Networking

I am slowly learning the do's and don'ts of business social networking.  Here are my thoughts so far:

• Do
• Build relationships even when not actively job seeking
• Use LinkedIn 
• Organize your contacts - 400+ in one big pile is not much use
• Share - share your knowledge, watch for those needing help, set aside 10-15 minutes regularly to look for someone on your network you can support or share something valuable with your network
• Thank your network for their support and personally thank those who took time for you
• Don't
• Spam - Highlight and link to items that are valuable and have a low chance of wasting your networks time
• Post your personal problems, issues, family etc - make sure you are remembered for the right reasons.
• Post pictures, jokes, or anything else you wouldn't feel comfortable with sharing during an interview
• Don't link with people unless you know for certain you want them in your network.  Quality vs Quantity!

Beware of free in the cloud...

Google has been shuttering all of its cool free toys they built. Remember Google Fast Flip? Google Body?

Google Wave? Eric Schmidt tried to paint the failure of Google Wave as a sign that the company's innovative culture continues to take risks and aim big.

"Our policy is we try things," the Google CEO said, hours after the company announced it washalting development of the complex real-time communication tool. "We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it is absolutely OK to try something that is very hard, have it not be successful, take the learning and apply it to something new."

Makes you wonder when they will decide GMail was a failure as a free service and either shutter it or put a price on it? Or shut down Blogger...

I like what CortexVortex said on SlashDot: "....This tells me that not only will I be using G'Linux / FLOS Software in the near future, and insist on hardware driver source-code, but that "The Cloud" I use must be built from my own servers, or not at all.

I think I'll call my globally accessible private personal network "The Closet"; I suspect many will identify with this terminology in terms of privacy for multiple reasons."

Personal MBA?

As I contemplated 2011 racing by, I wondered if I should go back to school. As I googled around the internet looking at the plethora of MBA programs and other Masters degrees I stumbled across an interesting term: "Personal MBA"

I found it on GenYWealth.com (excellent site by the way)

Which in turn led me to the PersonalMBA.com/manifesto/ and then on to the book: The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business

All in all very interesting...I am going to get the book and will post what I think of it.

Innovation

I recently picked up a book I got at a trade show a few years ago called "The Art of Innovation" (http://www.amazon.com/Art-Innovation-Lessons-Creativity-Americas/dp/0385499841). It tells the story from inside Silicon Valley. Around the same time I came across this article by Bruce Nussbaum that claimed Innovation died in 2008.
I read that article on my iPhone using a cool FREE app called ReadItLater (http://readitlaterlist.com/) that allows you to quickly save articles for reading later and it optionally strips the article to plain text (a must for quick reading on the iPhone).
Last week a business partner's iPhone started messing up and he could not type some of the letters because of an issue with the touch screen. Dragon to the rescue. A free iPhone utility app from Nuance, the publisher of Dragon Naturally Speaking. A super clean interface (one big record button). You click it, say what you want to text or email to someone, Click the big Done Recording button and voila...there is your text. Extremely accurate, cool and innovative.
Then yesterday my friend Tom sent me a link to Google Fast Flip (http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/). Another cool and free way to consume a bunch of information quickly. It essentially grabs the first page of all major news articles, groups them into categories and allows you to qucikly flip through them and read the first page and click to read the full article! Awesome.

So is innovation dead...no I think not. If there is still any question look at the military UAV's or the dog robot.

Shrinking Budgets...just focus

Budgets for Information Technology everywhere are shrinking. Does this mean that the business requirements that drove those budgets went away? No. In reality, during tough times, the business need for IT services and solutions tends to grow.

Why would the need grow when uncertainty and chaos abound? When times are good, the saying, "Easy come...Easy go" tends to govern the majority of companies...projects start...projects fail...projects succeed, it all works out in the wash...no big deal. However when the belt is tightened a notch or two, this is when the business actually begins to focus on how to really impact the bottom line and operate more efficiently.

How do you improve efficiency? DATA! I wrote a blog entry once on an internal company blog titled, "Data, Data everywhere. Not a drop of Information to drink" It highlighted the fact that too much data is useless without analysis and a framework to understand it in.  So...Who controls or is supposed to control all that data and turn it into information and eventually knowledge? The CIO...the IT department.

The business must adapt to this new environment quickly in order to survive and come out the other side stronger than ever. An excellent book on this subject: The Innovator's Dilemma  details how disruptive technologies redefined the competitive landscape.  In today's case, it is not disruptive technology so much as this disruptive economic downturn. Additionally, history has shown that hundreds of creative new companies start during every recession and depression...one of those new players could put you out of business with the disruptive technology they brought to the market!

Where do the answers lie? In the Data! Many of the companies highlighted in the above book and other similar books, show that, had the company been able to analyze and understand the data they had access to (either internally or externally), they could have potentially averted disaster and emerged a leader in their space. The challenge is that we are awash in thousands of gigabytes of data, how do you make sense of it all? This is where a Knowledge Management Strategy comes into play.

