Put down your iPhone for a second, we're strategizing here.

A prediction for 2012: There will be about 17,294 '2012 Predictions' blog posts and newsletter articles stressing the importance of mobile technology for workforce tools, marketing, branding, recruiting, gaming, training - you name it, chances are you will be warned that you'd better have a 'mobile strategy' for all of it.

And you better. So get on that now. And as the funny and apt cartoon from the Marketoonist reminds us, you might need to put down your toys for a few minutes while you sort that out.

Hello? Bueller?

Jokes aside, the correct approaches to mobile technology and the mobile-enablement of current workplace technologies probably present a set of challenges, (and certainly opportunities), unlike previous or last generation problems that needed to be solved. 

Needed to make sure the time and attendance system met your needs? Well, since everyone used to report to the office, the process of badging or punching in was fairly simple. As long as the data was passed to the payroll system, you had most of your problem licked. 

Today that same system and process might need to be supported on 5 mobile operating systems, on dozens of devices, and multiple languages. Not so simple for sure. And that doesn't even begin to touch upon the issues surrounding preferred usage styles and form factors on these devices, and just what workplace functionality should be mobile-enabled and what perhaps should not.

All in all, you will be told that in 2012 mobile will get even more important for getting work done, for engaging with employees, candidates, and customers; and for competing globally.

What you won't be told is that you'll need to sign off of Angry Birds and Flipboard for a few minutes to sort it out.

Wait, maybe we can build an Angry Birds extension that equates punching in at work to smashing a few pigs?

Metric of the Day - $10M in Revenue per Employee

Ten million in revenue per employee? How can you possibly get there? You're thinking revenue per employee comes in at around $150,000 maybe $200,000 in a good year.

One of the ways you approach $10M in revenue per employee is by outsourcing relentlessly everything that you consider non-essential to your business, thus significantly reducing the number of people you directly employ, and allowing you to focus more fully on those critical differentiators for your business.

The details behind this story are taken from a piece on Bloomberg Business Week about privately-held electronics manufacturer Vizio and their purposeful strategy of outsourcing most every function that they perceive to be not core to the design of their high tech products and to the customer experience they are trying to deliver. Vizio controls product design and customer support in-house, and just about every other function in the manufacturing and distribution process is contracted out to a large network of partners and suppliers across the globe.

By shifting the employment relationship from in-house to contracted out, Vizio has managed to rack up close to $3B in annual sales while directly employing only about 300 people. Sure, there are tens of thousands of workers scattered across the partner ecosystem, and Vizio has to skillfully manage and coordinate this partner network to ensure production standards and shipping obligations are met. But I wonder if supply chain and vendor management for a few dozen, (or even a few hundred), key partners is in the long run a more manageable and profitable task than trying to directly recruit, employ, compensate, manage, develop, and do all the other 'people management' tasks that are often so hard to pull off well.

Sure someone else, in this case the partner and supplier organizations still have to do all those pesky 'people' chores, but for a company set up like Vizio, it has to be seen as an entire set of challenges and problems that are not worth undertaking. They can maintain a really small but focused core team, can concentrate on the design and support processes they see as fundamental to their success, and can likely move and respond more rapidly to changing market conditions over time.

And they probably have a lot less drama than naturally occurs when trying to get 50,000 people to all row in the same direction, play nice in the cube farms, and not leave a big mess in the break room microwave.

What do you think? Are these kinds of 'networked' organizations the way of the future? Would it work in your business?

Have a great weekend! 

Revealing organizational strategy via job ads

I caught this piece on Gamespot.com about Google's recent job listing for a position called 'Product Manager - Games', located at Google's Mountain View, CA headquarters. Here's the information about the role straight from the job listing on the Google careers page:

Rare opportunity to grow a brand-new business - Games at Google! We are looking for a strategic, technical and game-loving Product Manager to drive Google's gaming strategy. You will design strategies for game distribution and discovery, player identity, game mechanics, and more. In addition to designing a great user experience and building out key partnerships, you will be significantly influencing Google's social platform as you work directly with a critical set of early adopters, game developers. Interesting and impactful decisions involving social gaming, privacy, virality, business, and technical APIs await you and the strong, passionate team of gamers you will work with.

Sounds like a pretty interesting and challenging job, right? A chance to really shape and drive what one day might end up being an important line of business for one of the biggest tech companies in the world in a space that is super-hot right now - think Farmville, CityVille, et. al.

