buckleyPLANET

Impulsive, Rebellious Course-Corrections

I was just reading a short post by Deepak Chopra over on LinkedIn (love their new content strategy, btw) on his best mistake where he made the impulsive and rebellious decision to walk away from a crappy job and a superior who had humiliated him in front of his peers – and how that decision to walk away had changed the course of his career, and his life. It made me think about a change I made to my own life…well, a decision to change. I thought I’d share it here (and then get back to my regular work).

Sometimes it can take something pretty dramatic to inspire change. In 2004, my mother whom I had been estranged from for many years, visited my wife and kids and I from out of state, and we had a nice little visit with her and my sister and her twin girls, who had just turned one year. It had started as an uncomfortable visit, but things really opened up and for the first time in quite a while, I started to feel close to my mom again, and was glad my young kids had a chance to visit with their grandmother – two of them for the first time. As we walked my mom, my sister, and her two girls out to their car, I strapped one of my nieces into her car seat and shut the door – and remarked out loud at how light the car door felt, joking to my sister that they were traveling cross-country in a tin can. Even as they pulled out of the driveway and drove away, I turned to my wife and commented again “That car offers no protection at all.”

The next morning I awoke to the phone ringing, with another sister on the line crying, letting me know that my mom and one of the babies had been killed in a rollover outside of Reno. I immediately got dressed, and taking my two oldest children with me (who were 11 and 9 at the time) because I didn’t want to drive alone, we made the 3 hour drive to Reno to see my badly injured sister and her daughter.

I’m sharing this because the event was clearly a shock to my system, and on the way up to Reno and back, I thought a lot about my life, how much time I was spending commuting and away from my family for a job that I didn’t much care for, and how much we needed to make a change. The transition took a few months – fairly quick, since I was already consulting and had some flexibility with my clientele. My wife and I ultimately decided to leave California and move closer to another sister living in the Seattle area, and we sold our house in a matter of days (hello housing bubble!), and I did not renew my contract with my main existing client, so work wrapped up in a matter of days. Although the money was good, I simply did not enjoy the work.

The real impact from this event with my mom was the decision to take back control over who I worked for, and what projects I selected (as a consultant or an FTE). Chopra’s article reminded me of this – what some may view as impulsive rebellion I view more as internal alignment to personal standards or guidelines. I realized about myself that I need to believe in what I am doing, and to have genuine passion for my work, and that I need to like the people I work with and for. Is that so insane? I’m amazed at what I put up with for so long – which is not to say that I haven’t wandered into situations and companies where I knew I should not have wandered, but I am much more quick to course-correct. I’ve gone through some difficult times by standing up for what I thought was the right path forward for me (and I’ve taken a beating for speaking very openly about my perspective, when I probably should have kept my mouth shut), but have always landed on my feet and even improved my situation by sticking with these internal standards.

For those who run into me at an event these days, its pretty evident that I wear my passion on my sleeve, and that I enjoy what I do. Hopefully it does not take a life-changing event to help people realize that they should follow those impulsive tendencies once in a while, and rebel a little. My two cents.

Ratings, Rankings, and Defending Mediocrity

I have never been a fan of the Jack Welch / General Electric model of employee rankings and ratings as part of the annual review cycle. When done poorly (which is most often the case) the process can be demeaning to the employee, an overhead burden on the manager, and an ongoing point of contention between leadership and the masses. Case in point: a manager has 7 direct reports, all high-performers and meeting or exceeding their annual commitments. But during the review cycle, the manager is forced to move one individual into the forced ranking of the bottom 10%, which will likely limit their development and progress in their career at the company, if not drive them out altogether.

Now, on the one side, it allows managers to regularly clean house on employees that  need to go. I get that. The problem is that far too many good employees are affected by this model. And the model does very little to identify crappy managers who use the system to pick favorites, promote friends, and thereby institute mediocrity. Weak managers who go into management deliberations to negotiate and position their employees against peer teams in the larger pool usually fail to properly defend the work of their team, nor fight for fair compensation. It's no wonder that Jack Welch later rejected the practice of forced rankings, acknowledging that it is only effective in temporary situations when an organization or company requires rebuilding. It was never meant to be the standard, ongoing model.

Now, I no longer work for a company following this model, thank goodness, but some recent conversations brought back some thinking around the topic, and how best to identify -- and root out -- mediocrity in an organization.

My own management style has long followed the ideas within Marcus Buckingham's book First, Break All the Rules -- a must-read for any manager. Buckingham promotes three concepts (among others): hire the best people possible, figure out what they are good at, and optimize the overall team output by putting those individual strengths to good use. Many times in my career as a consultant and as a people manager I found myself in a team that, on the surface, had several people who were viewed by peer managers as "not well-rounded." My response? I don't care if a person is not able to present well in front of a crowd if their core function is business analysis and complex problem solving. Where I believe I was the most effective as a team lead was when I was able to put people into roles where they showed the most passion, the most talent, and where I was able to structure my team around those strengths to fill in the gaps so that the overall team was effective. For example, pair a brilliant analyst with an organized and well-spoken project manager who may not have the technical skills to stand alone -- but together, they exceed expectations.

The key to successful project management, to a team leadership role, and to a successful employee review cycle is to have a constant dialog with your direct reports about what is happening within the company, how the employee is measuring up to their commitments against their strengths, and to provide active feedback in the moment -- as things are happening, positive or negative. I remember numerous occasions of pulling someone aside in the hall or into my office to discuss a mistake made or a customer concern, letting the person know the reality of the situation right there, in the moment -- and, more importantly, helping them devise a plan for moving past the issue, repairing a relationship, and learning from it. Similarly, I would let them know when there was positive feedback from the executive team or a customer, highlighting the things that went right. But the point was that I did not wait until the annual review to have that conversation, to let the employee know where they stood. And the process of assessing skills and making adjustments is constant, recognizing that the requirements of the business, the needs of your team, and the skills of your direct reports are constantly evolving.

