Robots Selling Cookies

According to a recent article in Business Week, the next wave of robot technology is aimed directly at the office market - robots that can file papers, deliver mail, and fetch a coffee for their human bosses.

These robots, according to Noriyuki Kanehira, a systems manager at robot manufacturer Kawada, will soon be able to take on a 'secretarial role' in offices. Joe Bosworth, the CEO of a firm called Smart Robots envisions these office robots as being able to 'take mail down to the mailroom and then travel across the street to pick up a latte.'

The price for this robot convenience for mail delivery and latte fetching is not cheap - prices on the current wave of office assistant type robots can run as high as $400,000 for a model called the PR2. Thankfully the PR2 comes with an associated web app called 'Beer Me' that allows the robot to be programmed to fetch and deliver beer from the fridge.

As with any new workplace automation or productivity technology, there will be some that will sound the alarm that the coming of these 'smart' robots will be the doom of more actual human workers.  Despite the high price, and (for now) somewhat limited application in the office environment the robots have many advantages over the humans they might replace.  Again from the Business Week article the robots 'doesn't goof around on Facebook, spend hours tweaking its fantasy football roster, or require a lunch break.'

When presented with that kind of a cost-benefit analysis, I imagine some executives might see the value in replacing some clerical and administrative employees with robot counterparts.  'Let me see, $300K for an employee that is never late, never gets sick, never complains about Judy's music in the next cube, and won't be hassling me to buy Girl Scout cookies every year?'.  Sounds like a good deal.

But for these leaders that might eventually make those kinds of decisions, there is another, more intriguing element to the 'robots in the office' angle. At Georgia Tech, researchers claim to be making progress on robot intelligence that will allow them one day 'to build robots that can not only interact with humans but are also capable of representing, reasoning, and developing relationships with others." They developed an algorithm that, they claim, allows robots, just like CEOs, "to look at a situation and determine whether [it] requires deception, providing false information, to benefit itself.'

Nice, not only will future robots be able to sort the mail, they will be able to be programmed to have Enron-style ethics and behaviors. Sweet.

Will we see the day in the foreseeable future where robots are as common around the office as pot-luck lunches, pedometer giveaways, and fluorescent lighting?  Perhaps.  But one thing seems likely to be discovered from the development of robot intelligence designed to replace and automate common workplace functions - that the line of irreplaceable human skills and intelligence is probably much higher up the managerial food chain than we like to think.

If what you are spending your time on today can be replicated by a robot, you are already in trouble. And if you think your contribution is on a high enough level where it can't be truly automated, think about it this way - if all the people that you support and direct were actually replaced by robots, then what would you do?

For laughs on a Monday - another take on the distant future of robot domination (email and RSS subscribers will need to click through)

Drive Thru Technology

No - it's not a post about the technical magic that happens from the time you give your order into the clown's mouth and you stuff your face with that McRib - it's a post to talk about the Drive Thru HR show on BlogTalkRadio.Want fries with that? Sir? Sir?

This afternoon, (1:00 PM ET, 12 Noon Central, Mountain and Pacific figure it out on your own), I am a guest on the Drive Thru HR show on Blog Talk Radio.  Drive Thru HR is a daily (insanely hard to produce) talk show ably hosted by Bryan Wempen and William Tincup.  Two smart, interesting, and classy gentlemen.  It will be easy for you to tell me apart from them, I assure you. You can listen live on the show page here.

I appreciate the invitation to appear, especially in light of the fact that with the HR Happy Hour show, this blog, and occasional contributions on Fistful of Talent that the listeners of Drive Thru HR have to be this close to becoming completely tired of me. Perhaps many are already.  But if you do listen, and I hope you will at least to hear Bryan and William, here are some of the ideas I plan to talk about on the show.

Consumerization of Enterprise Technology

This is not new, at least conceptually, since many enterprise web applications have made strides to design interfaces that are more user-friendly, more intuitive, and certainly easier to adopt by casual users in the enterprise.  But while interfaces and design have adapted to the expectations of the internet and Web 2.0 age, very little else in ‘big technology’ has. Lengthy deployment and upgrade cycles, little transparency in price and deployment costs, and an appalling lack of unbiased information on technology options for the small and mid-market customer.

