Off Topic: Generic Equivalents

You've probably seen or heard of the phrase, 'It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough', or if you read a lot of popular business or productivity books or follow the tech start-up space, you'll be familiar with the common mantra to 'just ship', shorthand for 'Don't endlessly obsess on every last detail in a pursuit of a kind of elusive and ultimately unreachable perfection that will only result in you never actually producing anything and giving up in frustration, i.e. it's better to 'ship' or release too soon than too late.'I have never had this. Probably.

I generally tend to agree with those sentiments, even if sometimes I think the 'just ship' people start to drift dangerously close to the 'Just be fantastic if you want to be fantastic' types. Like the kinds of tautological statements found in many self-help books, inspirational tweets, and inside fortune cookies. Oh really, if I want to be incredibly successful, I just have to start doing things that will make me incredibly successful? Wow, thanks for the tip.

But in our professional lives these kinds of decisions have to be made all the time, whether to chase the bigger and better solution, to invest time and money in the latest technology to support a particular organizational process, or whether we need to extend our normal salary ranges and budgets in order to land that person or two that might be formerly out of our reach and likely to get snapped up by our better known and better funded competitor. Even in our personal lives we come up against this all the time. How many folks reading this have already had a mental conversation with yourselves about ditching the iPhone 4s you just got for the upcoming iPhone 5 will be the right move?

So here is my question for you on a Friday - how do you know when 'good enough' is really 'good enough' and perfect isn't needed? What criteria do you use? Do you ever get comfortable accepting less when better or faster or more capable is still out there, just a little bit out of reach?

When might you decide, for example, that generic beer will do the trick?

I'm curious.

Have a Great Weekend!

WEBINAR: 5 Ways to Use Video to Raise Your HR and Recruiting Game

The merry band of misfits over at Fistful of Talent are at it again, ready for another classic no-holds-barred, (Really, you're probably asking, are there truly no holds barred? What about the Sleeper? Or the Figure 4 leglock? The Boston Crab? Trust me, even those holds are fair game.), free webinar designed to share information, insight, and real, actionable strategies and tactics all delivered in the trademark FOT style. This time the crew will be tacking video, and more specifically, how video is and can be used more effectively in HR and recruiting.

Here are the particulars:

You’re a progressive HR and recruiting professional (that’s why you’re reading this), and you know that video is more than a lame feature of bad compliance training.  You get that video transcends quirky YouTube videos that go viral or running Netflix/Hulu on an iPad.  You get that mobile video is the trend that will change the way your department works in the coming years, but you’re just not sure where to start…

That’s why Fistful of Talent created their latest webinar – The Future of Talent: 5 Ways to Use Video to Raise Your HR and Recruiting Game. Join us for this webinar, and we’ll give you the 411 for how to think about video within your HR or recruiting practice and a road map to get started in the following areas:

•    Employment Branding
•    Recruiting
•    Role Play for Mangers
•    Training Shorts Delivered via Mobile
•    A “How To” Guide to Get Started with Video in Your HR/Recruiting Organization

This webinar comes with the Fistful of Talent guarantee:  60% of the time, it works every time.  Join the FOT crew as they break down the video scene and brainstorm about the best way to build video chops in your HR or recruiting practice.

Compelling stuff, right?

Seriously, I promise it will be worth your time to check out the webinar, the FOT style and approach to webinars is not at all the usual boring, '45 minutes of some guy reading slides' method that you are used to.

It will be fun, informative, and relevant - and you'll walk away with at least a few practical and actionable ideas for video that you can begin to work with right away.

Register here, (did I remind you it is FREE?), and to learn more visit here.

Looking for Innovation in Recruiting Technology

Tomorrow and Friday I will be attending the Recruiting Innovation Summit, an ERE Media event, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. I will also have the great pleasure and honor to serve as one of the members of the judging panel for the event's startup competition, where six companies, selected from almost 50 initial submissions, will vie for a $10K grand prize, and get the chance to demonstrate their innovative solutions to a gathering of industry experts and leaders.

Innovation in any market often comes from the startup space, where experimentation is encouraged, barriers to change are less, and ideas often have more of a chance to find their way to the market. Having a chance to demonsrate their solutions, and to network and engage with so many industry experts in one setting makes for what should be a really fantastic experience. 

In addition to the startup compentition, the Recruiting Innovation Summit will have presentations led by lumiaries like Steve Cadigan from LinkedIn, Lars Schmidt from NPR, Mike Junge from Google, and more.

Additionally, the Recruiting Innovation Summit will stream live over the next two days, you can sign up to be notified when the stream commences where to watch from here.

It should be a fantastic event and I hope to see and meet up with anyone in attendance, and if you can't make it out to Mountain View then be sure to check out the live stream, it will definitely be worth your time.