So Google is getting more serious about social games as evidenced by this job listing.  Before the news of this listing broke, perhaps that was not so obvious. According to the Gamespot piece 'indicates that Google is definitely planning to get into the games business.' The strong implication is that the posting for the Games Manager job was the validation of some ongoing rumors about Google's potential involvement in the space. 

But I am not highlighting the post just because it seems like a cool gig, but to wonder a bit about how often organizations reveal their business strategies via public job ads. Let's play devil's advocate for a second and pretend that Google had some kind of skunk works project underway meant to try and make a splash in the social gaming space. It would make sense to keep that information on the DL, grab some engineers from other internal groups, have your execs and recruiters work their networks on the phone or online to seek out the talent they need, and really do what they could to keep the word that they were looking for a rockstar Games Manager off the radar of the rest of the Silicon Valley talent sharks.

Again for the purposes of this piece we are assuming Google would benefit from keeping these aspirations for Social Gaming under wraps for a while, so posting an ad like this sends a red flag up to all the other competitors in the space, and gives them public affirmation and impetus to take action, either offensive or defensive. Does the job ad serve as a signal of strategy that a smart recruiter would have never posted publicly, preferring to work this under the radar so as not to broadcast the company intentions in the space?

Is lazy or ineffective recruiting giving away too much?

Or is Google pulling a classic sleight of hand maneuver, posting a job it really will never fill, fr a business it may or may not be interested in, just to throw the pack off of the scent?

How much do you monitor the job ads of your competitors?

Tactics and Technology

The climax of the American Civil War Battle of Gettysburg that took place in July 1863 was a Confederate Army attack that has come to be well-known as 'Pickett's Charge', named after General George Pickett,General George Pickett one of the Confederate leaders on the field that day.

Pickett's Charge was essentially a direct frontal assault by the Confederates, across an open field, uphill, against an entrenched Union Army enemy force that was supported by artillery on even higher ground.

Part of The Conference Board's Leadership Experience program at Gettysburg has the participants walk the same path across the field and up the hill that Pickett's (and many others) men traversed that day. The well-documented history of the battle tells us that the Confederates suffered horrific casualties, were unsuccessful in breaking the Union Army lines, and were forced to withdraw and retreat.  Twenty-one months later the war ended, with the Union Army victorious.

As the leadership experience attendees traced the path of Pickett's Charge, it was seemingly obvious that attempting such an attack, covering almost a mile of open terrain, with the enemy dug in and holding the superior position, was absolute insanity. As we marched up the path towards the high ridge where the Union Army was aligned, one of the class questioned the 'march in a straight line in the open and approach the enemy' attack formation, that in 1863 was still the most common attacking tactic. This was troubling, since advances in technology and weaponry had improved the range, accuracy, and deadly force of the various artillery pieces, rifles, pistols, and ammunition.

The technology of war had dramatically improved to such an extent that it began to render the traditional tactics, if not essentially ineffective, certainly more costly in terms of casualties.  And the crazy part is that one of the event facilitators indicated that the basic attack strategies continued all the way until World War I.  But even then it required another technological breakthrough, (the tank), to significantly alter the accepted tactics.

I know the corporate world is not the same as the 'real' battlefield, and getting too comfortable with military metaphors risks oversimplification of what are usually complex issues. But in this case I think the comparison is appropriate. 

New and better technologies are being created, improved, and being brought to bear with increasing frequency in a wide range of traditional human capital functions.  Whether it is in recruiting, performance management, learning and development, or internal collaboration, the rate of advancement in capability and potential is accelerating.

But advances in technology, without an appropriate and complementary shift in the strategy and tactics to better leverage the new and more powerful technologies will only result in partial victory at best, and a significant loss at worst. Your competitors are likely to have the same access to these technologies as you go, simply 'owning' them will not be enough, being smarter and even bolder in their deployment will be the difference.

If you deploy fantastic new tools and technologies, but continue to execute in a 'march in a straight line across the field' manner, then history may be as unkind to you as it has been to General Pickett.

A Reader asks: How to get more 'Strategic'?

I have a few more posts to write from things I saw and heard at the HR Technology Conference, but this question came in from a reader in reaction to my 'Be Curious' post:

I am only provided information on a "need to know" basis. Never included in planning meetings, etc. What can I do to prove my value and become more strategic?

I did reply to the question, but I figured I would throw this one out to the community. What do you think, how does the average HR Generalist in a company that does not seem to place much value in the HR function break out of the administrative, paper-pushing role and become more 'strategic?

What specific steps should he/she take?

Thoughts?