One problem of the forced ranking system is that it often catches an individual quite by surprise. Monthly or weekly status reports may receive little or no feedback, so when suddenly an employee -- who thought they were at least meeting expectations -- is told that they are failing, they almost always feel blindsided. In my experience, the factors that most impacted that employee tended to fall into the "not well-rounded" category rather than look to their strengths and actual, day-to-day performance.

But the idea that got me writing was really about the problem of defending mediocrity. The forced ranking problem adds to it, perpetuates it, primarily because the best folks -- the risk takers, the creative types who are going to help your product or your service leapfrog the competition -- will not tolerate it for long. Nobody wants to work within that environment, except those who are content with working a 9 to 5, not making any waves, pushing through until retirement.

There are always exceptions, for sure, so don't bother sending me hate mail about how wonderful your job is. I am writing from my own experiences, having worked for several very large companies with different flavors of this practice. Ok, climbing down off of the soapbox now...

A Perspective on SharePoint, Yammer, and Microsoft

I’ve been going back and forth about how to approach this topic for the past week. There’s been a lot of thrashing within the channel, and more than a few industry analysts, SharePoint MVPs, and diehard Microsoft fanboys alike are finding it difficult to articulate much of what is going on. I’m going to make an attempt, even though my plan to come up with a quick little narrative to describe all of the moving parts has resulted in more of a list. I think that each of these topics is worthy of discussion, but i wanted to get the ball rolling by surfacing them all at once. So I am going with the list – which is more of a stream of consciousness effort to just get the many ideas floating around in my head down onto paper (er, I mean screen).

What is happening with Microsoft and SharePoint? Why so much change, so quickly, and when the products don’t yet feel like they’re ready for prime time? What are the industry drivers, and how are people responding to these changes?

Hopefully this provides some value and insight to my readers, and your feedback is welcome. My thoughts are boiled down to the following themes:

