In which I admit to my robot obsession...

Just a quick one today, and yes just like yesterday's post the subject is robots, and their slow, steady, inexorable march to world domination. And quite frankly I don't have a problem with all the robot posts, since my favorite source of inspiration and content, the National Basketball Association, seems intent on remaining in a labor impasse for who knows how long, and I have to write about something.How are you feeling? That will be a $50 co-pay.

So for a busy Friday, the day before getaway day to Las Vegas and HRevolution (tickets still available), and the HR Technology Conference, another dispatch from the Robots vs. Humans front lines, this time from Slate.com:

Will Robots Steal Your Job? - Why the highest-paid doctors are the most vulnerable to automation

Yep, another take on the upcoming, heck already started process of further automation and supplementation of traditional careers and functions by complex and dedicated robot technology. But like yesterday's post where I featured robot technology beginning to make inroads into farming, the piece from Slate shows us even highly specialized, highly paid, and highly complex tasks like the evaluation of medical samples for signs of cancer can and are beginning to be encroached by robot labor.

I don't keep reading and posting about these 'robot stories' here because I find them to be surprising, or that most readers might not be aware that automation in all facets of industry, from low-tech to high-tech is an unstoppable boulder rolling down hill. It can't and won't be stopped.

But why I like to read these pieces, and think about them, is more about our reaction and response to these developments.  And on that note, I'd like to end this post with the most compelling point from the Slate.com piece:

By definition, specialists focus on narrow slices of medicine. They spend their days worrying over a single region of the body, and the most specialized doctors will dedicate themselves to just one or two types of procedures. Robots, too, are great specialists. They excel at doing one thing repeatedly, and when they focus, they can achieve near perfection. At some point—and probably faster than we expect—they won't need any human supervision at all.

There's a message here for people far beyond medicine: If you do a single thing—and especially if there's a lot of money in that single thing—you should put a Welcome, Robots!doormat outside your office. They're coming for you.

Boom. Specialization, even high-touch, highly complex, valuable specialization that requires spending years training, developing, and perfecting, still that is no guarantee or security against a robot that van do it better, cheaper, and faster. Even if those skills are ones that society needs and highly values, that's no protection in the long term.

The message? Invent something new, stay one step ahead of the robot masters? You'd better be prepared to keep inventing.

Or possibly the message is to continuously explore, challenge, and differentiate yourself as being more than a highly trained, highly skilled one-trick pony. Because if all you are only bringing one thing to the table, no matter how wonderful and complex that one thing is, chances are, eventually, someone else, maybe ever a robot, can do it better.

I promise no more posts about robots for a while, unless the NBA season gets canceled!

Have a great weeekend and if you are heading out to HRevolution or the HR Technology Conference be sure to find me and say hello.

When the Robots Are Driving the Tractor

Last evening, as I stayed up far too late reveling in the latest Red Sox baseball club disaster, (sorry Red Sox fan - but your 'nation' has now surpassed Yankee fan for sheer obnoxiousness. You used to be able to pull off that 'lovable loser' angle pretty well, but ever since you won the World Series you have taken on this entitled and smug attitude that is really off-putting. So there.), I was skimming through a few blogs and caught this article on the Endless Innovation blog that stopped my cold:

'When Robots Run Our Nation's Farms'.

The piece is, obviously, about the development of robotic and other automated machinery to improve the speed and efficiency of many time, labor, and capital intensive farming practices. Additionally, this latest generation of agricultural robotics will also help farmers with higher-value and complex decision making. From the Endless Innovation piece:

A new generation of robot drones is revolutionizing the way we farm in America, with Kinze Manufacturing and Jaybridge Roboticsrecently announcing the first-ever robot drone tractor capable of farming without the need for a human operator. Video clips are already circulating online of the Kinze tractor, gracefully coordinating its harvest dance with other autonomous machines. Once this robot drone tractor becomes part of the agricultural mainstream, robots will decide where to plant, when to harvest and how to choose the best route for crisscrossing the farmland. Humans, except perhaps as neutral trouble-shooters, will be all but unneeded. So what does it mean when robots run our nation’s farms? 

It is a good question, and one the piece doesn't really have a good answer for, probably because these trends are still relatively new in large-scale commercial farming. But technology improving, enhancing, or replacing what was formerly human, manual labor and effort is certainly nothing new. We deal with this phenomenon every day practically in our homes and workplaces.

Last night I ordered a pizza online from a local shop, the order was automatically transmitted and printed out in the store, someone (it might have been a robot), made the pizza, and I received an email when the pizza would be ready for pickup. Since I had pre-paid online with a credit card, all I did when I arrived at the shop was tell them my name and walk away with the food. If we add in some theoretical process efficiencies in the shop, (RFID codes, automatic supply replenishment, delivery driver dispatch tools, etc.), it is pretty clear that the modern pizza shop could, like the modern farms described above, produce much more output that ever before, while employing far fewer people to do the work.

