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I Can’t Recommend This August 28, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
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12 comments

I like LinkedIn.  I’ve used it for many years, well before the term “social media” came into vogue, and value what it does well: keeping me abreast of the career changes within my professional network.  Although the powers-that-be at LinkedIn have added other features over the years, the core value of network awareness hasn’t changed. Many of those new features provide little value, at least to me. And there is one feature that needs to go immediately: recommendations.

In theory, recommendations seem to make a lot of sense.  If you feel strongly about a person to whom you are connected, you can write a recommendation of that person.  The recommendation, once approved by the recipient, is placed on their profile for all the world to see.  LinkedIn thinks this is such a good feature that your profile is not considered complete until you have accumulated three recommendations.

In reality, the LinkedIn recommendation system is useless.  Here’s why:

  • Recommendations are universally positive. No one in their right mind would permit a negative recommendation to appear on their profile.  Self-selected recommendations tell me nothing about you, except that you can apparently convince others to laud you in public.  I suspect this is a quid pro quo practice anyway, so even that skill is suspect.
  • Recommendations are usually solicited. Who hasn’t gotten a request for a recommendation?  How many of us have written one, if only to avoid an awkward refusal?  Not to upset anyone, but if I really thought highly of you, I’d write a recommendation without prompting.
  • Honest recommendations are tainted. Surrounded by so many fake recommendations, the occasional sincere unsolicited recommendation is lost in the noise.  Their value is diminished to the point that they are useless.
  • Real recommendations occur without the knowledge of the subject. Real recommendations (which LinkedIn was trying to emulate) occur between people privately.  When someone calls and asks my opinion of another person, they’ll get a real recommendation.   It will have for more value to the requester than any generic recommendation on LinkedIn.

To eliminate all these problems, I think LinkedIn should just drop the entire system.  No more recommendations cluttering up profiles, no more requests filling up my LinkedIn mailbox, no more “happy talk” about people you’d otherwise not write about.

Instead, when you want to find out about someone, find a mutual connection on LinkedIn and contact them.  Use LinkedIn for what it was intended: connecting with your professional network to learn things and do a better job. You’ll get a better, honest answer that benefits everyone concerned.

And please, if you like this idea, recommend it to someone else.

Legs And Memory August 21, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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4 comments

My grandfather had a saying: “A weak memory makes strong legs.”  This seems to be coming to mind more often these days, as my short-term memory seems to expire faster than I can get the items I set out to retrieve.  Multiple trips ensue, helping my legs and overall cardiovascular health, but wasting time and energy.

Forgotten items create more work, both at home and on the job.  While personal memory problems may be inevitable as we become more, ahem, mature, organizational memory loss should be completely avoidable.  Unfortunately, almost everyone is terrible at capturing and using our organizational memory.

Everyone you work with has huge amounts of useful information stored in their heads.  From the moment you begin employment, you are gathering information about what you do, why you do it, for whom you do it, and how you do it.  When you start out, everything is new and you spend lots of time gathering data that everyone else long ago internalized.  Simple questions confront you all the time: who is in charge of that?  Which form do I need?  Why does this work that way?  Your coworkers patiently explain all this, bringing you up to speed in your new role.  After a while, you internalize this information as well, to the point that you stop thinking about it.

When the next new person arrives, they begin the same process.  It is highly unlikely that you documented everything you learned when you started (who has the time for that when you are just getting started?) so this poor soul goes through the same process.  Time is wasted as the weak organizational memory forces them to do a lot of walking.

I have been on teams that set out to solve this problem.  We created formal guides and detailed documentation for our organization in the hope that new hires would get up to speed faster and waste less time.  We tried to create an organizational memory but in the end, failed.  Why? Continuous change.

Capturing most of this information results in a snapshot of a continually evolving process.  That snapshot works for a short time, but eventually fades.  Even after a few weeks or months, there are enough blurry spots in that snapshot that people will once again have to manually fill in the blanks.  As soon as people lose faith in the documentation, they abandon it and go back to the manual process.

Like real memories, captured organizational memories fade rapidly over time.  To reinforce real memories, you must replay them in your mind.  To reinforce organizational memories, you must constantly revisit and update them.  This is time-consuming and expensive, and ultimately not cost effective.  Except for the most important processes that require rigid definition and oversight, most of our business rules exist in the (very) fluid minds of the participants.

The idea of easy, effective knowledge capture has been an ongoing goal for the past thirty years or more.  It has yet to become a reality.  Our collection tools are simply not capable of collecting all that we do and learn in real time.  Currently, people are looking to social media as the next magic bullet that will make this a reality.  As tempting as this sounds, I don’t think it will pan out from a data collection perspective.

The real answer, I think, is to accept that organizational memory is best retained in the heads of the people in the organization.  It may be that these social networking tools will allow us to find the person who knows what we need better than any previous tool.  It may be that capture has never been the problem, but that the connection network has been deficient.  Social networking may let us connect the perfect capture tools (our brains) in better ways than ever before.  As I’ve pointed out before, knowing who knows is the key to success in any field.  We may be on the verge of solving the problem of finding who knows better than ever before.  Memories may continue to fade, but the walking will be greatly reduced.  We can only hope.