Regrets of the retiring

There is a pretty internet-famous post titled, 'Regrets of the Dying', written by Bronnie Ware a long-time nurse who worked with serously ill and terminal patients. Her 'regrets' post was really a summary and distillation of what she had heard over the years from patients, most very ill and dying, when they talked about what they might have regretted in their lives.The article, and the five most common regrets are not that really surprising or hard to guess, ('I wish I didn't work so hard', interestingly made the list), and is worth a read.

I'm not sure what led me to stumble upon the 'regrets' piece, but after reading it I had to wonder if there actually were some parallels to people's lifetime regrets and their workplace or professional regrets, besides the stated regret of wishing they had not worked so hard. After all, for many, work is such a massive part of life, and often, ones happiness or at least contentment can be profoundly influenced by their feelings (and regrets) about their life's work.

In case you didn't click over to Bronnie's piece, here are the top five 'Regrets of the Dying':

1. I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the one that was expected of me

2. I wish I didn't work so hard

3. I wished I had the courage to express my feelings

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends

5. I wish I had let myself be happier

In a way, most of if not all of these regrets can have direct equivalents to the choices we make, or feel we have to make, in our professional lives. How many of us took a college major in a 'safe' subject like business or economics, rather than what we might have been more interested or passionate about? It might have been the 'right' decision but it could have and often does send people down a path they never wanted to head. Or how often have we worked ourselves silly because we thought we had to, and perhaps missed out on fleeting moments in our families or children's lives? And if you are like me, no doubt you've lost touch with lots of your earliest workplace colleagues and mentors that sometimes you wish you could re-connect with today. And lastly, even though in these really tough economic times, being 'happy' at work can be considered a luxury and not a necessity, for how many of us is there nagging feeling that our best years that should be filled with our best work are slipping away just a little bit more every day.

I don't mean this post to be such a downer, (after a quick scan it seems pretty darn depressing I think), but I would rather just draw your attention to the list from Bronnie Ware if for no other reason to make anyone who takes a few minutes to read the piece, and think about the list of regrets, to consider if there is something missing in their work lives, and if truly, something should be done to make some, even small, changes.

I just think while it can be very hard, incredibly hard, it is probably even worse to call it a career someday and wish you had really been true to yourself, even just a little bit more.

Media and Consumer Tech Trend #3 - Information Acceleration

Recently the analyst firm Gartner issued an interesting press release sharing their '10 consumer macro trends shaping the technology, media and service provider markets over the next 10 years', and I have covered two of these trends Gartner called out here on the blog. The first one, the importance of understanding the customer profile as you create products and services, and perhaps more importantly, as you make decisions on hiring and promotion into leadership roles has definite implications for the design of enterprise technologies and programs. The second, the desire for simultaneously powerful, multi-functional, but simple and easy to use solutions that are prevalent in the consumer world, is increasing in relevance in the workplace as well.

Today I wanted to wrap up this series by taking a look at one more of Gartner's '10 trends', the one titled 'The Impact of Acceleration/Deceleration: The Temporal Digital Divide Widens'. What does this mean, and why is it significant? First, more details from Gartner on this trend:

Acceleration means consumers expect regular and increasingly frequent product upgrades. Over time, there has been a closing of the classic "digital divide" between the haves and have-nots in terms of access to basic technology products and services. However, new digital divides have opened up, especially inequalities in relation to the social graph and consumers' ability to access and manage — or not manage — real-time, nonstop ubiquitous connectivity that is the product of technological acceleration.

Interesting take no doubt, but as technology, particularly mobile technologies and more specifically mobile access to the internet particularly in the developing nations has the effect of levelling the playing field at least in terms of basic access, then the next source of advantage and opportunity shifts from providing basic technology and access, to providing ways to make sense of the flood of information that has become more widely available. On the consumer side think of it this way, most everyone is online, has access to more information than has ever been available at any time in history, and more than likely is building personal social networks that span local areas, states, and nations. The answer to just about any question can be found, the problem often is actually sorting the good from the bad from the ridiculous number of options.

At work, we see similar challenges, (and opportunities). As electronic communication and digital technologies have been introduced over the last two decades, most organizations no longer have a shortage of data and information, in fact, in some cases workplaces are drowning in too much information. The problem of collecting or at least digitizing information is less and less a problem, but making sense of it all, and turning or transforming all this raw information in its many forms, (email, voice, video, documents, IM, activity streams, external social network data, and more), into relevant, meaningful, accessible, and actionable insights is the next frontier for organizations and solution providers to master. More simply put, the next set and group of more interesting future developments in workplace technologies will be the ones that help to effectively address what Gartner aptly notes in their predictions, enabling people to quickly make sense of the massive flood of digital data that better and faster transaction processing systems, cheap data storage, and increasing mobile and virtual access to it all has made available.

What do you think? Where you work is your problem lack of information, or the ability to sort through all the information you have?