What's bigger than the World Series? Watching people play video games

This is a short update in a semi-regular series of 'If you are not paying attention, the world is probably a lot different than you think' department I offer up this nugget courtesy of The Atlantic - 'More People Watched the 'League of Legends' Video Game Championships that the World Series'.

Here is the opening from The Atlantic piece, click over to read the rest if you like, but unless you are a fairly serious gamer the first paragraph is probably all you need, (or I need) to make the point:

In October, some 15 million people tuned in to watch Major League Baseball’s World Series in the United States. But that’s nothing compared to the other big sporting tournament that took place around the same time: In late September and early October, 32 million people watched the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship, according to a new report (pdf) from SuperData, a games research company.

Additionally, over 18,000 people (real, actual people) filled the Stapes Center in Los Angeles to watch the finals live. Also, it wasn't just the World Series total viewers that were topped by viewers of League of Legends - the NBA Finals Game 7, the average for the NCAA College Basketball Final Four, and the BCS College Football National Title game all fell short of the 32 miiion people that tuned in to the League of Legends finals.

Why mention this story? Well, it is a Friday and in a nod to yesterday's crowdsourcing post, I kind of am out of other ideas. But seriously, I think this is an incredibly interesting story. Think about it in your own work or personal context - would you ever have thought about the growing popularity of watching other people play video games?

It sounds so silly, right? Who would actually want to watch someone else play a video game?

I am not really sure, but if you think about it for half a minute (and non-emotionally), watching 'real' sports like baseball or football is just as silly as watching people play video games. What is the difference really, except just that baseball and football have been around longer. But those of you who take 4 hours out of your Sunday afternoons to watch your favorite NFL team all Fall/Winter don't have the right to claim any kind of intellectual high ground over the video game fans.

In fact, most of the people who watch the pros play video games do it to try and actually improve their own game playing ability - something that can be said for very few football or baseball fans.

The world is not at all what we think it is at time.s I think it helps our work in HR and Talent, although I could not tell you precisely how, to keep aware of what is going on out in the big, scary world where millions of people are watching video games when you are watching football.

Have a great weekend!

The problem with deadlines

Is that, all too often, they are completely one-sided.

When I need something done, answered, actioned, or otherwise handled is almost certainly not perfectly aligned with how you would like to accommodate my request, (or to spend the time to take a decision to actively not accommodate the request).

My, 'I need it by the end of next week' has to be translated into the language of your workflow, capability, availability, and most importantly, that mental list of the things that are ranked in order to their importance to you, (and that I almost definitely am not aware of).

I can ask you if it is reasonable if I can have that thing by 'End of next week', and you will likely tell me 'Sure, not a problem' because when looked at on a Monday or a Tuesday 'The end of next week' seems like forever away from now and the commitment to deliver seems so far afield from the promise that I would think you kind of incompetent if you simply said 'No'.

I think a better question than 'Can I have this by the end of next week?' or its close equivalent, 'About how long will it take before you can turn this around?' would be, "Where is this item on your priority list?' or 'Assuming you had everything you needed to work on this, when would you actually, you know, start working on it?'

I think it is much more important for the requestor to know how the person being asked to do something actually has the item prioritized and importance-ranked in their own mind than the often irrelevant 'How long will it take to complete?' angle.

It almost never matters how long something will take to complete.

What matters is how motivated you are to start.

Have a great week everyone!

If the entire economy can fit on one slide, then you probably have too many slides

...and this blog post title is way, way too long.

Check the below image, spotted over the weekend on Business Insider's piece titled Here's The Entire Debate About The US Economy In One Huge Slide:

The slide presents, (simply I admit), what the financial services company sees as the key assumptions and challenges for the US economy in 2014, offers up some alternative and plausible implications of these assumptions, and then presents what it feels are the most important data visualizations (that are not too hard to look at), that support both the assumptions and the conclusions.

Think about it, they are attempting to distill a subject as large and complex as the economy of the USA down into one slide. Sure there are lots of data points and subject areas that are not and can't be covered in just one slide, and sure, the presentation gurus out there will cringe at the notion that there are way too many words in way too small a font to pass muster, but the overall effect I think is outstanding.

All the important data points, the reasoning, the charts - everything that this presenter needed to lead his/her talk about the state of the economy all laid out on one page.

I know I have gotten into a really bad presenting habit over the years of simply adding more and more slides to just about every presentation that I have done. Slides are free, right? Just add another one with a cool picture and a word or two in 64-pt font. 

But I think that approach makes you a little lazy and also can easily result in ponderous presentations that end up going everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

The tightness and the focus required to distill your content into its smallest container possible also forces you to consider what is truly important about the information and arguments you are presenting and to think much more about what you are going to say about that content, rather than spending umpteen hours scouring the stock photo sites for the 'right' images.

This has to be the next HRevolution contest - the 10 minute, one-slide presentation.

Have a great week all!

