social business evangelist, cloud specialist, consultant, blogger, software guy, West Ham fan, family man
Linkedin just posted growth above 100% for the seventh quarter in a row, and the company also said it would buy the content sharing company SlideShare for $118.75m. That looks like a great marriage. Here's the story in slides.
Big data player Splunk makes strong IPO debut: What you need to know
Summary: Here’s the rundown on Splunk, a company that’s likely to lead a big data IPO parade going forward.
Big data and business intelligence company Splunk made a nice splash on Wall Street. Here’s what you need to know about the company and your buying decision whether its stock or Splunk’s software.
The company priced its IPO for 13.5 million shares at $17 each and generated a good bit of buzz. Morgan Stanley was the lead underwriter, but a bevy of big firms were in on the deal.
Shares doubled initially and then topped $34 as trading ended.
With the recent acquisition of Instagram by Facebook for $1Bn when the company has only 14 employees and no revenue, you begin to wonder about how to value companies in this new world of social media, web apps and the cloud. Here's a more conventional company in the enterprise space with a healthy customer base of well known companies in 75 countries. They haven't made profits yet, but their topic of big data and business intelligence has a lot of attention. This one is more easy for me to understand, and Larry lays out the facts with clarity.
Comments 87MIT physicists have managed to build a light-emitting diode that has an electrical efficiency of more than 100 percent. You may ask, "Wouldn't that mean it breaks the first law of thermodynamics?" The answer, happily, is no.
I missed this last month - not perpetual motion, but a fascinating development!
The problem with the single loop cycle is that it has a bias towards efficiency. The goal of the single loop is to do what you’re doing better. Single-loop learning is a feedback loop to correct mistakes and to make production faster. Argyle and Schön argued that what was necessary for organization learning was not just better efficiency, but better efficacy.
Efficiency is making the effect better. Efficacy is being able to do the desired effect.
In other words, the learning organization has to be able to make sure they are being efficient at the right things. And that requires this learning:
The “double-loop” in double loop learning consists of questioning the basic strategy and foundation on which you are working with. It is taking a look at the assumptions you have, to make sure that you are improving organizational efficacy.
Fast forward to today. The Lean Startup framework also has double-loop learning: It’s called a pivot. When you start off working with the Lean Startup framework you explicitly state your “leap-of-faith” assumptions. These are the baseline hypotheses you are testing with your startup’s initial strategy.
At a certain point in time, you come back and re-evaluated these “leap-of-faith” assumptions in what is called a pivot or persevere meeting. In this meeting, you decide whether to continue to optimize your current strategy, or pivot to a new strategy/assumptions based on your learning.
Here's a great article referencing Toyota Lean Manufacturing technology, Eric Ries and earlier sources. So it's all about engineering + management + accounting. Think different, but think again.
Eventually Twitter will have to answer its biggest question: how is it going to make any money? Last year revenues are believed to have topped $45m and they are expected to double this year. But those are tiny sums for a company supposedly worth $10bn and Twitter made a loss last year after spending all that money on growing its business.
Twitter isn't the first fast-growing business without a coherent business model. Naysayers had (and some still have) their doubts about Facebook. Even Google struggled to find its money mojo; now it's one of the biggest cash generators in history. Last year Google's earnings topped $29bn.
In the end, says Paul Kedrosky, Twitterholic investor and author of the Infectious Greed blog, Twitter is worth whatever anyone will pay for it. Anyone paying attention should realise that is going to be a very big number, he says. The service has become the "ubiquitous fabric" of online real-time conversation and it would be extremely hard for another company to replicate that. "Twitter is the dial tone," he says. "It's transforming how we communicate."
I don't think we should blame it on Stephen Fry at all. The celebrity use of Twitter is important, but there are much more significant aspects as to why "Twitter is the dial tone" as Paul Kedrosky so eloquently says. Online, real time, conversation with global reach is here to stay and it IS transformational. We're well past the 5th birthday of the first tweet, and I signed up on 14 February 2007, but Twitter was spun off from Odeo in to a separate company in April 2007. From the first Tweet it took almost a year to catch fire (following SXSW 2007), but it's now part of the fabric of communication.
The manner in which we prepare people for work is based on the Taylorist perspective that there is only one way to do a job and that the person doing the work needs to conform to job requirements [F.W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911]. Individual training, the core of corporate learning and development, is based on the premise that jobs are constant and those who fill them are interchangeable.