Since many of the folks reading this are involved in the development, analysis, implementation, and advocacy of the latest and most wonderful technologies that we believe will enable organizations and individuals to derive increased value, benefit, and (hopefully) profit assisted by our efforts, we'd also be wise to think about the longer-term effects of these technology-enabled improvements. What legacy to these technologies help shape and what happens to the organization left behind?

Going back to the 'robot-farmer' example - someone used to have to drive the tractor that we've now turned over to the new, unmanned system. Hopefully as a result of this breakthrough new technology, that farmer is now able to spend more time studying the markets, providing customer service, volunteering in the community, helping his kids with their homework, or heck, even getting to know his cows better.

Because that would be probably the only real and meaningful benefit of handing the keys to the tractor over to the robots. If the technology only serves to make the process more efficient, but not so efficient that the farmer needs to find another line of work to survive - well then I'd think most of us would be happy to pay a few extra cents for our tomatoes next year.

In case you are interested - below is a video of one of the 'robot driven tractors' in action - (email and RSS subscribers click through)

Have a great day!

Talking Social at The HR Technology Conference

Next week at the 14th Annual HR Technology Conference at Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas I will have the privilege of participating in a panel discussion titled 'HR Technology's Second Annual Social Media Panel: Deploying Deep Social Strategies Without Destroying Your Career.'

The panel will be moderated by the HR Capitalist himself Kris Dunn who will be joined by Laurie Ruettimann, Mike Krupa, Oliver Marks, and myself.

It is no secret to anyone in Human Resources or in the enterprise technology space that 'social' needs to move past marketing buzzword and into demonstrable business value for most organizational leaders to take notice, to support social evangelists inside the organization, and to see the real benefits of deploying either social and collaborative technologies in-house, while opening up more fully and systematically to the use of outward facing social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter in support of enterprise objectives. I'll bet 90% of the vendors you will see exhibiting at the HR Technology Conference will have some kind of 'social' angle in their solutions, (or at least in their marketing copy), but which ones make sense for you and your organization, and which ones look and feel like they simply bolted on some 'like' buttons and badges as an afterthought. It's not always easy to tell.

And then there is the 'personal' side of social for the HR professional - how can someone that has a day job with real responsibilities, deadlines, and managers to answer to still use social tools in a way that won't compromise their ability to perform, as well as act in concert with company-wide messaging and postioning that quite frankly, most HR people are not always so well-informed about.  What happens when one of your employees, say a star engineer starts to gain popularity on his or her blog, has about 20,000 followers on Twitter, and starts getting asked to speak at events and do vendor webcasts?

Do you allow and support them in their 'micro-celebrity', or do you worry about tasks not getting completed while the young (or maybe not so young), emerging star is building his or her name. Can you accrue value from this activity back to the organization? Do you even know how?

Just because every vendor is talking about social, and just about every person at the Conference and who might be reading this blog is participating in social, (check the graph below for more color on this), hasn't made determining where and how social technologies and processes fit in a given organization's business model and processes any easier. And just because you finally convinced your VP of HR to join LinkedIn or get a Twitter account doesn't mean determining the right balance and relationship of your talent's personal brands and online presence any simpler.

So at the HR Technology Conference (our session is Tuesday October 4 at 11:00AM),  our panel on social will certainly try to explore many of these topics, I am sure in 75 minutes we can't solve them all, (or any of them), but I think we will provide some good food for thought and give attendees some ideas they can begin to explore in their organizations.

Oh, and here is the chart I mentioned I'd share - just one data point among millions you have to consider when talking 'social'.

Source - Business Insider

Wow - 16% of all time spent online is now on Facebook.  Hmm. Better quit reading this now and get back over there - I might have just tagged you in a picture!

Hope to see you at the Conference next week!

Labor Negotiations, Point Guards, and Genius Economists

So I am starting to get a little obsessed with the ongoing progress, or lack thereof, in the National Basketball Association's labor dispute between the owners, (billionaires that mostly didn't get to be billionaires by accident), and the players, (millionaires that also mainly did not get there by accident, unless you consider being 'tall' an accident).Who's that guy? That's not Metta WP.

For months the negotiations have dragged on, and last week the league announced the postponement of the start of team training camps and the cancellation of several early pre-season games. These developments, while not totally unexpected, act to raise the pressure on both sides to reach a settlement quickly, as the start of the NBA regular season, (and the point where players and owners actually start to feel the economic impact of the labor problems), is clearly in jeopardy of being postponed as well. Soon, each week the league and its players fail to come to an agreement means a week of games that will not be played, effecting players, team staffs, arena workers, media and broadcast partners, and all the extended ecosystem of stakeholders in the league. Not to mention me, and how I'll need to find a way to kill every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday night from November until June.

From the ESPN.com piece linked above, here's a short recap of the last set of negotiations between the league officials, and representatives for the player's union: (I've added some descriptors in parentheses for clarity).

