Talking Talent

Is the next Galileo sitting at home wasting his potential watching DVDs of Star Wars instead of watching the stars themselves?  Is the next Shakespeare tapping out love texts on her mobile phone instead of writing the next Romeo and Juliet?

Luddites and techno-phobes complain that digital technologies are stifling creativity and creating a generation of unmotivated couch potatoes.

Technology has undoubtedly made life much easier for so many - but that doesn’t mean we’ve become lazy.  Instead, technology has further enabled us to expand our infinite creative potential.

The Internet has given people a means to break down barriers that once muffled the flow of information and collaboration.  With people from across the globe now able to access seemingly infinite amounts of information and to be able to collaborate and share ideas, we are entering an exciting new era.

With blogs and wikis, everyone can communicate.  With RSS feeds, everyone can read about it.  MySpace, Ning, Bebo and FaceBook help us to connect with the world. Flickr helps to sort, store and share your snaps, while YouTube let’s you show off your movie making talents.  Tagging sites like Del.ici.ous enable us to share our favourite webpages.  Gliffy provides the tools to draw and share diagrams, Googledocs eliminates the challenges of document version control, while Slideshare hosts and shares presentations.  The list is endless.

And despite what the naysayers say, Internet technologies are not making us lazier, but instead have the capacity to deliver sharp upswings in productivity.

While MySpace might seem like fun and fluff, social networks, teleconferencing, wikis and other technologies that allow interaction on a large scale are changing traditional business models and improving productivity.

Cisco Systems’ Chairman, John Chambers, recently suggested that businesses that embrace collaborative communications models, such as social networking, into their processes could see a return to 3 to 5 percent annual improvements in worker productivity.

By allowing people both in and outside of companies to connect with each other, and share information over the network, the pace of business operations will escalate.  The power of connecting will enable us to do things at a dramatically different speed.

So, in the words of science fiction writer, Robert A Heinlein, “progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

I wonder if the time-honoured ‘the dog ate my homework’ excuse is finally dead and buried as a new generation of kids blame the dog for eating their iPods?

Schools and universities are already waking up to the potential of the iPod as an educational tool, podcasting lectures, making audiobooks available for students and using iPods to record music lessons, for example.

In the foreseeable future, iPods will become essential pieces of equipment in every student’s digital backpack.

Instead of being seen as disruptive devices with no place in the classroom, iPods can be exciting educational and training tools.

In the future, the MP3 player will probably look more like a memory stick with a roll out screen, and have enough memory to carry not only a student’s lifetime of notes, but rich media references, assignments, presentations and portfolios – not to mention a vast personal library of songs, audiobooks, photos and movies.

iPods are emerging as a popular device at universities across the globe as lecturers realise their messages can reach the masses of students who skip classes, and students realise they can use what used to be ‘dead time’ (such as sitting on a bus) more productively.

And iPod learning need not be confined to traditional educational institutions.  Baby Boomers are downloading language lessons to brush up on their French and Italian before taking their grand tours through Europe, for example.

There is huge potential for students and educators alike if educational organisations harness this emerging technology.  Today’s students are already ‘digital natives’ and we must find ways to engage students in learning, ensure that their educational experiences are relevant to Australia’s prevailing knowledge economy and to their lives outside the classroom.

Today, 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies have corporate blogs, according to SocialText, but only a handful have a designated chief blogger.

This will certainly change, as more companies embrace the power of social media.

March 2008 marked an inflexion point in Australia. It was the month that people spent more time online than watching TV.

According to AC Nielson, Australians on average spend 13.7 hours online and only 13.3 hours watching TV.  As the eyeballs move from TV screen to PC screen, this marks a change in the way we connect with people within our existing circle of friends and, more importantly, our ability to access and interact with virtual acquaintances who have new ideas, opinions and knowledge that we can leverage in our jobs and our lives.

This is a brave new world and we are yet to understand the opportunities that might flow from digital interactions for organisations and individuals. My interest in Internet communities and how they interact goes back to the early 2000s, when I was at CSC working on global knowledge management communities.

There are many such global communities and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace (where I have profiles), Linked In for professional exchanges and Second Life where I have purchased an island for the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) and had my own avatar.

I’ve been an active blogger since 2006, at a time when just a handful of business leaders had blogs of any kinds.

While I don’t believe the concept of a ‘chief blogger’ is right for all brands, blogging can offer some companies real benefits: it can humanise a company (like Microsoft), provide transparency (like Dell) or promote a company as a great place to work (like Southwest Airlines).

My blog is my personal views on a range of topics related to talent - the attraction, retention and management and other issues which impact on how people make decisions around jobs, employers and lifestyle. 

More importantly, I am interested in generating discussion and participating in a community conversation about talent management.  So, if you have an idea to share, spark up a conversation.