Am featured in today's Hindustan Times

So I am moderating a panel at the Shine HR Summit at Mumbai on 4th, and they asked me some questions - here are my answers

Oh the interview is online. You can read it all here

Crowdsourced: Indian Twitternagar's favorite bloggers

So I asked the Indian twitternagar for who was their favorite Indian blogger.

Here are the responses I have received until now:

Himanshu Kapadia said the late Rehab was his favorite blogger
Ruchi tells me her favorite bloggers are Meeta Sengupta, Abhijit Bhaduri and Manish Chauhan
Shreeharsha tweeted that his favorites were Nirmala (Whom I have followed also :), Sorav Jain, Vinaya Naidu, Jogi and Sandhya
Rajesh Dogra said his favorite blogger is Jyothi Menon
Vibgyor tweeted that his favorite blogger (and also mine) is my friend Gaurav Mishra
Shahid nominated the eminently readable commentary blog on Indian media, Churumuri.
Rimsha (from Pakistan) shared that Kiran Manral's blog is the only one she reads.
Rakesh Kumar nominated two of my favorite bloggers Manu Prasad and Karthik Srinivasan
Guillaume said that uber blogger Amit Varma's posts on poker made him his choice
Ashish Basu said that Nitin Gokhale (Security and Strategic Affairs Editor at NDTV) and Meeta Sengupta were his favorites
Pallavi shared that the Mad Momma, Sunny Days, Diptakirti (my fave Bollywood blog), Just a Mother of two, and Thirty Six And Counting

Quoted in the latest Chief Learning Officer magazine

My twitter friend Dan Pontfract the author of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization, and Head of Learning & Collaboration at TELUS recently wrote an article in the Chief Learning Officer magazine.

The article is titled "the social C-suite" and Dan says if the C-suite increases its social media use internally and externally, it could be used as a tool to impact organizational competence. You should buy the magazine - I am not sure if it is online right now.

Dan was kind enough to ask me if I would be willing to answer some questions that he would answer. I agreed. Here's what he asked and my answers.

*         What benefits does 'going social' bring members of the C-Suite with respect to internal employee engagement?

Remember the days of T-groups and OD interventions that originated out of NTL? Their objective was to make organizations more open and transparent. The thought being, if feedback loops were open and transparent, then it would be an adaptive and learning organization. "social" shorn of the buzzwords, aims at creating that organization finally. The benefits would be an organization where opinion and information is unfiltered and real time. Eventually creating an organization that responds faster to stimuli - both internal and external.

*         What are 3 key attributes C-Suite members should employ when 'going social' with their employees?

- Willingness to rethink the way they view "management" and "leadership"
- start thinking in flows rather than stocks as Hagel, Brown say in their book "The Power of Pull"
- Stop thinking of the boundaries as opaque walls - both internally and externally. Think of them as porous, translucent membranes.
-Be ready to fail. In public. Embarrassingly. Remember, it's a world of flows. You will recover faster as you will learn faster.

*         What if the C-Suite doesn't go social. What happens or will happen over time?

- The organization will go on. Things will be the same. For a time. Then the slow continental shifts of time will make sure that the organization gets irrelevant. And dies.

The #IndiaHRchat on Twitter. Why you should participate

Image via CrunchBase

For those people not on Twitter, here's an introduction to Twitterchats. A Twitterchat is a conversation centered around a topic which is tracked by a hashtag (denoted by a # sign followed by the name) - So #indiaHRchat would be a twitter chat. This was taken up by Tanvi Gautam (Singapore based consultant) and almost a month ago she hosted the first such chat with special guest Abhijit Bhaduri (Chief Learning Officer - Wipro) on the topic of social media for L&D.

Today evening is the second Twitter chat that Tanvi is hosting - this time the guest is Anand Pillai, Chief Learning Officer of Reliance Industries, and he would be talking on Personal Branding for HR professionals.

The great thing about Twitter chats is that they are not a one on one conversation and that anyone can participate. The open nature of Twitter makes it possible for even people who did not know about it to get involved.

So if you're on Twitter and interested in the topic, join us today from 7 pm IST.

Here's what happened at Abhijit's Twitter chat.

McKinsey on 6 social media skills for leaders

McKinsey Quarterly has a brilliant article on how leaders need to build social media skills, at a personal and organizational/strategic level. Along with examples from GE.

So if you're a leader in an organization which of these skills would you focus on depending on organizational priorities?

#SocialRecruiting news: MyParichay and Shine.com tie up to launch social job board

In the boldest step yet, Shine.com the job portal of HT Media, has tied up with social recruiting app MyParichay to launch a solution called "Social Bar"

Using their online network of Facebook contacts, job seekers on Shine.com can now get their foot in the door or an interview with a potential employer and expand their professional network on Facebook. One of the main benefits of the MyParichay Social Bar™ is that Shine.com users are able to see which of their Facebook friends and friends of friends work in the company that posted the open job on Shine.com. Once they have this information they can forward their resume to these connections and increase their chances of getting an interview.

 Shine.com has been a follower in the job board market in India to Naukri, Monster and even TimesJobs. So it's interesting to see them trying out something innovative like social recruiting to break away from traditional job boards.

The future of education and learning is social and gamified

So my friend +Gaurav Mishra shared this article about the 10 most innovative companies in education, and the list is led by companies like Coursera and Udacity, who are taking education out of the physical confines of classrooms.

This change of "social and gamification" is coming to corporate learning too, as this post at HBR shows how Deloitte made learning a game.

What is gamification?

Gamification takes the essence of games — attributes such as fun, play, transparency, design and competition — and applies these to a range of real-world processes inside an organization, including learning & development. The technology research firm Gartner, Inc. predicts gamification will be used in 25 percent of redesigned business processes by 2015, this will grow to more than a $2.8 billion business by 2016, and 70 percent of Global 2000 businesses will be managing at least one "gamified" application or system by 2014. 

Typically customer service and loyalty programs have been gamified mostly. Employee recognition and rewards is also being gamified by vendors like Work.com

I predict that the next big growth would be in corporate learning and development. So, are corporate learning leaders in India looking forward to such disruptive technology? That learners would love, but would mean L&D folks themselves would have to unlearn and learn a lot :)

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.

Related articles

• Now that's what I call outsourcing!
• How to earn a six-figure salary looking at cat photos: Computer programer sacked after outsourcing job to China
• Developer Fired After He Outsourced His Job To China
• Computer programmer 'outsourced job to China'
• Man Outsources Job to China, Watches Cat Videos Instead
• Developer fired for outsourcing job to China

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.