• Microsoft wanted an uber-release. My impression is that hell-or-high-water they were going to have a major marketing event by releasing a major new version of every platform, whether or not the company was ready for it. Feedback from some of the most respected SharePoint MVPs and MCMs has been that this version of SharePoint, while including some fantastic new features and a much more end user-centric design, has a lot of issues. Of course, you have to balance the bugs with the fact that the new release cadence (more on that in a minute) has Microsoft seemingly more responsive than ever, and I fully expect new features and necessary fixes to happen at a fairly fast clip. As a business/marketing guy, I understand the desire for this coordinated release cycle, but I think the data shows (so far) that Microsoft might have been better off waiting for all pieces of the story to mature.
• Yammer was a protectionist move that may, in the end, revitalize Microsoft. The story has evolved a bit to fit Microsoft’s marketing campaigns, but when the company acquired Yammer last year for $1.2b, Sr. Director of SharePoint Jared Spataro made it clear at the Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto that they did it for two reasons: 1) to stop a growing competitive threat (Yammer had been planning to build out more SharePoint-like features), and 2) to give Microsoft an instant foothold in a cloud-based, viral social platform. What most Softies did not expect was the rate at which Yammer has impacted other areas within the business. There has been an internal “dogfooding” initiative looking at how internal teams are collaborating, which may (according to rumors and speculation) be impacting (positively) the roadmaps of other products and services beyond what has been formally announced. It makes sense that Microsoft use the social model to rethink the Microsoft Office suite, for example. I have no inside information here – just thinking logical next steps as Microsoft looks for ways to innovate, and to some extent ride this wave of enthusiasm around enterprise social.
• Microsoft is serious about moving to an “online first” delivery model. This is more than just a SharePoint/Office365 decision – Microsoft is attempting to change the direction of a speeding train, moving toward a more agile development model and, more specifically, a cloud-based delivery model. I recently purchased a new personal laptop for home, and needed to purchase the full Office suite. I went online and ordered the entire productivity suite via Office365 Home Premium model, which I am able to install on up to 5 devices, with real-time updates as they come through (absolutely LOVE this model for home). This is the model that, I believe, most highlights the impacts from the Yammer acquisition – moving all software delivery to the cloud. Buy Office at a Best Buy, and what you’ll get is an empty box and a code to download. The Yammer model also gives Microsoft the ability to perform AB testing, allowing them to test out changes very rapidly, getting instant adoption metrics on those new changes. It’s the future of software, folks.
• All KPIs point to Office365 and Yammer. If I sound like I’m talking out of both sides of my mouth, maybe I am, but I am not a fan of the hard push by all Microsoft organizations toward Office365 and Yammer without understanding what my business actually needs. I do understand that Microsoft is trying to maintain its customer base, with threats coming from upstarts as well as the big names: Apple, Google, countless players in the social space, and IBM -- but I have to think about my customers and their needs, and how those needs may not match up to Microsoft’s desire to flip a switch and have everyone instantly move to the cloud.  Honestly, I believe a dual marketing strategy would have better served Microsoft, announcing a side-by-side on prem and online strategy, rather than a seemingly abrupt forced march toward the cloud [please note: nobody is being forced, per se. I’m using emotional language here to make a point]. My opinion on the matter is public record – people should look closely at their business requirements and make sound decisions based on what their company and their end users need, not chase after every shiny, new technology. Your security, compliance, data sovereignty issues may preclude you from moving to the cloud today, regardless of how good a deal sounds.
• Microsoft underestimated the demand for on prem and hybrid. Gartner estimates that 1/3 of SharePoint enterprise customers will never move into the cloud. Sitting here at the Gartner conference in San Diego, I heard a rumor from two different people who claimed that an analyst stated – I think it was a misquote or misunderstanding, but both people insisted its what they heard – that Microsoft will be sunsetting (stopping development and support) SharePoint on prem. Not only does this go against everything Microsoft has publicly stated, its just not realistic. It’s false, people. If your focus is entirely social – based more on communication and short-term sharing activities than on document management – you may not understand this issue, and why people are concerned about the strong push toward the cloud. But if you have made huge investments in on prem customizations and LOB app integrations, you need what Tom Austin at Gartner refers to as “asset inertia” before you move to the cloud. You need to achieve a certain ROI on what you’ve already spent before you can start thinking about the next version. And, honestly, your decisions to move should be based on business value, not pressure from any technology vendor.
• Microsoft is being pulled in two directions. We all need to recognize that Microsoft needs to change, to build out their solutions based on where software is moving – which is to the cloud. Competitors, primarily Google, are forcing them to move, while many enterprise customers are pulling them back, trying to slow them down due to their massive investments in the old model. That’s Microsoft’s issue here -- don’t move quickly enough, lose future customers. Move too quickly, lose existing customers.
• “Yammer = Social” is not a strategy. It is widely agreed that Microsoft has done a less-than-stellar job of communicating their social strategy. Telling us over and over again that Social = Yammer is not sufficient. Go onto the Yammer.com/SPYam site and you may see an almost religious battle on how one crowd is old and behind the times and unplugged from technology, while another crowd doesn’t understand customer needs, business ROI, or enterprise software in general. Yammer is a great tool, and I actively use the platform every day on internal and external groups. But my primary complaint is from the standpoint of my primary SharePoint customers, and the fact that Yammer today is completely disconnected from SharePoint. Inserting a Yammer feed into my on prem SharePoint site is not a solution. The feed from Yammer “breaks” many of the SP2013 features by moving the dialog of my team outside of what is being tracked (the core SharePoint activities which show up in a SharePoint social feed, like adding a document, liking something, following someone, etc). Having a Yammer web part available, allowing me to drop my Yammer stream into a team site is not sufficient. I get it that Microsoft has some hard work to do – integrate streams, unify profiles, unify navigation – but until that functionality is there, stop telling me that somehow Yammer is a valid solution to my SharePoint social needs. It just isn’t. It’s a separate solution – it has a valid story on its own. It doesn’t need a convoluted marketing message mucking up the story for both SharePoint and Yammer. Until there is integration with my SharePoint activities and taxonomy, Yammer will have a separate value prop than SharePoint social.
• Individuals need to watch their tone and message, listen more and spew fewer marketing talking points. There is an incredible amount of ageism happening within the channel -- as if only those under 25 understand what is happening. Clearly most under 25 don’t understand the difference between redirecting the ship versus setting the ship ablaze (and here I am adding to the antagonism). If you really believe that the gray-haired individuals in tech don’t “get it” when it comes to the cloud, you need to get out more. The reality is that what we’re experiencing here is nothing new – these technologies are incremental to technology we’ve been working on for the past decade or more. The disconnects, in my opinion, are around passion for new technology versus delivering actual, measurable business value. The conversations about how and when to move to the cloud are hard discussions. There are very real arguments – business as well as technology arguments – for not moving to the cloud right away…but I do believe everyone will be there, eventually.

I am confident Microsoft has thought long and hard about just about everything here. While I believe they have made some mistakes in their strategy, as a former employee with some understanding about the planning process inside Microsoft, I can see why they’ve made some of these decisions – and overall, I believe they are moving in the right direction. Microsoft always pursues features and products that will bring in the most net-new customers and while it may feel like they sometimes cater too much to customers on old technology, that is also the reason why most enterprises stick with Microsoft, because their products and platforms are feature-rich, and enterprise-class.

Overall, the numbers will improve. Microsoft has shown time and time again that they can come from behind and get through major changes. Gartner estimates that Microsoft received just over 50%  of the cloud user win rates in 2012 over Google’s 33%, but they expect the overall pie to get much larger, and with it, Microsoft’s portion will increase. They believe the size of the marketplace for cloud office/productivity solutions in 2017 will be four-times the size of the 2012 market, and predict Microsoft’s share will increase to 60 to 65% of that increased market. Gartner predicts that Google, on the other hand, will decrease their win rate to 20 to 33%, still showing growth, just not the size of what Microsoft will capture. 

Growing an Engaging Customer community

I am a big fan of the Tweet Jam concept: a gathering of a dozen or more experts around a specific topic and a short list of questions, all done via Twitter in an hour-long session. Of course, it’s an open forum – anyone can join in and participate. There are usually a handful of lurkers who join into the dialog, but most people just follow along. And then there are the 1 or 2 folks who are clueless about what is happening, and complain that you’re spamming your Twitter followers.

Note: if you’re complaining that the volume on Twitter is too much, you’re doing it wrong. Get a tool like Hootsuite and start building filtered views into the Twitter stream.

Today’s Tweet Jam was CMSWire’s 39th session, based on growing and engaging customer communities. You can find details on the primary participants here, and a follow-up article with highlights from the session in two parts: here and here. [Full disclosure – I am a regular contributor for CMSWire, and so I am often invited to participate in these kinds of events]

The questions posed by the CMSWire host: Which is more important — grassroots or company owned communities? How are companies tapping into these outlets to inform business decisions? What impact does social media have on communities?