Finding, evaluating, purchasing, and deploying HR technology is about as painful a process as a root canal.  Think about the very best companies that you deal with as a consumer, I’m not talking about the UI on the web or their ‘quirky but approachable’ Twitter account, but the best ones in terms of the entire buying and owning experience.  Easy to find the initial information on my own, without handing over contact information or being badgered on the phone. Multiple ways to interact with the organization depending on my preference and style.  A simple, transparent, and clean sales process, that doesn’t require a Dream Team of lawyers to vet.  Works when you need it to, and when it doesn't obtaining support is fast, simple, and effective. Enterprise Tech doesn’t need to just look like the best consumer tech, it needs to act more like it too.

Keeping Secrets

So many technology decisions operate from a basic position of fear.  Fear ‘company secrets’ will get leaked, fear employees can’t be trusted to create passwords that aren’t hackable, fear that if anyone outside the organization had a glimpse of what really goes on around here that the company would lose the plot and ideas would be breached, great employees would flee, and dirty little secrets would no longer be secret.  So we hide behind firewalls, pretend our ideas and processes are sacred and special, and pretend not to notice the speed of change and progress being made by smaller, adaptable, and organizations that are simply not afraid of honesty, openness, collaboration, and co-creation.  I’ll bet 90% of what most companies sell is also sold, in almost exactly the same way, in the same package, using the same processes as their competitors. Just what in the heck needs to be ‘secret’ about any of that?

Miscellany

What do people mean when they say - ‘It’s not about the technology’
Why does it seem that vendors building bigger and more integrated HR Technology suites looks a lot like the old, massive, monolithic ERP suites everyone know hates?
Why do so many great HR pros still appear to not give a hoot about technology?
Are my eyes really brown?

I think that’s it. Actually it is way too much content for a half-hour show.  Maybe if I don’t bomb Bryan and William can come on the HR Happy Hour to continue the conversation.

Emotional Spell Check (we are all really dumb)

In the world of office productivity software like the Microsoft Office suite of programs, (Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, etc.), the 'spell check' feature is so fundamental, so ingrained into our experience of using these tools that we probably can't imagine a word processing or other text-centric application lacking the capability.

At this point could anyone craft a 400 word email or 5 page quarterly report without running spell check at least two or three times?  In fact, spell check is so core to the process of content creation that we take it for granted, and some might contend when the capability is introduced to children in grade school via the use of common office productivity solutions that their ability to actually spell becomes diminished, as they come to rely on the spell check device too heavily.  This likely occurs in adults as well, but we often cleverly convince ourselves we don't really have a spelling problem, we have a typing problem, and that most of the corrections made by spell check are to words we really do know how to spell.

So if we can justify the heavy reliance on spell check as a mere productivity enhancer and not really a crutch, what possibly could we say about the newest 'check' solution launched recently, a product called ToneCheck, which is described as 'the emotional spell check'.  In the words of its creators:

ToneCheck™ is an e-mail plug-in that flags sentences with words or phrases that may convey unintended emotion or tone, then helps you re-write them. Just like Spell Check… but for Tone.

Does your first draft of that email message to your prospect read something like 'Come on already, quit wasting my time and jerking me around. Are you signing the contract or not?

Here is a screen shot of the ToneCheck plug-in activated on a possibly 'emotional' message:

A quick run of the ToneCheck plug-in can flag that passage as 'potentially angry' and suggest that you make some alterations to hit a more 'contented' tone. I suppose you probably knew the 'quit jerking me around' line did have the potential to seem angry.

This functionality has similarities to common features in HR Technology solutions for performance management, namely the 'legal scan' that catches managers from noting things like, 'Sally is really too old to grasp the technical complexity of this project'; and 'managerial helper' kinds of tools that suggest descriptive sentences and paragraphs to accompany objective or competency based ratings.

Having these kinds of helpers and filters and in the case of ToneCheck, a bit of a stop sign put up before you press 'Send' may be beneficial, but I can't help but wonder if these tools are really confirming something many folks often think. That is we really don't know what we are doing, we will quite likely get ourselves and our firms in big trouble if we are not monitored, and at the end of the day we really can't be trusted to spell, keep our emotions in check, and are in fact, really dumb.

Notes:

1.This post is about 500 words, I made 37 spelling mistakes that hopefully were all fixed by spell check.

