From Evil to Good, One Download at a Time

Remember just a couple of years ago when it was timely and hip to lament the loss of hundreds if not thousands of small, independent bookstores that were being crushed by the big box mega-purveyors like Barnes & Noble and Borders? Similar to the ire that Walmart tends to engender in some communities, the loss of long-established and local businesses that simply cannot compete with the purchasing power, time-proven strategies, and ruthless execution of many of the big chains, makes most of us want to root for the little guys. Well, at least we like to say we are rooting for the little guys, but once we got a taste of the massive in-store book selection, lower prices, on-premise cafes, and free wifi, well, like I said, we like to say we are rooting for the little guy.It's a niche

Heck, there was even a big Hollywood feature film made not that long ago that starred Tom Hanks and his very B&N like giant forcing poor Meg Ryan's cuddly little bookstore on the corner out of business.

Fast forward only a few years and the retail book industry looks almost nothing at all like it did when Meg and Tom were flirting by email at night and trying to destroy each other's business by day. Borders is bankrupt, and Barnes & Noble too is likely in the early stages in a battle for its own survival, under increasing pressure primarily from Amazon.com and its Kindle ecosystem. B&N has been able to survive and compete this long where Borders could not, mainly due to its Nook e-reader, and its commitment and willingness to take at least some of the fight to Amazon.

But today for many book lovers, Barnes & Noble represents in some ways the last stand for not just a retail model, but for the idea of the printed book at all. If you think about the town where you live, if the closest B&N were to close ip shop, just exactly where would you shop for real, actual printed books? Forgetting for a moment that walking into a large B&N it might be actually hard to locate any books, as they are often obscured by the Nook demonstration area, the kids' toy section, the coffee shop, and the thousands of other things in a B&N that are not books. Where I live, there are two B&N's within about 10 miles, and I can't think of another place anywhere that sells real live printed books.

So for those that cling to the almost prosaic notion of browsing through the shelves, picking up and touching the books, paging through the images of a $125 coffee-table art book that no one ever would buy, if the B&N goes, well, all of that likely goes with it. Maybe something else would come to fill in that void, in the larger cities something probably would, but for many other places book buying would almost certainly become an 100% virtual proposition.

And that might not be a big issue at all, who knows. But for me the interesting thing is how through all this change and technological progress in e-commerce and e-readers that the massive, powerful, and formerly evil megastore like B&N has come full circle to represent all that used to be good and nostalgic about the book buying experience.  B&N has gone from being the malicious, heartless competitor to the underdog that many people who love physical books are rooting for. 

It's really hard to pull off that kind of corporate reputation transformation, even if you wanted to. Once evil, always evil is more typical. Although I suspect B&N would have been happy to continue laying waste to little shops all over the world, evil or not.

What do you think - would you care if there were no more physical bookstores?

Have a Great Weekend!

Sunday Stories - The Wine Cellar

Last Sunday I posted the ridiculous story of my very first day on my first 'professional' job, which mostly involved downing multiple beers in a gay bar. Details of the day are here.

That story is one that I have told in class a few times, and this week I started thinking that maybe I should post some of the other offbeat, and hopefully humorous stories from the past that I like to share with the students. So here is the second installment of 'Sunday Stories', a little tale of a dinner at a nice restaurant in the Eastern US, with some former colleagues and some external consultants, and a trip to the wine cellar.

The Backstory

In about 1997 or so, I was working for a major manufacturing company and was participating on an Enterprise Resource Planning software selection team.  About 10-12 of us spent 6 months or so traveling around the country, meeting vendors, reference accounts, and external consultancies all who had an interest in our business. The contract my organization would ultimately sign for the software was for about $10M, and the bill for external consulting likely ended up at another $10 - $15M on top of that. So the vendors and consulting companies that were helping to facilitate the evaluation process all had a huge vested interest in the purchase decision.

The Dinner

The evaluation process was nearing the end, we were down to two vendors and two external consultancies still in the running for the contract. One of the vendors invited us to one of their main US training centers for a few days to get a feeling for their corporate training capability, and to do some additional process modeling of some key functions that were critical to our organization, and would be a major factor in the decision process. One of the consultancies sent a few folks to work alongside us, trying to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise with the solution.

On the last night we were in town, the consulting company guys invited the few of us who were still in town to go out to a nice dinner.  The party was about 3 or so from the consultancy, including one partner, and perhaps 5 of us, none of whom were 'senior' managers or executives.  So the 8 of us headed out for dinner to a locally famous restaurant, well-known for its cuisine, and for its expansive wine list. Flickr - Sam

We arrived at the restaurant, were seated, some drinks were ordered, and the sommelier soon came by the table to offer some wine recommendations.  As no one at the table knew very much about wine, the sommelier (sensing a major score I came to believe), invited us to accompany him to the wine cellar to sample a bottle or two, and make a better choice for dinner. When no one immediately volunteered to go down to the cellar, I raised by hand, and after that another guy from my team named David agreed to come down as well.

When we got down to the huge wine cellar, the sommelier showed us around a bit, then left us to look around while he got some samples for us to taste.  We tried two or three 'dinner' wines, and two or three 'dessert' wines, made our choices of which ones we liked best, and at once the sommelier said he would take care of everything. We made our way back upstairs to the table.

The dinner was fantastic. The food was excellent, and while really no one at the table was a big wine person, the wine was so good that many, many bottles were consumed, once a bottle was empty, another one immediately took its place. All told, it was a really great meal, some business was certainly discussed, but mostly it was just a group of guys who had been working some pretty long hours unwinding and cutting loose a bit.

