Star employees and the assignment of credit

As loyal readers know, I am all about the fashion and as such, am a subscriber and regular reader of GQ Magazine. 

In the most recent GQ, buried in an interview with journalist and TV personality Keith Olbermann, who as you might know has kind of a checkered career past and has burned lots of bridges with many of his former employers, like CNN, MSNBC, and ESPN, was an interesting take from KO on how star employees interpret and assign the credit for their success.

Here is the take from Olbermann:

So I don't think there are huge divergences between my personality and what they see on TV. And I think that's why I have been gainfully employed doing this. I'll always deliver what an employer wants. At some point they decide the result is more trouble than they want, or they convince themselves that they have created all this success that I created for them. As in my last prominent employer at NBC, which they're learning that perhaps they were wrong about that.

Olbermann has had lots of success, and been a star or high performer (who eventually flamed out) at every stop along the way. But it would be a mistake to only focus on the flame-outs and not on the psyche of the star performer that Olbermann speaks to so candidly.

Look at that part of the quote again - At some point they decide the result is more trouble than they want, or they convince themselves that they have created all this success that I created for them.

While from the outside, anyone looking at Olbermann's career arc would tend to focus on the 'He is more trouble than he is worth' argument, stars like KO usually see it from the latter point of view - that they themselves are driving success, not the company.

I think the quote provides a really useful reminder for any leader or manager or organization that is grappling with one of those similar 'It is worth keeping this guy/gal around?' kinds of conundrums.

Star performers can be prickly. They can demand a lot. They want to be paid more than your salary range says is permissible. Like Olbermann, they can be a real pain in the a$$.

But before you decide to simply cut them loose and be done with their ego and BS, make sure you ask yourself who is really responsible for their success, and if indeed, it is repeatable or transferable.

It's ok to let the star walk if they want too much, or they become too impossible to work with, but be ready to explain to someone in an expensive suit how the drop-off in organizational performance was worth it.

Have a great weekend!

Precaution and Preparedness

While reading some of the coverage and reports of the recent and massive Typhoon Haiyan I came across a really interesting piece on the Lean Crew site titled Wind Engineering. In the piece, the author breaks down some of the science behind wind speeds and wind pressure experienced in hurricanes, tropical storms, and tornados.Ellsworth Kelly - Colors for a Large Wall, 1951

It is a fascinating look at the topic, and kind of shocking too in a way, to think about the tremendous fury these kinds of natural disasters unleash, and their impact to life and property. In the piece, though, there was one really intriguing observation about preparedness and the precautions that can (or really can't) be taken by people and property owners in advance of these kinds of storms. Have a look and I will have a quick comment or two after the excerpt:

If you don’t live in the middle of the country, you may think of tornados as those storms that destroy trailer parks, but that isn’t giving them their proper respect. The winds in a tornado are typically much higher than those in a hurricane. Residential building codes are written to protect against most hurricanes; they don’t even try to handle tornados. A house’s primary protection against tornado damage is the extremely small probability that a tornado will hit it.

I don't live in tornado country, so I don't personally know if that last point is 100% correct, (but it seems pretty plausible, I mean, is it even possible to build normal, residential housing units that could conceivably withstand 200+ MPH winds?), but let's assume for now that it is in fact accurate.

What it reminds us, all too well, is that we simply can't (and probably shouldn't) attempt to prepare for every possible adverse event that potentially may impact ourselves or our businesses. Some risks, like a tornado, are simply too devastating for us to even have an effective plan for handling. 

But, as in the case of the storm actually making a direct hit on one individual structure, the odds are low enough that it makes the risk acceptable to the thousands if not millions of folks who live in tornado country.

Sometimes, I suppose, the best preparedness is just an honest assessment of the likelihood of impact.

Note: I know you know this but donations can be made for Typhoon Haiyan relief efforts via the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and probably lots of other relief agencies as well.

Twitter chat today on HR Tech Implementation and Adoption - #Nextchat

Note: Today, Wednesday November 13 at 3PM EST, I will be co-hosting the popular Twitter Chat called #NextChat, which was created by the great folks over at SHRM and brings important topics in the areas of Human Resources, management, leadership, and technology to the forefront, in a fast-paced and informative medium.

Below is the set up for today's @NextChat on HR Technology Implementation and Adoption that I will (along with Trish McFarlane), be co-hosting. I hope you can join us today at 3PM EST.

NextChat - HR Technology Implementation and Adoption

Technology solutions have for some time helped Human Resources departments improve service delivery, find and attract talent, provide employees opportunities to learn and develop their careers, and support an organization’s business strategy. But what has changed in the last few years are the methods, strategies, and challenges for to insure the successful implementation and adoption of modern workplace and HR technologies.

With more and more HR technology solutions moving to cloud-based delivery models, the way HR technology is marketed, sold, implemented, and deployed to users has dramatically changed in just the last few years..

Combine the changes in the technology development and delivery process with the explosion in the number of solutions that offer HR professionals support for their initiatives and programs and you end up with a market that is full of potential and promise, but also one that can be difficult for the HR professional to navigate. Making the ‘right’ decisions about HR technology has never been more challenging, (and more important). 

Please join @weknownext at 3 p.m. ET on November 13 for #Nextchat with special guest Steve Boese (@SteveBoese) and Trish McFarlane (@TrishMcFarlane). We’ll discuss some of the most important factors for successful selection, implementation, and user adoption of the next generation of HR technology solutions.

Q1. What are the signs that it is time to make an HR technology purchase/investment?