And here are the individual questions asked, and my responses to each:

1. What are the most important communities for organizational success and who owns them?
   --hmm...that could change per company/industry, but one critical internal community is support
   --some orgs build Centers of Excellence around project mgmt, product mgmt, service, ops, etc
   --some of the most important/successful communities are organically grown around a specific need
   --agree with @MJAutomatic -- when you assert ownership, it often kills community
   --ownership is often determined by the stakeholders, and then by who is most passionate
2. What are the top three opportunities customer communities provide organizations today?
   --1) Visibility into the collective unconscious 2) sounding board for ideas 3) accountability for taking action
   --the real value is getting a better understanding of the customer experience, internal or external
   --practically speaking, connecting passionate advocates to your customers reduces support costs
   --an annual survey will not provide an accurate picture of customer sentiment that community can uncover
   --participating in the community helps find new opps for your products or services, maybe an entirely new direction
3. How do you measure / evaluate that value?
   --organizations need to get better about understanding this data, appending to CRM data
   --product teams may mine social data for trends, help inform roadmap decisions
   --important to track community connections similar to marketing campaigns, show influence over time
   --it can be difficult to quantify a qualitative activity, so sometimes you have to get creative
   --I don't think leads, conversions, or sales r right way to measure, but you can track # of influenced deals
   --even gamification requires a planned outcome, which you then measure
4. Name three best practices for successful customer communities.
   --1) passion 2) purpose 3) flexibility
   --you need to constantly look for new community leaders, refresh the pool
   --it takes a lot of commitment. Most fail almost immediately by thinking it will self-sustain
5. List the three biggest challenges to running a successful customer community.
   --1) time 2) leaders 3) time
   --it takes consistency. Honestly, this is one place where volume is as important as quality
   --If you have a shared understanding of what the community is trying to do, content and leadership will follow
6. Has social media changed customer communities? If so, in what ways?
   --social has extended the long-tail of customer communities
   --social has made community possibly online or off, synchronous or asynch, across every timezone
   --the problem w/ social: the more people engage online, the less they feel they need to engage in person
   --successful communities learn to bridge the gap between online and offline engagement
   --at the end of the day, they're just tools to help develop real relationships
   --social scoring allows you to see the real reach/impact/amplification of your fans (and critics)
   --social has replaced cotton as the fabric of our lives
7. How will customer communities evolve in the next year?
   --even deeper ties into CRM. more companies will seek to measure their activity and impact
   --there will be a much larger push for community tools on mobile devices
   --i think most companies now view communities as an important aspect of their strategies

Of course, its more meaningful when in the context of the live dialog. I am often reading as fast as I can, retweeting the best messages from other participants, sometimes starting up side conversations. The hour just flies by, and I always end up following a couple dozen new faces, and gaining as many new followers who are, generally speaking, more engaged than your average Twitter follower.

I also want to point out that this was my first Tweet Jam using the Twubs platform. What a fantastic tool! It records your Twitter feeds for posterity, allows you to reserve a unique hashtag, and provides an interface for participants which automatically appends all messages with the appropriate hashtag (in this case #cxmchat) making it that much easier for people to participate. I will definitely be using this tool in the future.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

For those of you who are not connected to me on Facebook, you may not have seen that I posted the picture to the right with a snarky response to Microsoft’s tagline: “Don’t let your next great idea get lost in someone’s inbox.” to which I replied “No, instead let your next great idea get lost in an untagged, ungrouped social stream.”

The Yammerfication of all Microsoft channels is in full swing. I’m not trying to beat up on Yammer – I actually really like the platform, and participate in multiple public and private networks on a daily basis. But what bugs me is the heavy-handed marketing push around Yammer without context. I think my comment nails the problem on the head: for those who believe moving your entire dialog will break down every data silo, think again. Social improves the story, but organizations that have no process, that tend to bury ideas, will find that moving to social only moves the problem.

Don’t believe me? Deploy Yammer within your enterprise and watch how, early on, people will create logical groups, tag up content. Then wait a week. That’s about how long it takes for people to create illogical, mostly redundant groups, and stop tagging content as they upload documents, share links, and comment. Give it a couple more days, and most people stop adding anything to the groups, with all content, links, and conversations happening at the root site. Want to tap into the wonderful search features? Hopefully the tags you need to find that relevant content were used somewhere along the way.

I’ve been writing a lot about the differences between structured and unstructured collaboration (Links will trickle in as the content goes live, so be sure to follow me at @buckleyplanet) with SharePoint representing structured (yes, it has unstructured capabilities, as well) and Yammer on the other end of the spectrum as the hottest unstructured collaboration solution on the market. The poster shown above, which is being posted across the Microsoft campus as a tool to encourage employees to use the platform, is a great example of the disconnect in messaging.  With unstructured and structured collaboration, it is not an either/or proposition. Organizations need a blended experience. Tools like Yammer, to be effective within the enterprise, must be connected to the structured experience if we are going to truly build a tool or environment where innovative ideas are not lost within our silos of information.

If I post an update on my Facebook page, people can read it and comment. I might respond. They may comment again, Like it, attach a link, a picture, or a file. I might @mention people or #tag the content within the body of my message. All of this interaction is unstructured. It is data that is stored unconnected to any taxonomy, project or site hierarchy, albeit with limited search value. Maybe someone wants to search for conversations around a person or a particular tag, but that is rare from an end user standpoint (most search is done on the back-end to position advertising). And who cares? You don’t expect Facebook to serve as an analytical business tool. It serves its purpose.

