Acknowledging the Competition

This past couple of weeks the sports world has been chock-full of big time, high stakes contests ranging from the recent Super Bowl to what was in my little sports bubble, an incredibly entertaining and interesting NBA game last Friday night between the Los Angeles Lakers and the New York Knicks.

While in different sports, and certainly having wildly different levels of significance, these contests possessed some interesting back stories, both around how teams and players perceive and communicate about their competition. 

Two data points to submit -

Point One - shortly after the New York Giants victory in the Super Bowl, a full-page congratulatory advertisement in the New York Daily News was taken out in acknowledgement of the Giants fantastic victory, and commending the Giants organization for the 'passion' and 'toughness' they exhibited in winning the championship.

The organization that placed the ad? Not the New England Patriots, the team that the Giants actually defeated in the Super Bowl, but the New York Jets. The Jets, as the 'other' professional football team in the greater New York City area have had a long history of futility, and after some recent better play in the last few seasons, saw themselves as a serious title contender. Sadly for the Jets, their season ended in disappointing fashion, failing to even qualify for the league playoffs, in no small part to a loss to the eventual Super Bowl Champion Giants in a late-season game.

Point Two - Shortly before last Friday's Lakers-Knicks game at Madison Square Garden in New York, reporters asked Lakers' star Kobe Bryant, an all-time great player, and 5-time NBA title winner what he thought about the recent and surprising play of the Knicks young point guard Jeremy Lin.  Remember, Kobe is a pantheon-type player, one of the greatest ever, and Lin, while a sensation at the moment, has played only a handful of games of note in the NBA.

From the transcript of the exchange between Kobe and the press:

"I know who he (Lin) is, but I don't really know what's going on too much with him. I don't even know what he's done. Like, I have no idea what you guys are talking about. I'll take a look at it tonight though."

[Asked again about Lin] "I don't even know what the [fudge] is going on. What the [fudge] is going on? Who is this kid? I've heard about him and stuff like that, but what's he been doing? Is he getting like triple doubles or some [stuff]? He's averaging 28 and eight? No [stuff]. If he's playing well, I'll just have to deal with him."

[Would he consider guarding Lin?] "Jesus Christ. Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

It's hard to say how much Kobe really knew about the Knicks' Lin, and how much of his remarks were meant to make sure that the rest of the league, the reporters, and the fans know that he remains one of the top players in the league, on what is still a good team, and what the [fudge] are you guys doing asking me about some rookie no one's ever heard of before three days ago.

The difference in the two approaches? 

The Jets are the second-class citizens in the New York football scene. And their local rivals the Giants have just won their second Super Bowl in 4 years, (and 4th overall). The Jets have been looking up at the Giants for the better part of their history.  Kobe, on the other hand, has been one of the very best players in the NBA for over a decade, winning 5 titles in the process, and Lin, well despite this past week of excitement, has achieved about 1/1,000,000th of what Kobe has done in his career.

For the Jets management, taking out the ad congratulating the Giants sends a pretty strong message to the players, coaches, and fans that their job is not nearly done, and to see what success looks like well, they don't have to look far.  It is about making sure the Jets understand that and hopefully to keep them motivated to do something about that.

And for Kobe, the best player on the Lakers and the team leader? His comments are clearly meant to make sure his teammates realize that they are still the Lakers, and he is still Kobe Bryant, and that they, and the rest of the league should not forget that.  A leader on a traditionally great team probably has to take that tack, and to keep up the team's swagger and confidence. 

What do you think - does your position on the pecking order influence and factor in to what you say about your competition? 

Does what you say about the competition have any effect on the morale of your staff?

Postscript - The Knicks, led by Jeremy Lin's 38 points did beat the Lakers last Friday. Kobe played pretty well (34 points 10 boards), but the Knicks had too much #LinSanity going for them.

The Answers are Different

I have to spend the better part of this weekend preparing materials for the next session of my HR Technology course at Rochester Institute of Technology as part of the Master's program in Human Resource Development. Flickr - michael.heiss

The course, one of very few in the country with a 100% focus on HR Technology, has been in existence for about three years, and each time I prepare and deliver the course I try to change and enhance the content, structure, and assignments to keep the course fresh and interesting, and to attempt to provide to the students an accurate and relevant overview of the current set of technologies and the latest thinking of how Human Resources professionals can better leverage technology in their organizations.

