HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYONE !!!

Blogware is finally accepting my blog post again…It took a while and it was extremely frustrating, but at least it’s working agian. So here’s the QOTW that I was trying to post for the past 2 days…

I’m back!!!

WOW…I can’t believe it’s been more than a month since my last “regular” blog post and even longer since my last podcast. Things at work became ABSOLUTELY HECTIC over the last few weeks/months and, even though I thought life would resume semi-normality after my big meeting on December 1-2, stuff just kept piling up—clearing the clogged inbox, presentations to give, meetings to attend, budgets to reconcile, etc, etc.

Anyway, I think I can finally breathe a (small) sigh of relief for now, so I’d better get blogging again while I still can…

To continue on a topic that I most recently discussed, I thought I’d kick-off my “return to blogging” with a QOTW from one of the opening events at the 2006 Web 2.0 Summit: A Conversation with Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google). You can also download the full audio (MP3) or video (MP4) podcast from the Web 2.0 Conversations page.

In this on-stage interview, John Battelle talks to Eric Schmidt about “…Google’s recent purchase of YouTube and the importance of video as a format… Why Google stood up to the request to provide end-user data… [And,] if Google is building an online suite to take on Microsoft Office.”

While the interview itself was quite interesting and fairly candid, I personally thought that the Q&A session—in the last ~10 mins of the podcast—was more revealing of Google’s philosophies and worth listening to for Schmidt’s insights on various topics.

So our QOTW comes in the form of Eric Schmidt’s answer to a question by an audience member that really taps into Google’s strength—attracting and retaining bright, innovative people.

Here’s the question:

“You guys are famous for having attracted and kept some of the smartest minds in business; period—what have you learned about attracting, developing, and keeping those folks that could help others?”

And here’s Schmidt’s answer…

The simplest answer is that people don’t work for money; they work for impact. And if you can figure out a culture where (1) you listen to the people and (2) that they have an impact, you have a winner.

Google is run in an unusual way. It’s very consensus-driven; we don’t have single decision makers; it’s hard to deal with and our partners have learned this, and we’re working as hard as we can to address that. But ultimately, the fact that everything is done in groups—people talk to each other and so forth and so on—has produced more robust decisions and greater buy-in.

Another way of saying that is: you tend to get better answers if you ask a question as a manager, rather than telling people the answer. So the way we do our strategy, for example, is we produce 29 questions for next year (which are reasonably obvious to people in this audience) and we send teams off to try to answer them, and we’ll see what they come back with. Much better than telling them the strategy—promotes buy-in.

I’m not sure if I agree 100% with the whole “consensus-driven” process, but I really like that Schmidt stresses the importance of getting internal buy-in for corporate strategy (“Gettin’ ETech Support” anyone?), as well as the need for “listening” and “”impact”. To me, this is the hallmark of the Web 2.0 movement, which is typified by the likes of Digg,Flickr, Facebook, and many other Web 2.0 companies, including Google itself.

From what I understand of these Web 2.0 companies, the founders didn’t set out to gain profit and fame from the start (although many eventually did). In fact, many were simply trying to build a better web app for themselves and mostly in their spare time (at least initially). So, instead of simply trying to build the next “hot app” and marketing the heck out of it, they listened to what their peers were saying about existing apps, sought to make them better and create an impact through innovation, and then ultimately obtained buy-in from users throughout the development process and beyond.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the issue of attracting and retaining good talent will always be an issue for expanding businesses, and particularly for major corporations of a reasonable size (like Google), where it’s easy to get lost in hierarchy. However, just like everything else in business, we should look to new and better models for people-management as well; and the Google playbook for this seems to be a really good one to follow.

HELLO!

I'm finally back after a long, busy period without regular blogging. So, I was all excited and prepared to resume my blogging status with a new QOTW by Eric Schmidt from the Web 2.0 Summit.

Unfortunately, Blogware is not letting me post anything that is not typed directly into the “Post Article” interface. I usually write everything out in a text file (typically MS Word RTF file) and then copy-and-paste, which I've done for the last 59 posts. However, this time it doesn't seem to work–I've been trying to post this new article all day and all I get  is a bloody annoying message that says:

We are temporarily unable to process your request. Please try again later. Thank-you. Message ID 3546-BW3-2-5.

So, even though I'm trying so hard to “return to blogging”, Blogware is just not letting me do my usual copy-and-paste from anything–I tried it from a word doc, notepad, etc. and nothing seems to work. This has happened before, but never for longer than a couple of hours. It's now starting to annoy me and I'd rather rant and whinge about it than re-write and re-link my entire QOTW piece.

Sorry for the negative re-entry to blogging, but all I have left to say is THIS SUCKS!!!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving break and that you’re not having to eat turkey sandwiches all this week.

I know that I’ve been really absent from blogging/podcasting lately and I apologize for the lack of updates over the last few weeks, but I’ve been completely swamped with preparations for a major meeting that I’m putting together this weekend for my (real) job, so I haven’t had time to do much else.

Anyway, there’s so much that has happened this month that I’ve been meaning to blog about, like the Web 2.0 Summit—which happened in SF from NOV 7-9^th (check out their audio and video podcasts here)—together with their popular Web 2.0 Launchpad (read more at TechCrunch, ZDNet and VentureBeat). You can find lots of summaries and wrap-ups on the Web 2.0 Summit in the blogosphere, including some interesting coverage by CNET and write-ups at Read/Write Web, GigaOm, Stowe Boyd, and Fast Company.

And, speaking of Web 2.0, I find it interesting that Intel (of all companies!) announced at the Web 2.0 Summit that they were also getting into the Web Office game, with the launch of Suite Two—“…a rich set of interconnected services that combine to improve productivity and enable high-engagement marketing…[including] the most trusted platforms for blogs, wikis, RSS feed reading, and RSS feed management, all under a single management interface.”

Suite Two consists of four existing applications: MovableType from SixApart, SocialText, Simplefeed and Newsgator (read more at TechCrunch).

I think what is even more revealing than the fact that it shows how easy it is these days to put together a Web Office Suite these days (this suite was actually put together by SpikeSource for Intel), I think it also shows the shift in thinking of exactly what a Web Office Suite is. No spreadsheets. No presentation tools. No typical office suite stuff. Instead, this is really a suite of Web 2.0 content consuming/generating tools. Cool (or should it be “Sweet”?).

Anyway, that’s about all the time (and thoughts) I can spare before my big meeting this weekend. Hopefully, life will get back to semi-normality after this weekend.