One day in blogging, a partial list of pitches

Blogging has been pretty good to me over the years. So has doing the HR Happy Hour Show/Podcast. Both of these things have opened up plenty of doors, created some interesting opportunities, and enabled me to meet some great people along the way. One other thing about doing this is (and back when I started I had no idea was even a thing), is that once you have been blogging or podcasting for a while, you get on the radar of lots of news folks, PR firms, and other organizations that would like you to know about and potentially help publicize their news, product launches, their client's new book, or some event they are promoting.Jasper Johns, White Flag (which is what I am waving towards my Inbox)

Most of these outreach messages are perfectly professional, offer up some kind of interesting content or news that in theory might be interesting to me (or readers and listeners), and I honestly don't mind getting them one bit. I don't/can't respond to all of these PR pitches, (there can be lots of them in any given day), but I still appreciate them. Even after all this time doing this it is still sometimes surprising that (some) folks are interested in what I think, have to say, and want to connect with the audience. 

Why blog about the behind the scenes stuff that goes on with blogging, even a small, niche blog like this one?

I don't know, it just seemed interesting to me today. Which continues to be the primary reason I blog about anything (note for any PR folks who might read this). But just in the last hour or so as I was checking some email, planning out the day, I received four or five of the aforementioned 'pitch' emails, in quick succession. That seemed kind of unusual, and so I checked back at the last 24 hours or so of my received emails and I thought that, wow, I have gotten a ton of PR pitches already this week. So since I brought up the topic, and I am too far down the path of this post to start over with some other, better idea, I wanted to share a partial list of the PR pitches (mostly Email subject lines only) that have arrived in my Inbox in the last 24 hours or so. 

Submitted without comment, judgement, or endorsement...

1. Disturbing: Workplace Suicide the New Trend

2. Volcano Calbuca Erupts! Are you Prepared?

3. Innovating Service Summit Webinar Will Feature Internationally Customer Service Experts

4. Lee Hecht Harrison Poll Finds Most Workers Losing Sleep Due to Work-Related Stress

5. Gain Insight to Independent Workers to Build the Best Teams

6. Nepal Earthquake Rocks the World!

7. WiFi Will Run Future Wearables

8. 8th Annual Mobile Excellence Awards Coming Soon!

9. Special Invitation: HR Secrets You Need to Hear

10. The Lavender Graduating Class of 2015 Lacks Legal Protection Moving Into the Workplace

There's a bunch more, but you get the idea. If there is an idea.

Blogging is kind of a weird thing sometimes.

Have a great day!

VIDEO: The project is called 'Replacing humans with robots'

Directing you to a super-interesting short (about 5 minutes or so) video produced by the New York Times as the first installment of a series they call 'Robotica'. In the video, we see more about the growth, challenges, and worker impact of the surge in adoption of industrial robots in Chinese manufacturing. Take a few minutes to watch the piece, (embedded below, Email and RSS subscribers will have to click through), and then some comments from me after the clip.

Really interesting stuff I think, and for me, very instructive as in 5 minutes it hits many of the big picture issues associated with the increasing automation of work and the impacts this will have on human workers.

1. At least in this Chinese province, the goals of this program are extremely clear - 'Replacing human workers with robots.' While the motivations for this stated goal might be specific to this region, I think it would be foolish to think that this phenomenon and executive attitude isn't much more common, and not just in China. CEOs everywhere are going to be intrigued and in pursuit of what increased automation promises - lower costs, increased consistency and quality, and a predictable labor supply.

2. The video does a nice job of showing the likely mixed or divergent impact of increased automation on the front-line workers that are usually most effected. While one (hand-picked by the factory leaders) employee waxes happily about how the robots are making his job easier and happier, another talks frankly about his (and other's) inability to easily transition from manual, repetitive work that is replaced by robot workers, to higher value added or creative and 'human' work. Whether in China or in Indianapolis, no low skilled worker can suddenly become a high-skilled or creative worker overnight. 

3. The video alludes to the potential, one day, for robots to actually manufacture the robots themselves, even if that is not yet happening today. This notion, that automated technologies will largely build more of themselves is one of the key differences from modern, robotic-type automation than in previous technological breakthroughs. Henry Ford's Model A didn't drive itself, (or build itself). Telephones didn't make calls for you. Personal computers needed LOTS of people entering data into them in order to get anything useful back out from them. But robots building more robots to replace more people? That sounds a little scary.

I will sign off here, take a look at the video if you can spare a few minutes today and let me know what you think in the comments below. Or have your robot assistant watch it for you.

Have a great week!

CHART OF THE DAY: The World Economy in 2030

Today's Chart of the Day comes to us courtesy of Bloomberg - a look at the World's 20 largest economies by GDP, stacked up and showing both their relative sizes today, and the estimates for where the Top 20 will rank by 2030 - just 15 years from now.

As always, we will hit you with the chart, then some FREE commentary from me (it is my blog) after the data:

So for the HR/Talent pro what is there to make from the data on the World's largest economies in 2030?

Three things come to mind:

1. Look around. If you and your organization is US-based, or derives its sales and income primarily from US customers, you probably have a few years, maybe as many as 10, before you need to really worry about how these shifts in size and scale might impact your business and livelihood. You might be ok for a while, maybe for a long while, but if double-digit growth in sales and income in on your organization's 5-year plan, then it is going to be really challenging to achieve that target unless you start (or increase) the business you are doing in the faster-growing countries of the world.