However, with SharePoint you *do* expect these interactions to tie into a broader body of content. I want to have the social dialog around my project documentation, but i want that conversation to be within context of my project, my team, my business activities. If I am a legal team, where eDiscovery is a core aspect of my environment, I want to have similar social interactions – but need that threaded discussion around my documents to be a part of my eDiscovery results. Simply adding a Yammer feed within my SharePoint environment does not meet my business needs – Yammer needs to be able to connect to and pull from my taxonomy, add to my folksonomy, and adhere to my governance rules.

I didn’t mean to get on a soapbox here, but obviously it is something at the top of mind, and messaging like the poster above is misleading – it fogs the underlying business need for unstructured collaboration engine atop a structured chassis, if you will. It’s why I was quoted by RedmondMag’s Jeffrey Schwartz as saying Microsoft’s social strategy was “clear as mud.” Unless the messaging gets cleaned up and points to a roadmap of integration, I predict a lot of angry customers one year from now looking to migrate off of Yammer into something with a few more rules and some structure.

Freudian Personality Types and the Many Faces of Influence

While in Columbus, Ohio earlier this year I was hanging out with members of the Buckeye SPUG and folks from one of Axceler's local partners, ICC, and got into a fascinating conversation with Josey Neidhart (@JoseyNeidhart) from ICC on the topic of social influence and, interestingly enough, Freudian personality types. Actually, we started talking about the Insights program I went through with my team while at Microsoft, which lead to a conversation about team dynamics and leadership styles, which then lead to the topic of social influence. I had hoped to write an article or two on some of the topics we discussed, but what prompted me to action this week was seeing an infographic (which I tweeted out a couple times) on the primary personas behind social influence.

I'm sure I've lost a couple folks. Not exactly a straight line between these things, I know, but here is how it all fits together in my mind:

Insights. While working for Microsoft, I would visit with various individuals and from time to time see in their offices on a shelf little colored foam building blocks, like Legos. Each set of these blocks included one  of each in red, blue, yellow, and green. I was told it had something to do with a team-building exercise, but that was about it. After joining my second organization, all of the people-managers attended an offsite where an organizational development team from a vendor called Insights were on site to guide us through their Insights Discovery process. Based on work by psychologist Carl Jung, the goal of the program was to help people understand their own management or leadership style, and from there to understand how those styles connected with, related to, and managed the other styles.

I won't bore you with details, but it is a very well organized and useful team development exercise -- one which I was able to draw upon numerous times to help resolve conflicts within my own team. The colored blocks represented the four primary styles: Red for task-driven, or your classic A-personality type; Blue for data-driven; Green for relationship or nurturing personalities; and Yellow for collaborative, expressive personalities. Each of us has all of these qualities and draw upon them as needed, but we tend to lead with one, and can, with a little training, identify the traits in others fairly easily.

No surprises: I am almost equal Yellow/Red (on a scale of 1 to 100, I was 82/78), followed by Green and a small sliver of Blue. I want to take collaborative action, now! I'll high-five you on the way (no hugs, please) and will send you an email on the data I need you to gather.

Pathwise. In my waning days at Microsoft, I was introduced to a fairly in-depth leadership development program by my friend Heather Hamilton (@Notyoursugar) called Pathwise, which was developed by psychologists Todd Hollow-Bist and Chad Hattrup. Similar to Insights, one of the goals of Pathwise is to help leaders identify and understand their own style and those of the people around them with the idea that understanding these styles will help you better understand people's motivations, and your own reactions/responses to people and circumstances. Much of their program (outlined here) draws upon Freudian concepts such as ego, Id, and oral fixation (joking about that last one), as well as material from Psychological Diagnosis: Understanding Personality Structure in the Clinical Mind, which is pretty much "the" textbook on character pathology, outlining the 9 personality types.

Whether or not you agree with Freud or Jung is not the point. When people are backed into a corner, we regress and respond with certain personality traits. The reality is that we all lead with one of these personality types, just at a higher-functioning level than what is displayed when we are under duress. And if we better understand our own personality a little bit better, and how we may react to certain situations, like stress or organizational conflict then we can prepare ourselves for those situations and, in the end, become better managers and better leaders (see how I separate those two things? That's because they are very different)

Hopefully these two topics -- Insights and Pathwise -- make sense together. They are similar programs, though Pathwise is much more in depth (and a major time investment), and for those who may be looking for this kind of leadership development program, I highly recommend it if you are based in the Seattle or San Francisco areas.

[Side note: I helped organize the first Pathwise cohort at Microsoft, and worked to help get them approved as a Microsoft training vendor. It has really caught on there, with a dozen or more cohorts and two of my former VPs having completed the program]

Social Influence. If you follow this blog, you know that I've written a few posts about the growing category of social influence. Making the biggest headlines is Klout, but they are really just scratching the surface to the potential of this facet of business intelligence and analytics. The idea behind this relatively new category of analytics is not just about gathering data from social networks, but look at depth of engagement and ability to inspire action. Klout just happens to be an easy model to discuss because most people have had some experience with it. Klout looks at your activities across all of the main social networking platforms, and gives you a score between 1 and 100. It's not about how many people follow you, or the number of tweets you send out -- although they both factor in -- but in how your network responds. If you send a tweet or post a picture on Facebook which then gets re-tweeted or shared with others, who then share with even more people, THAT is social influence.

Early on, Klout also included in your individual profile a personality category, or classification. You might be a "pundit" or "connector." My problem with including this information was that there was no explanation as to why, so insight into their methodology, or why you might move back and forth between two or three classifications, as I did fairly regularly.