2. I do not have 'ToneCheck' turned on in the comments, so please feel free to tell me what you really think.

Birth, School, Work, Death and Ngram Viewer

Chances are by now you have heard about or seen some examples of Google's latest search-related application, the Ngram Viewer.  The Ngram viewer lets users examine the trends in usage of specific words and phrases in published books, some of which dating back over 500 years.

The Ngram viewer searches for specified words across about 5 million books, a portion of the huge quantity of works that have been digitized by the search giant. The Ngram viewer tool works rather simply, enter a word or phrase (up to five words), and the tool generates a chart of the frequency of the selected words appearance in books over the desired timespan.

Since the tool has been released to the public lots of bloggers have posted results of comparative searches for technology-related terms (shockingly, the word 'internet' was not that common in the 1700's), cultural shifts (when does 'feminism' start to enter the lexicon), or sort of interesting but not really all that important (when did 'hot dog' get more common than 'frankfurter').  

So when I decided to post about the Ngram viewer I felt the challenge to come up with a set of search words or phrases that would be both interesting and relevant to either the technology subject matter this blog normally attempts to focus on, or the more general world of work and talent management. Since the technology related terms would not generally start appearing until the last 25 or 30 years, I ruled out that angle, and decided to shift to a more broad focus, using more common terms that hopefully would shed some light on the culture, and the relative importance and focus on said terms.

Without further delay - Birth, School, Work, and Death from 1800 - 2008:

Curiously, 'Birth' tends not to fluctuate much in usage over the last 200 or years, while 'School' and 'Work' both have seen an upward trend over that period.  At the start of the chart, 1800, 'Death' was the most frequent term, probably since in 1800 death must have seemed pretty imminent most of the time.  'Work' passes 'Death' in about 1845 or so, and remains the most commonly used term of the four for the remainder of the chart.  

What does it mean?  Are we as a culture so focused on work, more so than by birth, school, and death that we have lost sight of what really matters?  Maybe it is 'work' that really matters? 

Maybe this post was just a cheap excuse to play around with Ngram Viewer and post a classic video from The Godfathers.

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Classic.

Does Technology Change Everything?

Over the weekend I watched the archive of a presentation given by Allen Delattre, Global Market Managing Director for Technology for Executive Search firm Korn/Ferry at last week's GigaOm Net:Work conference in San Francisco.

In the presentation Delattre makes some interesting predictions about the increasing impact of the major technological shifts that enable (or perhaps require) organizations to grow more global, collaborative, and virtual, while acknowledging that 'virtualization' and 'collaborative' have become so overused as terms that they have lost some of their punch. But despite this, the very real effect and impact on new technology from social, to mobile, to collaborative has had on organizations, augmented by the growing influence of the Gen Y and Milennial cohorts, have created such a new environment and set of challenges that the fundamental human resources issues of leadership development, identification of high potentials, and succession management all need to adapt to this new, technology-based reality. 

Delattre sees the ability to understand and successfully implement these new technologies as not only critical to organizational growth and survival, but that the most successful leaders of the future will be the ones that are best able to assess, adapt, synthesize, and implement new technologies to support business strategy and to unleash the best performance from employees.  And since the technology landscape continues to evolve and change so rapidly, Delattre theorizes that traditional organizational succession planning approaches that often emphasize 'coming up through the ranks' and often taking rotational assignments in different parts of the organization will no longer be the best way to find and groom future leaders. His remark that successors for big-time CIO positions used to count on 'surviving that SAP project and bringing in it only at double the original budget' is both sad and amusing.

This is a simple and really direct argument that the technology itself, is a primary driver and leader of the massive changes in organizational structures and that it presents significant impact on the nature of leadership and talent management.  When these kind of 'technology changes everything' speeches come from hot tech companies, or from systems integrators that stand to benefit greatly from the consulting and advisory fees they stand to earn from helping clients navigate the myriad choices on offer, you would be forgiven for taking the remarks with a grain of salt.  But when a Managing Director of a leading executive search firm makes the case that technology leadership is a fundamental and an imperative for tomorrow's leaders, then perhaps a second listen is warranted.

You can take a look at Delattre's presentation at NET:Work below, be warned, the first few minutes are a series of 'Did You Know?' style statistics about globalization, economic, and demographics.  I think by now we all get the idea the world is changing pretty rapidly. Delattre's remarks start at about 4:10. 

What do you think?  Do these new technologies present not just better ways of getting things done but rather a core and enduring change in what tomorrow's leaders must understand and master?