Be proud of where you work: Talking points from the NSA

An internal NSA memo leaked over the weekend, one where the good folks at the National Security Agency provide some tips for their staff to take home and use over the recent Thanksgiving holiday in case they were confronted with a drunk Uncle or angry Cousin who might not be totally pleased with having a member of the family a part of cyber spying, stealing personal information, or whatever else the NSA can be accused of carrying out.

The 5-point document (with supporting examples) can be found here, and if you can overlook the source, history, context, etc., it actually provides a really useful outline of what employees can do to carry the brand message out into their personal lives.

Here are the 5 talking points about the NSA that the agency wanted, or at least advised, it's staff to share while sitting around the holiday table, with some comments from me about how they might be more generally applicable to any organization.

1. NSA's mission is of great value to the nation.

Applicability for you?

Probably some. Obvious if you work for a children's hospital or for Waste Management. Maybe less relevant if you are in some kind of management consulting group or work for one of the local car dealerships. In those cases you want to find someone (other than the greedy owner of the company) that benefits from the existence of your organization to speak up. There must be somebody, right?

2. NSA performs its mission the right way.

Take a page from the NSA, (as well as the example set by the local personal injury attorneys in your market), and stress it is not just what you do, but someone you do that thing with more integrity than the other guys that do that exact same thing as you. Don't worry about proving it, it is pretty much impossible for anyone to dispute your claim tom the moral high ground.

3. NSA performs its mission exceptionally well.

Probably the weakest of the talking points to rally behind. But I suppose in your context the fact that you are still (for the moment anyway), an ongoing concern that is employing people must mean you are doing something well. Don't grab for too much else here.

4. The people of NSA are loyal Americans with expert skills.

Drop the nationalistic bit if that makes sense for you, and go for the standard and universal 'We only have the best of the best here at ACME' take. We all know that to be the case. Everyone only employs top talent, 'A' players, etc. So what if it is not true. Unless you work for Yahoo, apparently.

5. NSA is committed to increased transparency and public dialog.

Your company has an official corporate Twitter account, right? And probably a Facebook page too. And whatever other associated social outposts that the last batch of summer interns set up for you. Forget that the last post was some inane blather last week about Black Friday, the fact remains that you are an open and transparent organization. And you will prove it the first time someone, anyone tweets at you or leaves a comment on your corporate blog.

And there it is. The much-maligned and reviled NSA has just handed you the recipe for indoctrinating helping your teams share the good news about the work you are doing there at the Widget factory.

Think of it this way, how hard can rallying the staff and goosing morale be if even the NSA thinks it can  do it?

Do not attempt

Did you watch any TV over the weekend?

Of course you did. We all did. And please no comments along the lines of 'I don't even have a TV' or 'I only stream Hulu to my iPad'. If you are one of those people, you are still the outlier, still the exception, still kind of annoying.

So over the weekend I caught a new (I think new) commercial from the good folks over at Jeep. The spot (embedded below, email and RSS subscribers will need to click through), was one of those artsy kinds, with lots of quick cut scenes of people out and about in the woods or on trails or climbing up things, a soundtrack of an old Bob Dylan song with his typical incomprehensible lyrics, and an overall message of 'When you were young, you could do anything, be anything, go anywhere. Now you are older and you think you can't do all the crazy, adventurous, exciting things you used to do, (or wanted to do, but never got around to them before you took a boring office job, signed on for a (too big) mortgage, and became 'responsible.' But you still can do these things, well, if you drive one of these cool, off-road capable but probably won't see any terrain more dangerous than the mall parking lot on Black Friday, new Jeeps!

It actually is a decent commercial as these things go, and in its final, dramatic, inspirational image we see someone about to embark on a base jump, leaping off a canyon or ridge of some kind, about to hurl his or her mini-parachute in the air that will ostensibly help guide them down to safety below. The voice over reminds us that 'You can still throw yourself at the world head first again' while we see from behind this amazingly exciting, probably dangerous, and likely something 99% of us would never try, leap off of a perfectly good mountain.

But as we watch that tremendous leap of faith and adrenaline and courage, and internalize that since we are listening to an old, obscure Bob Dylan track that this must be cool, a tiny disclaimer appears on the screen. 

Do not attempt.

No, this amazingly exciting (potential) life and set of adventures we portray in our Jeep commerical, they aren't really meant for you to try. (We really just want you to buy a Jeep. And be careful.).

And we don't want to be held responsible just in case anyone watches our little minute and one second of inspiration and actually thinks that yes, they can crawl out of their cubicle and climb mountains, walk around shirtless, and stare pensively into campfires.

And yes, there are lawyers somewhere that told us we have to place Do not attempt right over the images just in case someone out there is crazy enough to Attempt and ends up lying in a broken heap at the bottom of the valley.

What's the point of all this?

As usual, there is not much of one.

Except to think that maybe on some if not all of the 10,249 articles that will be published today telling you how to better engage your employees, or how to manage people, or to find and recruit 'top talent' that at least some of them should come with the same disclaimer.

Do not attempt.

Have a great week!