Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: management

  • Recruiting big data

    Recruiting big data

    One of the predictions for 2020 is that decade’s business successes will be those who use big data well.

    A good example of a big data tool is recruitment software Evolv that helps businesses predict not only the best person to hire but also who is likely to leave the organisation.

    For employee retention, Evolv looks at a range of variables which can include anything from gas prices and social media usage to local unemployment rates then pulls these together to predict which staff are most likely to leave.

    “It’s hard to understand why it’s radically predictive, but it’s radically predictive,” Venture Beat quotes Jim Meyerle, Evolv’s cofounder.

    There are some downsides in such software though – as some of the comments to the VentureBeat story point out – a blind faith in an alogrithm can destroy company morale and much more.

    Recruiters as an industry haven’t a good track record in using data well, while they’ve had candidate databases for two decades and stories abound of poor use of keyword searches carried out by lazy or incompetent headhunters. The same is now happening with agencies trawling LinkedIn for candidates.

    Using these tools and data correctly going to separate successful recruitment agencies and HR departments from the also-rans.

    It’s the same in most businesses – the tools are available and knowing them how to use them properly will be a key skill for this decade.

    Job classifieds image courtesy of Markinpool through SXC.HU

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  • A business lesson from the Catholic Church

    A business lesson from the Catholic Church

    The Catholic church may be a two thousand year old institution with medieval beliefs and beset with scandal, but the clerics know how to handle business succession well.

    Pope Benedict’s resignation was not only unexpected but also almost unprecedented with it being six hundred years since a pontiff quit before dying on the job.

    In many organisations such an unexpected and rare event – dare one use the ‘black swan’ line – would create havoc, or at least paralysis. Instead the clerics handled the process smoothly.

    This contrasts with the succession planning in many companies. In larger business even when the CEOs handover is planned, there’s a period of write downs and blood letting as the new leader stamps their authority.

    Sometimes it gets very ugly indeed, particularly if the former CEO has been kicked upstairs onto the board.

    In smaller businesses, there’s no succession planning at all. Many businesses die when the owner retires if there’s no buyer for the operation.

    That shortage of buyers is a major problem for smaller business owners. Many baby boomers have planned their retirements around getting a good sale price for their businesses.

    If they can’t get the sale price, the boomer small business owners work until they drop.

    Which is what popes usually do.

    It’s often said the Catholic Church is the biggest corporation on the planet. Given how smoothly their bureaucracy deals with succession planning, that’s not surprising.

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  • First we kill email, then Powerpoint

    First we kill email, then Powerpoint

    Two years ago French technology firm Atos raised eyebrows after announcing the company would go email free.

    Atos CEO Thierry Breton said at the time,

    We are producing data on a massive scale that is fast polluting our working environments and also encroaching into our personal lives. At [Atos] we are taking action now to reverse this trend, just as organizations took measures to reduce environmental pollution after the industrial revolution.

    Eighteen months on, the Financial Times reports Thierry is well on the way to eliminate the office pollution that is email. Lee Timmons, one of Atos’ Vice Presidents, tells the paper,

    “At the 2012 London Olympics, we were able to zero-email certify some processes – a first – and (we) look set to be email-free internally by the end of 2013,”

    Now Atos is looking at eliminating other business distractions, notably Powerpoint presentations and meetings.

    Eliminating inboxes, Powerpoint and meetings from the workplace seems a noble cause. Few organisations would be prepared to even consider this.

    For many staff and managers, spending hours sorting email, attending pointless meetings and futzing around with over-elaborate Powerpoint presentations is how they justify their time.

    It’s going to be interesting to see how Atos goes with thier objective of streamlining the workplace and how many other companies are prepared to copy them.

    Man sending an email image courtesy of Bruno-Free at SXC.hu

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  • Leadership in a connected world

    Leadership in a connected world

    Managing a business or government agency as information pours into organisations is one of the great challenges for modern executives.

    As part of the Australian Cisco Live event, a panel looked  at Public Sector Leadership in a Connected World, many of the issues discussed apply to private sector executives as they do to public sector managers.

    Cisco’s Director of Global Public Sector Practice, Martin Stewart-Weeks, kicked off the panel with the observation that “we now live in a world where information has become completely unmanageable.”

    Martin quoted from David Weinberg’s book Too Big To Know, Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room. The author has a good explanation of his book in this YouTube clip.

    Trusting the community seems to be the biggest problem facing politicians and the public service, policy consultant Rod Glover puts the general distrust towards governments on the failure of leaders to consult over changes and decision.

    Economist Nick Gruen and Australian Industry Group adviser Kate Pound echoed this problem in that a change of culture is needed among leaders towards the way information is controlled and managed.

    Nick sees that culture changing while Rod thinks there will need to be demonstrated successes before risk adverse public service leaders will be prepared to adopt new ways of managing.

    Kate’s view is that culture change will require a realignment of incentives which will make managers accountable for the delivery of services. She cites a situation where businesses are obligated to register online but the agency’s website doesn’t work.

    So the problem is as much gathering the right data along with processing the information inside an agency. Both are challenges for organisations with rigid hierarchies and  information flows.

    Information is no longer power — it’s how you use it. But the structures are still based around access and control of knowledge.

    The big culture shift for politicians, public servants and corporate executives is we can no longer hoard information.

    For managers in both the public and private sectors, the task is now to share information and trust the right people will use it well.

    Paul travelled to Cisco Live courtesy of Cisco Systems

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  • Using big data to find the cupboard is bare

    Using big data to find the cupboard is bare

    Last week this blog discussed whether telecommuting was dead in light of Marissa Mayer’s banning of the practice at Yahoo.

    While I don’t think telecommuting is dead, Marissa Mayer has a big problem figuring out exactly who is doing what at the company and abolishing remote working is one short term way of addressing the issue.

    If Business Insider is to be believed, Yahoo!’s absent staff problem is bad.

    After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

    Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

    Business Insider’s contention is that Mayer makes her decisions based on data analysis. At Google she drove designers mad by insisting on reviewing user reactions to different layouts and deciding based on the most popular results.
    If this is true, then Marissa Mayer is the prototype of tomorrow’s top executives – the leaders in business by the end of this decade will be the ones who manage data well and can sift what matters out of the information deluge.
    For all of us this is going to be a challenge with the probably the biggest task of all being able to identify which signals are worth paying attention to and which should be ignored.
    Of course, all this assumes the data is good quality in the first place.
    An assumption we’ve all made when talking about Big Data is that it’s about marketing – we made the same assumption about social media.
    While Big Data is a good marketing tool, it’s just as useful in areas like manufacturing, logistics, credit evaluations and human resources. The latter is what Yahoo!’s staff are finding out.
    In age of Big Data it may not pay to a slacker, but it’s going to be handy if you want to know what’s going on your business.

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