Until then, I’ve got other problems.  Where did I put my keys?  Time to start walking…

Lessons From Broadway, Part 2 August 14, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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4 comments

A recent opportunity to see three Broadway shows in three days has me finding leadership lessons on the Great White Way.  Here’s another.

One of the shows I got to see this summer was Mamma Mia!, a love story set to the music of Abba.   Mamma Mia! is a great show on several levels, despite the fact that it forces people to put an exclamation point in the middle of a sentence when they write about it.

The story is actually two stories: a young girl seeks to find her real father just before her marriage, while her mother comes to terms with the love she lost long ago.  As a result, the show has two casts: the young girl, her friends, and fiancé; and the mother, her friends, and previous lovers.  These groups interact, of course, but they also spend a lot of time on stage independently of one another.

While the show is wonderful, it quickly becomes clear that the older troupe can act and sing rings around the younger cast members.  Their timing, presence, and stage business is subtly better; they are more natural on stage and deliver a better performance.  The younger actors aren’t bad, but the older ones are better.

The younger group, on the other hand, can dance like there’s no tomorrow and get to engage in more physical numbers and a bit more shtick than the older group.  And irrespective of acting chops, spandex jumpsuits favor the young.

I’m hopeful that most of us do not deal with spandex at work, but almost all of us are dealing with a similar generational divide in our teams.  More than ever before, we have waves of younger employees coming into our businesses with distinctly different skills and approaches to life and work.

Much has been made of this Millennial Generation and how we need to reshape our world to accommodate their new ideas.  The more seasoned members of the team, naturally, are a bit put out by this approach and wonder why their ideas and approach are suddenly out of favor.

I’m not a big fan of turning our business world upside-down to make Millennials feel all warm and fuzzy at work.  But I’m also not convinced that the “old ways” are the only way.  The reality is that there are useful ideas on both sides of this generational divide, and we need to exploit them all to be successful.  Like the blended cast that makes Mamma Mia! successful, we need to draw from both groups to build a better whole.

The rapid changes that social media and web-based technology are bring to our world are important, if not fully understood.  The Millenial enthusiasm for that technology is important, and we need to harness it, no matter what the older curmudgeons say.  Conversely, with age comes perspective, and there are some real traps in those tools that are only understood by those who have been burned before.  The risk needs to be managed, despite the complaining of those young whippersnappers.

Where should the leaders be?  Right in the middle.  That’s why you need to engage this technology, not just read about it in an airplane magazine.  Most of us have the experience part, but we need to learn, first-hand, what these tools can and can’t do.  With real data in hand, we can speak to both sides of the issue and pull the best parts from each.  But that direct experience is crucial, allowing you to earn the respect that lets you speak credibly to your younger team members.

Each of us have to craft a successful show from all the actors at our disposal.  Find the best singers, dancers, and actors, and get them on the stage together.  But please, avoid the spandex.

Living In Multiple Worlds June 26, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
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2 comments

This is the third of three articles recounting the separation of my personal and professional Twitter streams.  The first dealt with why, the second with how, and here I share the end result.

In most good experiments, you tend to learn a lot more than you intended about things you never considered before you began.  This was certainly the case in my project to separate my single Twitter account into two streams, an open professional stream and a private personal one. Some pertinent discoveries, in no particular order:

  • Dividing your account is not complicated, but it can be confusing.  I had to pay attention to make sure I did not alter the wrong account at the wrong time. You also need a lot of email addresses; Twitter requires a unique email address for each account. I don’t understand why, but it will make life complicated for those who cannot readily create a handful of addresses to support their new accounts.
  • Current Twitter tools are just starting to become adept at managing multiple accounts.  Thankfully, the new version of TweetDeck was released soon after I began my adventure.  This new version makes multiple account management much easier on both my desktop and iPod Touch.  PockeTwit provides some nice multi-account features on my Windows Mobile phone.
  • Having a locked personal account dramatically reduces Twitter spam.  This alone made the transition worthwhile.
  • I had to find a way to gently steer people who followed my personal stream to my professional stream.  Since you can’t DM someone unless they are following you, I have to allow them to follow my personal account, DM with a request to switch to my professional account, and then drop them from my personal account.  This doesn’t always work; people seem to make the switch about half the time.
  • It is annoying that I can only associate my phone with one account.  I understand that tweets sent from my phone via SMS can only be sent to one Twitter account, but I’d like to have tweets from both accounts delivered to my phone.  Anyone at Twitter listening?
  • I got a lot of interest from people who were confronted by this same problem.  A few (@BevBrown/@RunnerBev and @BruceCarlson/@CarlsonSpeaking) have also gone down this path.  Many others are deciding if this kind of change suits them, and how the idea fits into the overall philosophy of open social media. (Credit goes to @BevBrown for coining the phrase “Twitter splitter.”)
  • I am very grateful to those followers who made the leap and refollowed my on my private account.  I am also grateful to those who put up with the confusion along the way.  I was surprised by those who thanked me for bringing them along to my new account. I learned that for those of us who have developed real relationships through Twitter, the follower/following relationship is an important connection that is not to be trifled with.  It’s not like we’re going steady or anything, but it is certainly more than a passing connection.