2. China. Of the Top 20 economies China is expected to grow the most in the next 15 years, coming really, really close to topping the US as the world's largest. What are you doing today to help your organization better prepare to compete for your piece of this huge and growing market? Do you have the right kind of talent that can work in and understand this market? Are you able to talk confidently about the unique HR/Talent challenges you'd face, both with managing expats as well as recruiting locally?

3. Slow growth in the old world. Places like Germany, France, Italy - heck, pretty much all of Europe are predicted to grow much slower, and thus make up a smaller portion of the world economy, over the next 15 years, than emerging powers like India, China, and Brazil. This is not really news, but again for the most part in the US we still tend to think of Europe and European countries as having much more influence in the global economy than perhaps we should.

No HR pro lives in a vacuum. No organization operates completely immune to the larger market forces that surround us all. It's important to know where the future might take us, and perhaps even more important to know how to speak the local language when we get there.

Have a great weekend!

Expressive, boisterous, and unpretentious

Expressive, boisterous, and unpretentious - not sure they would be the first words that would come to mind if I were asked to describe myself, but according to IBM Watson's Personality Insights Demonstration, based on a text analysis of my post about text messaging earlier this week, those are the most accurate descriptors.

It is a fun tool and exercise to try, (you can play along with any of your, or someone else's writing samples here). Simply paste in a block of text, click on 'Analyze', and Watson will let you know how the text sample equates to personality elements like openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, and more.

The tool even generates a neat narrative explaining the person behind the text sample, who knew that 'My choices are driven by a desire for modernity'. That is pretty accurate, I think. Well maybe. 

What's the point of the tool, if not just for a bit of fun?

According to IBM -

The IBM Watson Personality Insights service uses linguistic analytics to infer cognitive and social characteristics, including Big Five, Values, and Needs, from communications that the user makes available, such as email, text messages, tweets, forum posts, and more. By deriving cognitive and social preferences, the service helps users to understand, connect to, and communicate with other people on a more personalized level.

Better understanding, ability to connect with others, and to enable improved interpersonal communications all sound like pretty worthy goals, so at least I am interested in any technological means to assist us humans with these challenges.

Oh, one more thing, the Watson Personality Insights tool also generates a neat looking graphical analysis of the writer's personality - here is mine from the aforementioned post about text messaging.

Like I said, really neat. Although from the looks of the chart I probably need to work on my 'self-transcendence' a little bit. Whatever that means.

You can take the IBM Watson Personality Insights tool out for a spin here, and if you do, let me know what you think.

UPDATE: The uniform is here for me, I'm not here for the uniform

A few months back I wrote here on this blog, and over on Fistful of Talent about the idea of professional folks donning a corporate 'uniform', i.e., wearing the same clothes more or less every day like Steve Jobs with his black turtleneck or Mark Zuckerberg and his hoodie. The reasons that Jobs and Zuck and even President Obama (who wears pretty much the same dark suit every day), usually offer for their lack of sartorial variety are pretty consistent - having important, stressful jobs requires them to make lots of decisions every day, not having to 'decide' what to wear in the morning removes one more decision from their lives, thus freeing up mental cycles for more important matters.

But one of the curious aspects of the 'corporate uniform' idea is that it is almost exclusively an option seemingly only open to men. Jobs, Zuck, Obama, even some Australian TV host - the professionals that seem to be able to get away with turning a blind eye to fashion are almost always men. Women, we think anyway, are more prone to be judged as professionals at least in part by appearance including choice of clothing.

And that leads me to the reason for revisiting the 'corporate uniform' topic, this recent piece from Business Insider titled 'This woman has worn the same outfit to work every single day the past 3 years'. Matlilda Kahl, who works in advertising, has adopted the 'uniform' approach like Jobs and Zuck, and surprisingly, has not had any real issues at work with this decision. From the Business Insider piece:

For the past three years, art director Matilda Kahl has been wearing the same outfit to work every single day.

“I just wanted to save some time and energy,” she told Business Insider.

Kahl was tired of running late in the morning, reevaluating her outfits, and stressing about whether her clothes were appropriate for different events or meetings at her creative advertising agency.

For someone in the creative field who has to make a lot of decisions throughout the day, she longed for one less choice to make.

“During the weekdays, I have so many creative challenges at work to keep my mind stimulated that I don’t feel an urge to express myself creatively through what I wear,” she said. “I finally had enough.”

“The uniform is here for me, I’m not here for the uniform.”

A very similar decision and conclusion reached by the much more famous adopters of this strategy like President Obama. One less thing to think about. One fewer decision to make at the start of the day. One less hassle.

But hat makes this version of the story notable, and interesting to me, is that, obviously Ms. Kahl is a woman, and professional women are not supposed to be able to basically ignore appearance and fashion and style. In fact, in my earlier FOT piece I wrote the following:

If Ginny Rometty or Sheryl Sandberg or Marissa Mayer wore the same clothes every day (like Jobs and Zuck and Obama), would we EVER stop talking about what they are wearing and focus on their performance?

Probably not. Men get judged (primarily) by what they do. Women, especially in visible, important positions, never seem to be able to shake the criticism and commentary about things like clothes and hairstyles.

But to her enormous credit, Ms. Kahl proves this assertion wrong. She is proving that if you can perform on the job at a high level, then no one will care, or they will eventually stop caring what it is you are wearing.

Which is a fantastically cool idea. Even fashionable.