Or I could roll out the same set of content as the last time and rely on the old Einstein line alluded to in the title of the post.  Short version - Professor Einstein gave the same exact final exam two terms in a row, a student asked him if that made sense, since savvy students would always connect with kids in the prior class to learn about the exam content.  Einstein responded with 'Yes the questions are the same, but now the answers are different.'

Anyway, we cover the basics, Core HRMS, payroll, time and attendance stuff.  We then spend quite a bit of time on Talent Management tools, like performance management and succession planning.  Finally, we wrap the course with a look at new collaboration technologies and ways that technologies and social networks can be used to further organizational objectives. We do quite a bit of hands-on work and get to try and test several really cool technologies.

And do you know what my past students have consistently wanted me to focus on in much greater detail?

Helping them with their personal LinkedIn profiles.

The second we start discussing LinkedIn in an organizational context, its power as a corporate recruiting tool, and the importance of groups, answers etc. in employer branding efforts, at least two thirds of the class will ask for advice and guidance on completing, (and in some cases creating), their personal LinkedIn profiles.  Many of the students are in an active job search, or will soon be in search mode once they complete the program, so this kind of personal and practical knowledge is way more important to them than me waxing philosphic on the benefits of SaaS deployment of HR Technology.

So when that happens, I will carve out some time to spend on LinkedIn profiles, as well as some other places where students can consider for building up an online identity and reputation that can benefit them in their job searches.  I am certainly not an expert on this, but I give it a shot.

The whole 'LinkedIn' discussion though takes me to a more interesting question though:

As the instructor should I be talking about and stressing what is 'important' or what the students really need to know?

Postscript - Since I know I will have to have the 'How to make a better LinkedIn profile' discussion again soon, if you have some tips or links to good resources, tutorials, etc. please let me know in the comments.

New Class, New Ideas

The latest installment of my HR Technology class (I think this is number 5) is set to begin in about two weeks time.  Since I am now a veteran of developing and delivering this class, there is the temptation to to think I have it all figured out, and I can simply roll out the last term's content, assignments, readings, etc. and the class will more or less take care of itself.

But I think to do that would be a disservice to both the students and to myself to some extent. 

The market for HR Technology is constantly changing. Great and new content is being published every day.  Heck, even the legend Naomi Bloom is now blogging, a new development since I last taught the class.

And my perspective is changing as well. Since the last class I have attended a half dozen events, read stacks of papers and blog posts, done ten or so HR Happy Hour Shows and met some incredibly smart and talented people.

So for the new class, I am determined to keep the content and the delivery fresh, relevant, and here is the key I think - forward thinking.  More emphasis on what is 'next' I believe is of more short and long-term value to my students than spending too much time on the past.

Finally, another goal I have for this session is to have even more community involvement in the class and more external expert interaction with the students.  In the past I have done virtual guest speakers, an HR blogger/student guest post project, and some online discussion forum moderation by outside experts.

These activities were all interesting, reasonably successful, and to some extent fun.  But I want to do more, push the 'community' aspect even further and try to ensure that once the students have completed the course they have established a real connection to the broader community of HR and Technology stars that have done so much to further my own knowledge.

If you are an HR pro, HR Technology expert, vendor, or blogger and want to get involved in the HR Technology class, leave me a comment, or send me an e-mail - steveboese@gmail.com.

If you have some suggestions or recommendations as to what technologies, strategies, and skills I should emphasize I'd love to hear those suggestions as well.

And as always, thanks for your support.

Majoring in Facebook

Saw this article via a Tweet from the really cool folks at Socialcast,

Oshkosh creates new social networking major

Classes will revolve around technology, publicity, outreach

The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh is creating a major in social networking. The course of study, expected to launch in 2010, is meant to provide students both the technical and 'business' perspectives on the use of social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Program designers are trying to attract students to Oshkosh that might not have previously considered the school.

The full article can be found on the Badger Herald site.