(NBA Commissioner David) Stern celebrated his 69th birthday Thursday but didn't appear in a festive mood after meeting for about five hours with leaders from the union. He was joined by Silver, the deputy commissioner, Spurs owner Peter Holt, who heads the labor relations committee, and NBA senior vice president and deputy general counsel Dan Rube. (Los Angeles Lakers Point Guard Derek) Fisher, (Union chief Billy)Hunter, attorney Ron Klempner and economist Kevin Murphy represented the union.

 A description of a classic 'Management v. Union' negotiating meeting, right? High-ranking officials from the league, the Union Chief, the player's rep (Fisher), and of course a couple of lawyers and even an economist tossed in for good measure by the player's side. 

Typical unless you take a closer look at the one, 'sort of out of place but not really because I've never heard of him' Economist, Kevin Murphy.

Because Mr. Murphy is not just an ordinary economist - in fact he might be one of the smartest and most influential economists out there. From Mr. Murphy's Wikipedia page:

In 1997 Murphy was awarded the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal by the American Economic Association, given once every two years to the most outstanding American economist under the age of forty, and widely considered to be the second most prestigious prize in economics (after the Nobel Prize in Economics). Murphy was cited for his study of the causes of growing income inequality between white-collar and blue-collar workers in the United States and his research linking the growth in income inequality to growth in the demand for skilled labor. His other research has covered such topics as economic growth, income inequality, valuing medical research, rational addiction, and unemployment.

On September 20, 2005, he was named as one of the 2005 recipients of the MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to as the "genius grant."

So I can imagine the mindset of Commissioner Stern, (no dummy certainly), and the league owners in all this. They have (collectively), more money, more power, more control, and probably think more negotiating leverage in this situation. They usually sit across the table from union officials and player representatives and have to think - 'We're smarter than them.'. It would not be an irrational conclusion. 

But all of a sudden the meeting starts, and in walks the economic genius, Mr. Murphy along with the Union Chief and the Lakers point guard, and I wonder if Stern and the owners did a double take. Did they know who Mr. Murphy is? Did they have any idea about his history and reputation? Did they know they were sitting across a 'not quite but probably pretty soon Nobel prize candidate'?

You want to win your Beer League Friday night softball game? Easy. Bring in a ringer from the local college baseball team and claim he's the new guy in Accounting. 

Want to get an edge at the negotiating table? Drop a 'genius' economist next to your starting point guard.

Eventually a deal will be reached, and the games will be scheduled, and it is hard to know which side will 'win', but for me I'll give the players the halftime lead for their creative approach to stacking their team.

A Good Idea is Just an Idea, or Why You are Not Driving a Smart Car

You've probably seen, or if you don't live too close to a major urban area, have at least heard of a relatively new vehicle known as the Smart Car. The Smart Car, designed to be a highly fuel-efficient and easy to maneuver and park utility vehicle, (obviously important in many U.S. cities), debuted in America a few years ago, and reaching its sales peak in 2008, just as domestic gas prices were soaring.

The Smart Car is not just 'smart', but its also quite small. Almost incredibly, jarringly, and even disorienting small. To put the Smart Car in perspective, the length of a 2011 Honda Accord is about 195 inches , for the Smart Car you are looking at about 106 inches. Or for another frame of reference, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar stands at about 86 inches.

But from its peak in 2008, Smart Cars have in the last few years seen a gradual, yet steady decline in awareness, interest, and sales. The most recent annual estimate was about 6,000 Smart Cars were sold in 2010.

The parent company of Smart, Daimler, has recently announced that Smart Cars will be the beneficiary of a new national advertising campaign, and has also indicated the dealer network in the U.S. will expand from 75 to 100. While this is good news for fans and employees of Smart, only time will tell if these measures can turn around the flailing brand. 

Even for a truck driving, HR Mini scoffing, traditionalist like me the Smart Car seems like it would be kind of fun to drive. So why are sales in a free fall?

And why should you care about the (short) rise, fall, and uncertain future of the Smart Car?

Well to me, the story offers a few interesting angles, the foremost one a lesson about how an idea, even an idea that seems like it should succeed, often needs much more than its own cleverness to make any kind of a lasting impact. My most measures, the Smart Car really should be a success. It is extremely economical in purchase and in operating cost, its diminutive dimensions make it a perfect vehicle for urban settings, and its quirky uniqueness caters well to the 'look at me and what I'm driving' constituency among us.  The Smart Car website contains scores of pictures of happy Smart owners, (many with highly personalized modifications of the base vehicle that emphasize its flexibility and fun.

But even with all these attributes going for it, the Smart Car is in trouble. And the main reason is that the brand managers have allowed pre-perceptions, often inaccurate ones particularly about the vehicle's crash-worthiness, dominate potential customers and the public's views of the car. People look at the tiny car and often reflexively conclude there's no way I'd be safe in a car so small. 

And that is kind of too bad, because despite what really is a cool idea - economical, agile, quirky urban transportation, the Smart Car might soon become a footnote, albeit a small one, in automotive history.

The Smart Car was, and I suppose still is, a really good idea. Too bad for Smart, the company has not quite realized a good idea in only step one on the long march to success.