Ed Batista

Companies and organizations that continue to resist blogging often do so because they view bloggers as isolated individuals with hidden agendas and axes to grind.

Dell initially made that mistake with Jeff Jarvis, but as Jeff noted yesterday, they're taking a different approach now:

...I had a rather infamous run-in with Dell here at Buzzmachine when I complained about a bad machine and service. They ignored me, but thousands of similarly frustrated customers did not. Dell’s attitude toward blogs at the time was “look, don’t touch.”... But things began to turn around when Dell opened a company blog, which was off to a puffy start until Lionel [Menchaca], the chief blogger, entered, speaking with customers in an honest, direct, humble, and human voice. Next they put together a team to reach out to bloggers who had problems...

It is clear, through [Lionel and his colleagues], that at least at some levels, Dell has changed its culture and certainly its attitude toward bloggers. They now see value in reaching out. As they’ve said before, bloggers tend to state their problems clearly, which makes it easier (and, I assume, more efficient) to solve them. A problem solved is not only a customer likely to be saved, but also often leads to good PR and branding as the bloggers recount their happy endings. And the Dell guys say they get information and data from this; they hear about problems that may arise before others in the company do, because their customers are talking about it...

Lionel, who came from years of customer service and PR at the company, said the team working on the blog and with bloggers loves it. Aren’t there a few people out there who just can’t be satisfied, no matter what you do? Lost causes? Bozos? They agreed that there are a few and the outreach people don’t always say yes to their demands. But my drinking companions agreed that in an open forum, other folks tend to know who the bozos are. And the bozos tend to stand alone.

That, you see, was the real moral to my story. Whether or not I was a bozo, I did not stand alone. My story wasn’t about me but the people around me, the ones who said, “me, too.” I was merely the agent of coalescence. That’s what you have to watch for on the internet. That’s what the internet enables. [emphasis mine]

The "agent of coalescence"--I love that phrase.  It may have been easier for Jeff to step into that role because he's a big-name blogger with a sizeable readership, and because he tapped into frustrations shared by thousands of Dell customers, but any one of us can do the same, albeit on a smaller scale.

We blog because we care, passionately, about something.  And thanks to the live web, others who share that passion will find us.  If we're not bozos, they'll join us--they'll say "me, too," in any number of ways.  This is how movements and constituencies and networks of all sorts are built today--they form around agents of coalescence.

Which leads me to two questions: If you're blogging, how might you serve more effectively as an agent of coalescence on behalf of a cause you're passionate about?  And if you're a company or organization, how might you identify and engage those agents of coalescence who are passionate about what you do?

Photo of Jeff Jarvis by Doc Searls.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Swivel is a content-sharing application for data and graphs.  It's sort of like YouTube meets Wikipedia for people who love spreadsheets.  As with YouTube, you can create a user account, upload your content (in Swivel's case, raw data or a spreadsheet file rather than a video), format and tag it, and set it free for others to view, comment upon, embed or otherwise use as they see fit.  As with Wikipedia, accuracy is in the eye of the beholder, so read the citations and take the figures with a grain of salt.

The most-viewed graph on Swivel today is Growth of Creative Commons Photos on Flickr, by Brian Mulloy, Swivel's CEO and co-founder:

There's tight integration with several Google apps, including the ability to make Swivel graphs from Google spreadsheets and a feed from Google Blogsearch showing people posting Swivel graphs, which just this minute led me to my friend Beth Kanter, who posted today on this very same topic, using the very same graph above.  Small world!

Could you condense your organization's entire purpose into five basic statements?  Could you do it in 26 words?  And could you insure that those 26 words would stand for 75 years and show no signs of age?  S.R. Ranganathan could.

Ranganathan was a preeminent Indian mathematician and librarian who died in 1972 at the age of 80.  In 1924 he was appointed the first university librarian of the University of Madras, a position he held for the next 20 years (during which time he supposedly never took a vacation.)  Among Ranganathan's many contributions to the field, his Five Laws of Library Science (written in 1931) stand out for their brilliance and their brevity:

1. Books are for use.
2. Every person, his or her book.
3. Every book, its reader.
4. Save the time of the reader.
5. The library is a growing organism.

I love so many things about these 26 words, starting with the ethic of service and utility that runs through them, and ending with the metaphor of organization as organism, surely an unusual concept in the '30s.  And although I'm no S.R. Ranganathan, his example makes me want to think up "Five Laws" for everything.

At the very least, this list is worth revisiting every time I'm working on a mission statement or a team charter or a set of ground rules.  Maybe some of Ranganathan's wisdom will rub off.

Cited in George Eberhart's Whole Library Handbook 3, page 62. Photo by pl_jakub.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

If your job ever involves helping people think through a set of challenges, here's a framework that might be useful.  I came up with it in response to a colleague's request to help her make more effective use of technology--hence the focus on "tools," although I think it could easily be adapted to non-technical needs.  I thought I'd be most helpful if I had a clearer understanding of the specific issues she wanted to address, so I asked her to draw up the following three lists:

Headaches
These are problems you encounter with tools you use on a regular basis.  We can talk about how to use these tools more effectively by solving (or working around) the problem.

Opportunities
These are things you'd like to do using tools you're at least somewhat familiar with.  You may know that a tool has this capability, but you're not sure how to make it do what you want, and we can talk about new ways of using the tools.

Dreams
These are things you'd like to do in a perfect world—when drawing up this list, don’t even think about the tools, just focus on what you’d like to do.  We can talk about new ways of using existing tools and/or some new tools that might meet your needs.

