the network, the sharing and the shared community it forms. See the change that is starting in higher education, where value is being unlocked slowly by surely.

When the dominant media of an age changes, it impacts society and shapes it differently, the organizations of tomorrow will be based on new mental models (as Santosh Desai says in this presentation)