Data -> Information -> Knowledge

That sounds big, complicated and expensive!  But the amazing thing is that this does not need to be complicated.  Sure in the hey day we would make this into a multi-million dollar transformation project.  But by using simple needs analysis techniques, combined with a modest amount of initial research, you will generate multiple targets (more than your budget can support). The Criticallity and Priority can be quickly accomplished by bouncing these targets off the strategic plan. See...we looked at the data, mixed in needs, added in some context (strategic plan) and our raw data became information and then turned into knowledge. Now we know what really needs to be done first during this economic downturn. Start small and iterate quickly...agility is key.

Not sure where to start, download, install and open Xmind or FreeMind. Get 6-10 stakeholders in the room and start talking...a map will emerge within 2 hours. Allow someone a couple of hours to clean up the verbiage and layout and have a follow-on one hour meeting for fine tuning. You got your plan. Now using that plan focus your reduced resources on it and execute...your company, your bottom line and the team will thank you.

Under 7000....focus on cost effective solutions

Wow...The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a new all-time record high at 14,164.53 on August 9, 2007. Yesterday the market closed at less than 1/2 that number (6,763.29).  Quite a ride in the last 17 months!  We have a very confused Washington DC, all the politicians from the President on down are scrambling and jumping at any idea that seems like it has any chance of helping.
So what are we to do here in the business world?
Most of us have during school taken an economics or business course where we learned things like:

• The balance sheet tells how much the business is worth.
  
• The profit and loss statement tells if your business is profitable or not.
  
• The cash flow statement predicts your cash balances into the future.

Somehow in all of the hoopla about stock price we have forgotten about common sense things like assets, equity and liabilities.  It became very in vogue for companies to finance growth through borrowing, but this is very dangerous and increases your liabilities in pursuit of cash flow growth.   Granted there are some valid reasons to do this, but it became so common place that many companies routinely were dipping into a line of credit just to make payroll!!!  This is wrong and is not founded in sound business principles.

Having a focus on the bottom line and affecting the profits is good common sense.  

Let's take something that we use everyday in the workplace and in almost every workplace...the telephone!  Many companies today use VOIP (voice over internet protocol) for economical and robust phone system.   The challenge is that it is still an emerging market and the vendor you pick could go belly-up during this economic downturn, or you could pick the leading vendor and be locked into an expensive proprietary solution.  Could you come up with an even better phone system?  One that is cost effective?  One that could affect your bottomline.  Yes :)  

Let me introduce you to Asterisk. (http://www.asterisk.org )  Asterisk is a versatile VoIP PBX system that can be configured to accomplish almost any telecommunications task you require!  Asterisk has the lowest total cost of ownership of any solution in any class because it is the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit.   Asterisk is a worldwide community supported product, because it is completely open, it has been connected to virtually every telephone system in the world!  Check it out and other GNU General Public License open source solutions.

For example...maybe you want to setup a discussion board at your company to discuss whether to use Asterisk...check out MyBB. (http://www.mybboard.net/) Its an easy to use, powerful, multilingual, feature packed and FREE forum software package.  

Free is very cost effective.  These are both Free as in a free donut as well as free as in free speech (freedom).

Happy New Year

Wow...2009. What will this year bring?
Personally...Last year was a roller coaster for me. Had a really good first half of the year, but then in July-August, my company (DynCorp International) went into turmoil mode, with a new CEO, change in management etc. On September 10, 2008 DynCorp did a RIF and laid me and a bunch of other people off! So the last quarter of the year was great too...just Unique!
I had been at DI almost 6 years and so being back on the job market was fun and exciting. I have not yet landed anywhere full time yet, but have had a blast working on numerous part time stuff including helping out on some marketing, proposal development, software development, general consulting and advice for firms in the small business, Natural Gas and Oil, RFID, and government technical services companies.
I am excited about the new year and look forward to what God has in store for me.
Information Technology...This coming year looks exciting. Some of the items that catch my eye are:
1. Cloud Computing - Still early and only those early risk takers will jump on this year, but it appears to hold great promise.
2. Business Continuity - The risks of disasters and turmoil are as great as ever, if not greater. Companies need to make sure their DR plans are current.
3. Agility or Agile - In business, agility means the capability of rapidly and cost efficiently adapting to changes. This term, primarily originating in the software development arena, has met the mainstream now and is overheard in conference across the industry. "How can we be more agile?"
4. Cost Reduction - This is not a 'fun' or 'exciting' topic, but a hard work one. How do companies stand out or differentiate themselves in these times? A great book that I read on this in the Innovators Dilemma which discusses how disruptive technology results in either success or failure for companies. I see innovative approaches to cost reduction as being one of the key disruptive technologies of 2009 and 2010 as we emerge from this depression/recession.

On a final note...Becky made me laugh the other day with this humor...she asked: 

"Whats the difference between a recession and a depression?" 

The answer: 
     A recession is when your neighbor loses his job.
     A depression is when you lose your job.

Have a great New Year!