Most every college has elements of social networking interspersed among various programs. Public Relations, Internet Marketing, Graphic Design, Journalism, and Advertising programs all typically include aspects of social networking. Curiously, most courses of study in Human Resources have not incorporated much social networking content.  My HR Technology class does include some discussion of internal and external social networking in the contexts of recruiting, performance management, and workforce collaboration, but truly even my class does not spend nearly enough time on the topic.

I have wondered in the past if I should try and create an entire class in the HR program to concentrate completely on social networking and so-called Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and now that Oshkosh is pioneering with an entire major in the subject, I think it is time to re-visit my idea and try to get such a course created and delivered.  I had a guest post last week on the Fistful of Talent where I took the position that current and future HR leaders have to get educated in this area in order to be in position to leverage these emerging technologies effectively.

What do you think, should a Human Resources program have a dedicated Social Networking course?

And if so, what specific topics should be included?

Tomoye Community Software in the Class

For the current edition of the HR Technology class we were fortunate enough to use the Tomoye Ecco Community platform as a basis for many class activities, and all class discussions.

The Tomoye Community platform is a basis for sharing and collaborating on content (documents, images, video), asking and answering questions, and finding and accessing organization expertise. Content can can be organized by main topic, then further identified and described with user-defined tags. Users can comment on or ask a question about any piece of content in the Community.

In class, we took advantage of these capabilities in several ways:

Organization

The Course content was organized into Topics, one per week, and all readings, assignments, discussion questions were placed in the Week's Topic, as well as being tagged as a 'reading', 'project', etc. This way students could easily see all content in a chronological manner, or by type (by doing an easy tag search, or using the tag cloud).  This made content more accessible and consumable for students, and did not necessarily 'force' them to access content in only one prescribed manner.

Content

All class assigned readings were uploaded to the community as 'Documnents', but beyond simply loading a file, I was able to introduce the reading, set some context, and even offer some of my observations on the content. Sometimes I asked a specific question or two, and other times simply asked the students to share their comments and observations about the reading.  Here again the ability to post comments or ask questions directly tied to the content item was very valuable, and a great feature for the class.

I also used the Documents feature to load images, usually diagrams or charts taken from presentation material from the 'in-person' version of the class.  This worked well, as the ability to set context and describe the material in the image was key to ensure better student understanding.

Discussions

Each week there was at least one 'required' class discussion topic that I entered as a 'Question' in that

week's topic.

Students were asked to provide their views on the question, and to comment and discuss their answers with each other.  Here the class utilized one of the powerful features of Tomoye, the ability to mark an answer as 'Helpful'. This is a simple, yet effective mechanism for bubbling good content to the top, and for building the reputation of community members.  In a short class, community ratings and recommended members have fairly limited utility, as really more time needs to pass and more discussions created for this feature to be really powerful.

Overall Thoughts

First, the Tomoye Community was vastly superior to the course management system that is available through my school in the areas of content management, discussions, and organization and locating information. While all these are possible in a traditional CMS, the features of Tomoye like tagging, commenting, asking questions, and rating are a major improvement and enhancement.  The visibility in comments and discussions to all student contributions is also far superior in Tomoye to the 'classic' threaded forum style in the CMS.

Certainly Tomoye, or any other community not designed for course management can't completely replace functions like online grading, online live quizzing, and perhaps even private exchanges between and individual student and the instructor. 

But going forward I see huge potential for using a platform like Tomoye not just for an individual course as I did this quarter, but as an overall community platform for the entire program. I can envision a community that is set up for all enrolled students, faculty, staff, and even alumni.  There could be separate content areas or topics for each individual course containing overview material, sample course content, reviews from students, faculty bios, and areas where prospective, current, and past students could ask questions and have discussions. Additionally, topics can be created for overview information, coming events, and perhaps job opportunities posted by alumni or friends of the program.  What I am thinking about is sort of a hybrid between traditional 'alumni' networks and an active student network.

To close, we had a great experience using Tomoye in class, and many thanks to the great folks at Tomoye, especially Eric Sauve and Kathleen Brault, I am truly appreciative of the fantastic support in this initiative.