The Damage

When the meal was finally over, the waiter brought over the bill, and as was typical for these 'selection process' outings, the external consultants that were trying to win the project insisted on paying the tab. When the partner examined the bill, his eyes bugged out, his mouth sort of hung open, and he seemingly could not utter a word.

Turns out the dinner wine that David and I selected in the wine cellar was $750 each, and the dessert wine was $400. Yikes! Of course down in the cellar, we had never bothered to ask the prices, since we knew the consultants were paying for the dinner anyway, and we were being wined and dined all over the country by vendors and consultants trying to win this huge contract.

The total bar tab with the pre-dinner and after-dinner drinks (some of the guys ordered some really expensive single malt whiskey), and the wine was about $9,500.  With the food, tip, and taxes added in, the grand total bill for dinner for 8 people was over $12,000.

So essentially, I helped turn a nice, low-key dinner into a $12K debacle. 

The partner soon regained his composure, took out his American Express card and paid the tab. On the way out of the restaurant, he cornered me and David and in a very low key way said, 'Don't you ever do something like that again'.

Ultimately, I did not feel that bad about what happened, this consultancy eventually did win the majority of the contract to provide services on what became a massive ERP implementation, so their $12K 'invested' in this dinner certainly was not wasted.

There are lots of sweet assignments when working with enterprise technology, and being on the selection team for a multi-million dollar software purchase certainly is one of them.

Happy Sunday everyone!

New HR Technology Class Partnership

My next HR Technology class is set to start in a few weeks, and I am really pleased and excited to announce a new vendor partnership, that will put leading-edge and exciting technology in the hands of my students.

I will be working with Tomoye, a provided of software solutions that support employee, customer, and partner communities.

Tomoye is a leader in the emerging market for these Enterprise Social Networking solutions, that organizations are increasingly adopting and deploying to strengthen employee ties, foster collaboration and innovation, and build a more powerful organization 'community'.

Some of the features of Tomoye Ecco platform that I plan to utilize in class, are the employee profile, the questions and answers tools, blogs, document authoring and sharing, and hopefully even video.

I have been eager for my classes to explore in a 'hands-on' way the real power and capability of corporate social networking, and this partnership with Tomoye will give the class an extremely valuable set of experiences.

I will be posting a series of updates on the project, as the preparations for the class progress, as I am sure the topic of Enterprise Social Networking is so complex and rich that more detailed analysis is warranted.

Thanks very much to the great folks at Tomoye for generously agreeing to support graduate HR education.  It is a great thing when industry and academia can partner for mutual benefits. And a special thanks to Maggie Patterson, PR Consultant extraordinaire, who facilitated the agreement, and is a great person to work with.

Trying out Rypple

Heard of Rypple?

Until a few days I hadn't either until I read this post, from the HR Capitalist blog.  After reading the post, and checking out some other press and buzz on Rypple, I applied for the Beta program and thanks to David Priemer at Rypple, I was quickly invited to participate.

Why was I so intrigued?  Well, Rypple has a great concept, it enables anyone to solicit fast, meaningful, and anonymous performance feedback on literally any topic.

The process is straightforward and intuitive. Ask a question, enter three attributes or criteria to be assessed, and invite folks to provide feedback.  Responders are not required to give their name or e-mail address, so the responses are assured to be anonymous.

For my test, I decided to use Rypple for a quick, mid-course evaluation for the students to rate my performance as an Instructor.  Rypple lets you pose a topic or question for feedback and then indicate three criteria, or attributes that are to be evaluated.  You can re-use these same attributes or tags on further feedback requests, enabling you to get a view over time of your performance against a key measure like 'Creativity' or 'Leadership'.

So for my test, I asked all the class members to respond to the following question:

How do you feel the Leveraging Technology class is doing in these three areas?

The three categories or attributes I asked to be evaluated on were challenging, interesting, and relevant. Respondents can also enter free form text responses to 'What you like' and 'What can be improved'.

I sent out the request for feedback on a Sunday morning, and within 10 minutes I already had received feedback.  Within an hour or so, I hade received feedback from six students, and three or four more gave their feedback in the next day or so. Most of the feedback was really solid, and I immediately noticed a theme in the responses, something I need to improve in the second half of class.

So about ten students gave precise, informative, anonymous feedback in a day or two, and the entire process took me about 15 minutes to set up, and each student no more than three or four minutes to respond.

My other alternatives to soliciting this kind of feedback would be to use a tool like Survey Monkey (good, but certainly takes more time to create and administer), or the survey tool in my Course Management System (not that good, and I would waste time figuring it out since I've never used it).

The advantages of Rypple - ease of setup, anonymity, sheer speed of the feedback loop, cost (free).

The shortcomings of Rypple - not easy to get summary information, no ability to export feedback into another tool or system for further analysis. 

But honestly, Rypple seems designed for one thing, simple and fast performance feedback, and it does that one thing very well.

I encourage you to check it out - Rypple.

Hi Santa

Hi Santa
Originally uploaded by steveboese

Time to make your HR Technology Christmas list?

This year I am asking Santa for the following:

1. More vendors willing to donate use of software for my HR Technology class, (thanks once more Halogen Software, SpectrumHR, and Standout Jobs).

2. More students, faculty, colleagues on Twitter, and seeing the value of this platform - follow me - Sbjet

3. Help to make this blog a better resource for students and others who care about HR and Technology.

4. Some more converts in the internal organization to 'modern' tools and technologies to facilitate collaboration, sharing, and connecting.

That is not too much to ask I think. 

And really, I made this post to test the automatic feed of the Santa pic from Flickr over to the blog.  Absolutely awesome functionality.

What is on your wish list for HR Technology?

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