Photos by Lazy Lightning, destinelee and Daquella manera.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

You're an experienced professional with an impressive resume, and you took a few years off to raise your kids.  You'd like to work outside the home again, but you're not feeling the love from recruiters, and you're beginning to wonder if the business world could have passed you by so quickly.

Or...you're a recently graduated History major who's having second thoughts about that Ph.D.  You're a skilled writer, researcher and critical thinker, but companies with B.A.-level openings are apparently allergic to Humanities grads, and you're counting down the days until those student loans kick in.

So what the hell do you do?  Well, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College is hoping you'll think about spending some time (and money) in Hanover, NH.  Tuck is making a special effort to help people outside the business world find their way in (or back in, as the case may be) through two innovative programs.

First, Tuck is offering a Back in Business program (launched last year) aimed at experienced MBAs who've taken some time off from their careers.  Tuck prof Constance Helmat describes the program's rationale (PDF):

The answer to who can benefit from this program is twofold: companies seeking leadership talent and business professionals actively seeking to reenter the workforce.

What this program does is connect the two—first by helping companies to access a largely untapped pool of leadership talent, and second by helping these business professionals update their business and leadership skills and by facilitating their process of career reentry.

The "Back in Business" curriculum is focused on three "streams": business skills (from strategy to operations), leadership development (which seems like a bit of a catchall, ranging from communication skills to a "capstone project") and career reentry (hands-on resume workshops, networking events, and interview prep sessions.)  Tuck describes the program as "gender neutral," and you won't find the phrase "mommy-tracked" in their materials, but they also make it clear that women are a key target audience.

A parallel effort is Tuck's Business Bridge program which they describe as "a four-week, total-immersion program for rising juniors, seniors, and recent graduates of arts and sciences colleges."  As you'd expect, the curriculum sounds like a collegiate version of "Back in Business":

First, you'll dive into business fundamentals—finance, accounting, economics, marketing, management communications, decision making, problem solving, and presentation skills. Next, because just about any company who will hire you probably employs other people as well, you'll get a big dose of teamwork and leadership training.

Finally, Bridge will prepare you to land a job. You'll get expert career advice, interview training, networking knowledge—we'll even help you learn how to prepare a top-flight résumé.

I heard about both programs through entirely separate channels in recent weeks, and the coincidence prompted me to take a deeper look.  A few thoughts:

• First and foremost, I believe programs like this fill an important need, and I'm glad they exist.  I was that History major described above, and although I love my alma mater dearly, I was not well prepared for life after graduation.  And as someone about to turn 40, I know several women in my age bracket who'd love to return to the corporate world now that their kids are older, but it's harder than they thought it would be.
  

• These experiences don't come cheap.  "Back in Business" costs $12,000, and the "Business Bridge" program costs $8,500.  I'm an MBA who works at a business school, so I understand the economics from both perspectives.  Executive education programs like these cost a lot because they tend to be good investments for the participants and because the tuition is often defrayed by third parties, such as employers and parents, both factors that increase the amount the market's willing to bear.

• That said, I know plenty of people with talent and dedication to spare who would certainly make the most of an opportunity to attend "Back to Business" or "Business Bridge," but they couldn't afford it.  They need a program like this in the first place because they made choices that undermined their earning power, and there's no company and no parent waiting in the wings to help them out.  They're also at a point in life--middle age with young kids in school, or post-grad without a clear career path--when they probably have more urgent needs for ten grand.  This is no slam against Tuck--I applaud their efforts--but it makes me wish we could find a way to include even more people in the "largely untapped pool of leadership talent" who will benefit from these programs and others like them.

Photo by Tom Coates.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

From Grant McCracken:

Notice everything and pay attention to things that puzzle.  Pay attention to things that demand your attention and then refuse your understanding.  Pay attention to the failure of attention.

He's writing as a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic researcher, but it's a message that resonates deeply with me as an executive coach.

Everything I do professionally starts with noticing, and that's why I try to notice as much as possible about the people around me.  Even--especially--when I don't understand what's happening or why, I need to note that something is happening.  In the coaching process, the act of noticing what's happening in the moment is more important than the act of interpreting what happened afterwards.

My interpretations are filtered through my meanings and subject to my biases; they're inherently limited.  My observations are constrained by my cognitive abilities, but if I can notice something and communicate it effectively to a client or colleague, we can work to interpret it together, broadening the frame of reference and diminishing the risk of misunderstanding.

It's easy for coaches and consultants to fall into the trap of imagining that we're valued most as interpreters.  It makes us seem more important, and it relieves our clients of a burden they're often glad to relinquish.  I'd like to believe that I do add value as an interpreter, helping others understand by making meaning, but that role is secondary to my role as observer, as noticer, helping others see what they may have missed.

My only exposure to T-groups has been in the United States, but I've participated in groups with members from France, Hong Kong, Israel and Japan, and the cross-cultural dimension makes the experience both more challenging and more rewarding.

So I was excited to learn that there are several organizations that promote T-groups and other forms of "process work" in India, including the Indian Society for Applied Behavioural Science, Sumedhas, and the Aastha Foundation for Human Learning and Growth.

Many thanks to Gautam Ghosh for enlightening me (and for his kind words about my recent post.)

That's India at night, framed by the pitch-black Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, and the relatively dark regions of Myanmar/Burma, the Himalayas and Tibet, and Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How effective are your interactions with others?  What behaviors enhance your effectiveness, and what behaviors undermine your effectiveness?  How do people perceive you?  What behaviors positively affect the way you're perceived, and what behaviors make a negative impression on others?

Getting answers to these questions is one reason why people participate in T-groups (the T is for "training"), an interpersonal