Josey and I discussed the idea of measuring personality types/traits based on social activities and influence, and possibly using offline systems like Insights or even the Freudian personality types to help organizations better define, and predict, behavior within collaboration platforms (like SharePoint). There are possible applications in the areas of user adoption (get more users to log in and use the platform), end user engagement (making collaboration platforms more "sticky" so users stay on them longer, get more involved), and gamification (using games, incentives, and rewards to encourage specific user behaviors).

Great conversation in Columbus, and I hope to continue the dialogue with Josey, from which you should see some more content in the coming months.

Social personas. Of course, what triggered this blog post was an article that showed up today in my newsfeed about the different faces, or personalities, of social influence. The infographic is below, but you can also download a copy of the associated whitepaper here.

I'm interested in the science behind social informatics, as I view this as an area of burgeoning within the business intelligence space, impacting marketing, sales, operations, software development, and social networking itself. Right now we're in the early stages. The social technology may not be new, but the way in which we're using the data captured by these systems is brand-spanking new. This is the Big Data problem. The volume of data being created, and the speed at which it is being generated, is increasing rapidly. Moore's Law around micro-processor speed and capacity is dwarfed by the gro

Technorati Tags: social influence,social scoring,collaboration,buckleyplanet,Insights,Pathwise

wth rate and complexity of the data organizations capture and store. And like every other Big data problem, people just haven't figured out what to do with it yet. I do believe that innovative companies will begin to figure out our social networking activities and patterns, be able to figure out much about who we are and how we collaborate, and utilize this information to sell more products to us, proactively identify and meet our needs, and then lure us down into subterranean tunnels where we'll be caught and processed into soylent green.

Ok, maybe not that last one. But now you've had a window into how my brain works. :-)

[Apr 25, 2013 Update: Came across this great post on the Five Roles for the Future of Analytics that moves in the same direction as my points above. It all points toward the need for better (and more visual) analytic tools in the hands of the information worker. It's the future, people!]

Does a LinkedIn Recommendation Lose Value Over Time?

I occasionally get requests from people I worked with as a peer, or who worked for me directly sometime I the past, asking for a recommendation for their LinkedIn profile. For many of these requests, I am happy to do so. If I have maintained a strong connection with you over the years, and kept in regular contact, I am likely to respond and write a recommendation highlighting my experience in working with you. But if we’re only loosely connected, or I haven’t heard from you for 5 or more years….I’ll likely ignore your request altogether.

Recommendations can be an important part of your LinkedIn profile. As a hiring manager, I most definitely reviewed these recommendations and scrutinized those who offered them, looking for

• Relevance of role (and whether their feedback had anything to do with the role the individual was applying for)
• Feedback from a variety of roles and levels (peers, managers, partners, direct reports, and so forth)
• Age of the recommendation (if the recommendation came 7 to 10 years ago, how relevant is that opinion going to be to current work experience?)

If we are just casual acquaintances, never having worked together in any capacity, I am just not likely to write you any kind of recommendation – nor should you be asking. In fact, the fact that you are asking me, someone you hardly know, to attach my name and reputation to your work history – I’m going to question the value of any recommendation already on your page, and the value of you within my social network.

Similarly if we are connected through some social circle or network, such as the AIIM Global Community group on LinkedIn, but are without any personal or professional connection between us, I will likely not pass along an official LinkedIn Introduction to someone else within my network.

Why am I so protective of my LinkedIn network? Unlike the very social Twitterverse where the more followers, the better chance to make connections and find valuable content and insights, LinkedIn is a “high-trust” social network. These kinds of requests – whether writing a recommendation or forwarding a connection request between two people – are high-trust activities, not a commoditized activity offered to someone I just met. Authenticity, active engagement, and network amplification (your ability to get others to take action) are all critical factors to these connection types. When I see a recommendation on a candidate’s profile by someone I know and trust, the value of that candidate goes up. When I see a connection request coming through a trusted advisor or friend, I automatically trust the quality of that connection – because I know that people within my circle of direct connections would only forward that connection if they believed the connection was of value.

I am happy to connect with new people, to extend the social dialog around relevant content, and to provide valuable connections to the rest of my network.  My recommendation for those who are looking to build out their networks – don’t abuse the LinkedIn platform, because you dilute their relevance. Be authentic.

Klout Is the Most Interesting Company on the Planet, and Here’s Why

I just finished reading Return on Influence by Mark Schaefer (his blog), which focuses a good portion of its pages on the rising importance of social scoring and, specifically, the Klout platform, and its potential impacts not only to corporate and professional marketing, but on the way we capture, analyze, and consume data about our many networks – whether they be networks (or circles) of customers, employees, partners, or friends. I’ll dive more deeply into the book itself in a future post, but want to instead capture a few of my key takeaways of this must-read for modern corporate enthusiasts.

Just to clarify – social scoring is not just about tracking the number of tweets or followers of an individual. Klout manages more than 100 different data points within their algorithms, and is constantly refining and changing those algorithms based on what they learn from the data, and as network patterns ebb and flow. While there is still the occasional  mistake – such as associating the topic of My Little Pony to a technology professional like Seb Matthews (this is my attempt, by linking his name to the topic, to get My Little Pony to show up in his Klout profile ) – the platform is rapidly improving, and the applications of these scoring mechanisms are countless.

About my title to this post: I really do think that what Klout is working to perfect is one of the most important technologies we’ve ever seen, with the potential to revolutionize sales, commerce, marketing, people management, and more.