With all said and done, was it a Good Thing?  For me, absolutely.  I feel like I can be much more focused in my professional persona, and a little more relaxed in my private one.  As Bruce Carlson shared with me, you can “keep up with your friends better and there seems to be less pressure.”

Ideally, this kind of content stratification should be native to the tools.  Someday it will be.  Until then, we need to make do with what we have at hand.  That’s what drove this process for me; I hope you find my detailed explanation useful as you seek the right balance point in your social media world.

The Great Divide June 24, 2009

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Networking.
Tags: , , ,
5 comments

This post is the second in a series on managing layered Twitter streams.  The first post explains why this is needed; this post goes on to address how it can be done.

My earlier post outlines the problem at hand: a single Twitter account that has grown to include a broad range of disparate followers, leading me to split the account to better serve two different constituencies. In short, I want a professional stream open to the world, and a private stream that is more tightly controlled.

Step 1: Create my professional account

Splitting a Twitter stream isn’t hard, but it can be confusing.  I began with a single account (@cmusciano) that combined personal and professional tweets.  I had accumulated about 450 followers, and my goal was to split the stream without unduly confusing or annoying all these people.

Since most of my followers were on the professional side, I elected to make this account my professional stream, but with a new name.  Fortunately, Twitter allows users to change their account name on a whim.  By simply editing my account preferences, I changed the name of @cmusciano to @EffectiveCIO.  This allows my professional Twitter stream to better align with this blog, creating a more consistent presence in both arenas.

When you change your Twitter account name, all of your followers are automatically updated with the new name.  Unfortunately, references to the old name in existing tweets are not updated, so someone clicking on an old reference will be misdirected.  I don’t know a way around this; it corrects over time as people begin using the new account name.

The last step in this process is to update all those third-party tools that accessed the original account so that they use the new account.  This is tedious at best and generally annoying.  Many sites don’t have the ability to make these changes; you have to delete your account and start over with the new one.

Step 2: Create my personal account

With a professional account in hand, I needed to recreate my personal account.  I wanted to use the same name (@cmusciano), slightly updated to be @CMusciano.  I quickly created the new account after renaming the old one.  Although remote, there was a chance that I could lose the name while things were in transition.  Luckily, having an obscure name makes that unlikely, and I got my new account.

I set up the profile and began the task of migrating my personal followers from the old account to the new one.  This is where things get very confusing.  You need to remember which account you are logged in as, and it’s easy to lose track and alter the wrong account.  I finally used two computers to keep myself from getting confused.

The easiest way to bring folks over was to log in as @CMusciano and visit the Following list of @EffectiveCIO.  I scrolled through the list and followed everyone I wanted in my new account.  This is an interesting experience; you have to evaluate each relationship and decide if that person is part of your personal or professional world.  You don’t want to insult someone, but you do want to ensure that your personal space remains personal.  In the end, I added about 90 people and companies to my personal account.

This immediately confuses 90 people.  They all get messages telling them that @CMusciano is following them.  Since they thought this was already the case, they get confused about what, if anything, to do about it.  My goal was that they would refollow me back, re-establishing their presence in my new personal account.  Most of them did, fortunately.

During this process, I kept my account unlocked to make it easy for people to follow my new account.  After a few days, when the following settled down, I locked the account.  I now had a personal account, containing my personal contacts, securely removed from anyone I had not approved. My final step was to link this account to my (equally secure) Facebook page.  This allows my Facebook status and personal tweets to be combined, making each account an extension of the other.

Step 3: Create a landing page

With two accounts on Twitter, I felt it would be confusing when people tried to find me.  To help with that, I created a Twitter “landing page:” a place where people could learn about my accounts and choose the one that suited their needs.

Since there is no such thing as a Twitter landing page, I created a third account: @ChuckMusciano. This account contains six tweets that explain my other two accounts and directs people to follow me there.  It is open, but I’ll never post to it.

When I wrote the content for the instructional tweets, it was a bit of a challenge to craft them in little 140 character snippets and then to post them backwards.  This allows them to read in the correct order when you visit that page.

People occasionally follow this account.  I delete the spammers and gently DM the real people, asking them to choose a real account to follow instead. It’s too early to tell if the landing page helps at all, but I do feel better having some public explanation of what is going on.

Final thoughts

Although this process is not hard, it can be confusing.  After plugging away at it, I am happy with the result.  In my next post, I’ll share the final results, reactions from others, and how it’s been working out since the Great Divide.

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