Q2. What are some of the key elements and concepts in cloud HR technology purchases that HR professionals need to understand?  #nextchat

Q3. What are some of the common statements and buzzwords given by HR solution providers, and what do they REALLY mean? #nextchat

Q4. How can HR professionals identify the most important factors for their organization in their technology decision process? #nextchat

Q5. After a technology is selected and purchased, what are the essential next steps to launch the implementation project? #nextchat

Q6. Are HR technology projects similar to other HR projects and what specific skills does HR need for technology projects? #nextchat

Q7. Once the project ‘goes live’ how can HR continue the positive momentum and ensure adoption rates meet project goals? #nextchat  

Q8. What are the tools &  metrics to evaluate/assess HR technology success? How can HR learn from past project experiences?

 What's a Twitter chat?

I hope you can join in the conversation today at 3PM!

You're not just the product, you're the (unpaid) employee too

With the rise and subsequent IPOs or gigantic acquisitions of the largest social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, an often-repeated observation about the users, (and source of content/value) for these platforms has been, 'You're not the customer, you're the product.'

The idea in the sentiment is simple - the end users of these social networks create all the content via status updates, photos, or in the case of LinkedIn, a catalog of all your professional credentials, and the owners of the networks then package, parse, and sell this information to (variously), advertisers, 'power users', or other services. And as long as the individual value equation for consumers/users remains in balance, i.e. you feel like you are extracting more value out of say using Facebook than your perceived cost of allowing Facebook to sell ad space that shows up in your feed every time you open the app, then you happily will continue to use the service, supply more content/inventory, and keep the machine running.

Remember, you are not the customer, you are the product.

But if you are the product, or more accurately, you are an active contributor to building the product, then would it be too far a stretch to say that you are also the employee?

Take a quick look at this piece on Business Insider about a recent case being raised by some power users of the review site Yelp, that derives all of it's value from the end user comments, ratings, and reviews of restaurants and bars.

A group of reviewers recently filed a class action lawsuit against Yelp, claiming that the company should treat them like employees and pay them for their reviews.

The suit argues that since Yelp's business model and success is dependent on its over 42 million user-submitted reviews, the company technically employs those users and should fork over some cash (wages, reimbursement of expenditures, and damages). The plaintiffs believe that willfully volunteering to share their thoughts about a business makes them employees because Yelp can only make money if it has their reviews.

Yelp, which went public in 2012, told Circa that the case is a "textbook example of a frivolous lawsuit" and said that the law does not support the idea that voluntarily using a free service equates to an employment relationship.

Sounds kind of crazy, right?

I mean, Yelp or LinkedIn or Facebook does not force you to create content for them or to have a profile on their networks.

There really is no hint of an employment agreement or relationship that is established between any of these services and their users. So it does seem on the surface anyway, that the Yelp user's lawsuit doesn't have much merit.

But if we seem to pretty easily accept the entire notion of 'You are not the customer, you are the product', then why doesn't it make logical sense to take it to the next step, in that you as one of the millions of builders of at least an element of that product should not be compensated somehow?

Every time I get an email from LinkedIn pitching me to upgrade to one of their premium, paid accounts of some kind, I have the same reaction (I say this out loud too, although no one seems to listen) :

"Pay for a LinkedIn account? They should be paying me."

And they should be paying you too.

The consumer is the enterprise

On the list of SMB-approved services is Box.  Box, at it's simplest is a cloud-based file storage service, (but has grown tremendously to become a serious player in the enterprise collaboration space), provides a flexible, simple, and eminently useful solution for storing, sharing, and collaborating on documents and files.

Box is led by CEO Aaron Levie who recently shared some interesting comments and observations about the changes in how enterprise software is being developed, purchased, and deployed at an event in London, (documented here on the Cytalk.com site), and are worth noting for both software providers and software customers as well.

I recommend reading the entire piece, but below I've pulled out below what I think is the most important, (and maybe seems like it's obvious but it really isn't), observation about how cloud deployed enterprise solutions differ from their legacy and traditional IT-dependent forebears, and what that means for both software solution providers and the modern HR organization using (or looking to begin using), cloud-based enterprise technologies:

The shift to cloud and mobile changes the way software is bought and deployed. “This shift means the onus more than ever is on the vendor. If we don’t stay competitive, if we don’t build whatever that that next thing is the user wants to do and build it in as simple a way as they expect from the consumer tools they are using, then we will get swapped out.”

By making it simple for users to deploy solutions, companies like Box need to be aware that they’re also making it easy for customers to replace them with something new. “You will either get swapped out because IT will swap you out or just because people will stop using you because they’re using a consumer solution, And because it’s SaaS, they’re only paying for what they use — and you stop getting paid”. Levie sees these forces as a Darwinian engine driving software evolution.

Any enterprise software vendor that doesn’t actually think they’re in the consumer business really doesn’t understand where the future is going.” It’s a future that he believes will carry on changing the industry. “That use-centric approach will see a very different set of vendors playing in the space. Existing vendors will have to change rapidly or become irrelevant to the world of the future.”

It seems like we've been talking about the idea of the consumerization of enterprise technology for quite some time now, but up until fairly recently the dialog and the emphasis has been around product design, user interfaces, and the shift towards mobile and tablet applications and solutions. There has been much less focus on the processes by which enterprise solutions are evaluated, acquired, implemented, and, as Levie is talking about, replaced by other solutions.

Levie's take is really interesting and hopefully a signal that in the near future enterprises (and the actual people in these enterprises), will wield more power, influence, and have more impact on how the solutions they use every day are built and leveraged. Slick interfaces and an iPhone app are great, but until enterprise solutions are forced to engage and delight the actual users in the enterprise or risk a quick replacement, then the tools we use are work will always seem less attractive than what we use in our personal lives.

Have a great week everyone!