Social scoring will one day become as ubiquitous as maps have become to mobile phones. You just expect them to be there, and regardless of the brand providing the tools, you expect them to work in a certain way, and to get you from point A to point B (unless driving in downtown Boston, in which case maps don’t work. It’s the Bermuda Triangle of GPS devices). However, as I wrote about in a previous post, social scoring is just one data point (or set of data points) and like any data analysis effort, should be combined with other data and resources, online and offline, to paint a more complete picture of a user, or of a company or product. Call it “analytics triangulation,” if you will.

My reading habits may seem eclectic to some, but I really do try to suck every useful morsel out of the business and marketing books I read, as illustrated in the image above. As I read, I mark up, annotate, and dog-ear pages that have actionable ideas that I want to follow up on. As you can see from the image, I had quite a few takeaways from Return on Influence as I was sitting on airplanes these last two weeks, and started jotting down ideas for ways that social scoring could change a number of different products and services…..only to find that many of the ideas I had reached were shared by others, and captured in the final chapter of the book. For example, Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) shares his thoughts on connecting online and offline behaviors, making social scoring a powerful potential solution for test marketing a product. The author shares his thoughts around social scoring’s logical fit with customer relationship management platforms – which was where my thoughts were going, as well.

Think of what you could get with Klout integration with Salesforce or Dynamics CRM, allowing you to capture influence metrics for companies, brands, and individuals associated with them. You could then create lead generation and email campaign strategies focusing on key influencers or with people that have influence over combinations of topics – like SharePoint and Yammer, or Seb Matthews and My Little Pony (attempt #2). You’ll be able to better target your marketing efforts toward those users with the greatest likelihood to take action: to forward it, blog about it, buy it, recommend it, or to come into the brick and mortar store.

Think of how this kind of data analysis might fit into the corporate world: analyze how users collaborate, how they participate in social networks inside and outside the company, and then use that data to develop gamification strategies to further encourage the right behaviors, and to build a more compelling, engaging environment. Watching the trending data around how people are dogfooding your own products (the practice of using your own software/solutions before shipping to customers) will show you what is working, and where future customer pains may arise.

Another application might be augmenting (or replacing) the annual review process, basing raises, rewards, and recognition on social scores – assuming there was a blending of online and offline data points, such as 360 degree feedback. This might go a long way into fixing the sometimes perceived (but mostly real) problems with fiefdom-building, favoritism, and high-quality employees being overlooked because they just don’t do enough “managing up.”

Social scoring is a fascinating space, and one which is growing rapidly. Schaefer includes a list of related companies at the back of his book, and explains their value add. I’ve been checking out a few of them (you may have seen my tweets), and not all are up and working – fewer more look to provide any real value. But I’ll keep testing the waters, and will share my findings.

And if you’d like to see my Klout profile (hovering around 72 right now), you’ll find my page here.

2 Days of Gamification and Productivity in Denver

It has been a long time since I’ve walked beyond the walls of the Denver airport (last time, I was in my mid-20’s), and I believe that this trip was my first time I’ve ever actually been downtown. As for the event – this was my second time participating in a SharePointFest conference, my last one taking place in Chicago back in 2011. Great crowd, lots of good discussion and interaction inside my sessions and out in the exhibit area, and a lot of interest around my topics of gamification and improving end user productivity.

In my first session, entitled Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013, I shared ideas, case studies, and examples of many of the new social features in SharePoint 2013, also mentioning some of the features available in SharePoint 2010 and through the partner ecosystem, and how these features can help teams confront the end user adoption issues that most organizations are experiencing with their SharePoint deployments, regardless of version.

For those unfamiliar with the topic, gamification is the strategy of using games, rewards, and other tools to make your system more engaging, creating addictive experiences that encourage and motivate end users to participate more frequently, and to delve more deeply into the system.

You can see my slides on SlideShare or through the viewer below:

Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013 from Christian Buckley

In my second session, entitled The Four Facets of SharePoint Productivity, I touched on some similar themes to my earlier session, but instead of a simple outline of the available features, my presentation went more deeply into “Why” organizations should spend more time, resources, and effort in focusing specifically on productivity issues – spending a goo portion of my time on the business value of social.

My slides are here and below:

The Four Facets of SharePoint Productivity from Christian Buckley

With the recent news out of Microsoft about the roadmap and initial integrations between SharePoint and Yammer, I added 3 slides into my second presentation with mockups of how these integrations will look…..and I’m including them here (all of which star Mr. Noah Sparks, who you can find at @noahsparks).

Essentially, within the on prem version of SharPoint 2013, you have the option of replacing the newsfeed with your Yammer newsfeed (for the paid version of Yammer). I’m going to write a separate post on the topic, but this is an option – not a must need. There are reasons for switching your newsfeed now, and holding off until further integrations are available. Understand your business needs.

Within a team site, you can replace or have the Yammer newsfeed side-by-side with your team site newsfeed. Again, I don’t recommend replacing, but side-by-side would be a great value add if you have both on prem and are also using Yammer.

Finally, the navigation in Office 365 is being modified to include a link to Yammer. Yammer is becoming the primary newsfeed in O365, but you have the ability to switch back and forth between O365 and Yammer through a streamlined navigation, so it won’t pop open a separate window with a different interface. This is a great integration for all of us using both.

More content to come out soon. I need to run to a lunch session here at the Heartland Region SharePoint Conference taking place in Columbus Ohio (#iccspc), but will be posting again later today or tonight on this topic.