However, when you look at the modern organization, it is moving to a model of constant change, whether through mergers and acquisitions or as quick-start web-enabled networks. For the human resources department, the question becomes one of preparing people for jobs that don’t even exist. For example, the role of online community manager, a fast-growing field today, barely existed five years ago. Individual training for job preparation requires a stable work environment, a luxury no one has any more.
A really excellent article/white paper from Harold, covering the shift from Taylorist thinking to the networked, modern organisation - describing Jon Husband's "wirearchy" along the way. It highlights how you can make social learning work in the enterprise. A must read for anyone interested in social business!
Can social media help unlock your business's inherent cultural knowledge?
Enterprise social networks are making waves across the world of business as more and more companies embrace the social revolution.
The argument is simple--corporate communications systems like email are outdated and should be replaced with software that functions more like the social networks people now use in their everyday lives. Enterprise social networks help us to collaborate, socialise, and share expertise more effectively than before, and in doing so help companies to unlock the inherent knowledge embedded in their culture.
However, before jumping on the bandwagon and potentially disrupting your company's culture in the process, you would be wise to analyse what social networks are fundamentally about, and the likely consequences of installing them.
In order to do this, it's useful to draw back the curtain and consider social networking from the bottom up, starting right at the beginning with the most fundamental of social questions: What makes people tick?
This article argues that networking is hard wired into our psychology. Enterprise social network will change the way we do business, but you need to understand the processes and help you company evolve in to an approach rather than creating a revolution.
The stickiness of this speaker comes from content, not from gestures or movements. Audiences do not care about physical qualities unless the speech or presentation content is boring and the gestures and movement are highly irritating.
So why would you ask a speaking or presentation skills coach to deliver a workshop that focuses on gestures, movement and the perfect place to stand? Even worse is using video as part of presentations skills coaching. The video puts too much emphasis on these unimportant elements and makes people feel badly about themselves.
Having just seen some videos of myself talking social business for IBM's YouTube channel, I was horrified at some of my annoying verbal habits and mannerisms (although I hope my enthusiasm overcomes some of that). We used to take a regular refresher skills course where video helped you change some of that behaviour - I reckon I need some. However, I was heartened to read this and be reminded that content is king! I so hope that's right.
But how will this shift – the consumerization of IT impact – the way an organization recruits, engages and manages its workforce? What opportunities and challenges does it present to human resources?
I invited a few industry thought leaders to weigh in:
- Bob Calamai, Interim Director - Leadership and Human Capital Management Program - New York University
- Brandy Fulton, Vice President of HR Operations at Citrix Systems, Inc.
- Rob Garcia, Vice President of Product at UpMo
According to a survey conducted by Avanade, 73% of executives consider the consumerization of IT a top priority, and 79% will make new investments to embrace this trend in 2012. What factors are driving this?
Fulton: Things that we used to treat as exceptions are becoming the new normal. From road warriors to an increasing number of workers working from home--mobility is huge. Add to that the generational expectations of a workforce who are digitally enabled from day one. If you treat each of these as an individual event, you have a dozen different problems and solutions you have to come up with. If you look at it holistically, you’ll see that there’s a shift happening that you can enable by changing your infrastructure. Embrace the consumerization of IT, and the ability to provide people with the variety and flexibility and mobility they need--you can do all of that.
Here's some discussion on the impact of social tools, cloud and bring your own device from the human resources angle. The bottom line is that it's happening and companies need to catch up and get on board.
The most viable rival to Apple's iPad isn't produced by a traditional hardware firm. Samsung, Motorola, Toshiba, HP, RIM and HTC have hardly made a dent in Apple's dominance. Remarkably, the leading challenger is online retailer Amazon, with its Kindle Fire tablet.
The innovation game is changing. Delivering great products is no longer sufficient for success. And as the Fire's limited memory, ho-hum processor, and and lack of camera demonstrate, great products may not even be necessary. Rather, what matters is delivering great solutions.
This shift from products to solutions matters to everyone. In industries ranging from consumer electronics to construction and from media to mining, the firms seizing the lead are those that can best align ecosystems of offers and partners.
The new third generation iPad keeps Apple well ahead of the competition. The Android based players like Samsung, Motorola, HTC just aren't in the game because they haven't got the ecosystem of apps - people want a solution as this article says, which leaves the Android guys only competing on price. Amazon can carve out a very nice niche/sub category of the 7 inch low cost Tablet with enough useful functionality for the solution required at that end of the market. Microsoft will finally join the party towards the end of the year with Windows 8, but they've given Apple almost 3 years head start. And, because they don't build the hardware, their partners won't be able to compete with Apple's vertical integration across the whole of the supply chain. I wonder when we are going to stop calling them Tablets and start calling the whole category iPads?