March 2013 SharePoint Travels

The month began with SharePoint Saturday Austin (#SPSATX) and a year-long hungering for good barbeque. For those of you keeping score, you may remember that a couple of us were unable to make the trip to last year's inaugural event due to Seattle's snowpocalypse, which shut down SeaTac airport. I hated to miss that event (for one, it was snowing in Seattle, and I was looking forward to a warmer climate for a couple days) but honestly, the chatter about the excellent food is what motivated me to participate this year. It was a fun event, great venue, and it had some of my favorite people in the SharePoint space participating as speakers and organizers. Especially enjoyed hanging out and having long chats with Benjamin Niaulin (@bniaulin) and Liam Cleary (@helloitsliam), and of course, Jason Himmelstein (@SharePointLhorn). Looking forward to the next one. Plus, I took some really good cityscapes from the plane. Love those.

From Austin, I made my way to SPTechCon in San Francisco, where I had a full schedule of 4 regular sessions and a lightning talk. For those who attended my sessions and missed my tweets with the links, as always you can find them up on my SlideShare page. But in particular I wanted to share my lightning talk slides. A little history for those who are unaware, sponsorships of the conference at a certain level includes one lightning talk at the end of the first full day of the conference. You basically have 5 minutes to get your message across, and, let's be honest, many of them can be incredibly boring. Well, they used to be boring, and the crowds who attended them were not massive compared to overall attendees (this is my recollection of these in the past). When my Director of Product Management, Gail Shlansky, and I started planning out our talk, we decided to do something silly and fun as a way to just drive people to our booth rather than bore them with a product pitch. So we compared the growth of SharePoint against the parallel success path of Sonny and Cher. It went over well, and people did, in fact, come by the booth because of our presentation. So we did it again at the next SPTechCon, adding some info about Cher's latest movie with Christina Aguilera. Since those presentations, the organizers keep asking me back – not to talk technology, per se, but to do something funny. And I enjoy mixing it up. I hope people enjoyed my latest deck, looking at the future of SharePoint governance – 50 years into the future. Anyway, here's my deck:

SharePoint 2063: The Future of SharePoint Governance from Christian Buckley

 

As for the remaining days in the month of March, I'll be traveling southeast to Denver for SharePointFest, then over to Columbus Ohio for the Heartland Region SharePoint Conference and Buckeye SPUG, then heading back down to San Francisco for meetings and a presentation at the Azure user group (I'm not an Azure guy, folks, but will be talking about it from a SharePoint perspective, and from a business opportunity perspective). Here are the details on each of these events:

http://www.sharepointfest.com/Denver/
SharePoint Fest Denver
March 18-20
Colorado Convention Center

BV 104 - Productivity, Gamification, and SharePoint 2013
2:50 to 3:50pm Tuesday
In this session, we'll help you understand why a focus on Productivity will improve overall SharePoint adoption, outlining some of the key productivity features in SharePoint 2013. We'll explore the topic of Gamification and how it can help improve productivity, and discuss how SharePoint can be expanded to include Gamification as a way of improving productivity.

BV 202 - The 4 Facets of SharePoint Productivity
11:30 to 12:30pm Wednesday
Enterprise platforms are increasingly looking not just at solving core work streams, but in ensuring productivity in moving between work streams. In SharePoint, this is accomplished through four primary areas: Taxonomy, Workflow, Forms, and Social. This session walks through examples of each, highlighting productivity best practices for each using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities.

http://www.iccsharepoint.com
Microsoft Heartland Region SharePoint Conference 2013
March 21
Columbus Convention Center

What Governance Looks Like in the Cloud
Strategy and Governance Session – 1:00pm to 2:15pm
This session reviews the changes coming to SharePoint due to Microsoft's plans for the Cloud, helping attendees to better understand the impact of the Cloud to their business. We'll discuss the rise of the hybrid SharePoint environment, and whether this model makes sense for your business, as well as how moving to the Cloud will impact your SharePoint planning, and your ability to manage SharePoint across the enterprise.

10 Best Productivity Features in SP2013 You Need to Know About
Business Value Session – 2:30pm to 3:45pm
This session walks through 10 features or solutions that are available out-of-the-box with SharePoint 2013, and which can instantly help your team to be more productive. Geared toward business users and new administrators who want to make the most of their SharePoint investments, the session will help attendees better understand their business requirements, and how SharePoint can meet these needs.

http://www.buckeyespug.com
Buckeye SharePoint User Group
March 21
Microsoft Columbus

Understanding the Disconnect Between Collaboration Tools and Business Goals
With broad adoption of SharePoint 2010, and as companies begin to investigate the SharePoint 2013 platform, governance has become a critical topic for most organizations, and yet many struggle to understand where to begin or how to align SharePoint with their business objectives. In this session, Christian will provide valuable industry data on the state of SharePoint governance, and in an interactive session, will share insights into real-world examples of governance pitfalls and successes. The goal is to leave attendees with a framework and actionable steps for aligning their governance planning with business goals.

http://www.bayazure.org/
San Francisco Bay Area Azure Developers Group
March 26
Microsoft San Francisco

Building SharePoint 2013 Solutions on Windows Azure
With the new SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365, developers will be able to create apps for Office and SharePoint and host them on Windows Azure. There is also a powerful option to extend Office 365 solutions with Windows Azure web sites. In this presentation, Christian will discuss what changes are happening across the SharePoint and Office 365 platforms, share some insights into how his company is using Azure, and discuss where there may be technical and business opportunities for developers and businesses within the space.

In April, I'll be presenting at the Australian and New Zealand SharePoint Conferences for the 3^rd year in a row, taking place in Sydney and Auckland, respectively. Still trying to lock down some other travels, possibly heading back to Boston for a whirlwind visit to Axceler HQ, and then down to Southern California toward the end of the month. I keep telling people that I am trying to decrease my travels, spend more time with my family and on creating content – and March/April will not be the months where I am going to convince people of this. But it's true, people. Really. Maybe.