Mike Schorah

Blame the Daleks : I've never got over the childhood scarring from knowing our sofa was just no match for their death rays! I consider myself fairly well-read, certainly with a vocabulary bigger than England's soccer manager Fabio Capello claims . But thanks to the Daleks I've never read much science fiction so, until today, I'd never heard the word 'grok.' Kim_Cameron   kim cameron   People didn't "get over it". [ http://tcrn.ch/fER72l ] DOES NOT COMPUTE yet - "creepy"  GMAIL   HAL  too far out to GROK. Just wait. Check out his  www.IdentityBlog.com It seems that ' grok ' means " to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because of our Earthling assumptions) as color means to a blind man. " @Kim_Cameron is...

If you're a one-man-band, regardless of whether there are others in the organization or not, then mission statements are so much hot air and a waste of time. But if you're prepared to lead followers who are willing to be led then a mission statement can prove vital to get everyone on the same page with a shared understanding. I often say that project management, at any level, is at heart as simple as going to the grocery store: First, you need to know why  you're going. That's where mission statements come in. And the reason for the journey has got to outweigh both the cost of travel and the benefit of staying put. Like going to get provisions for breakfast so you won't be hungry in the morning. Second, you need to know what  you're going to do. For example, the objective is to get milk. Next, where  are you going? (Better than GPS, this is a certain shelf on a cabinet in the store...) And where are you going from? Only then can you plot the route for how...

According to a BBC news item today, security firm McAfee alerts that " Intellectual property and business secrets are fast becoming a target for cyber thieves...research found that some hackers are starting to specialise in data stolen from corporate networks. McAfee said deals were being done for trade secrets, marketing plans, R&D reports and source code. " Well, a security firm selling products to counter such threats would report the threat, wouldn't they? Whether you lean towards that cynical view or not, the reality is that many organisations find that their core value now lies in the data they store. (It's not just firms like Google that have precious few assets beyond the data that other people allow them to collect; many much smaller firms, too, have valuable data they can mine for value.) And it's often trivially easy to lose it. Last week I walked out of a building with a copy of the business's entire database stored on a tiny sliver of a ...

The History of GMT is well worth viewing , as is this post on time in space: See the Interactive Map Get more like this

Great conversations with other digerati at #chelttwestival last night with lots of interesting war stories: Social media/networks deployed in government departments are empowering ground-level staff to connect cross boundaries (geography, time, department, skill set...). And empowering them to connect straight to senior management. They love that; and so do the seniors - they get immediate access to real-time info about what's actually happening, without filtering, spin or time delays. But layers of middle management are threatened with irrelevance and resist change due to fears of power loss. Arab Spring suggests they won't succeed in holding the status quo! Jury is out on whether internal social networking can effect positive change in smaller organisations: with under 100 staff (the overwhelming majority of outfits) there might not be enough overlap of affinity group interests to catalyse viable sub-group activity. It certainly can't be done without a supportive cul...

Recently I was told that Richard Olivier (son of renowned actor, Laurence) uses Shakespeare insights to coach leadership skills . It just occurred to me that other literary figures have much to teach business, too. I remember school studies on Chaucer's Wife of Bath . In her tale the queen famously tasked a knight with discovering what women want most in the world . The tale's answer, of course, is that women want to be in charge [of their husbands and lovers], to have the authority to make their own choices . Just like customers do. (It's this insight that's leading our emphasis upon customer managed relationships  rather than the more usual Customer Relationship Management.) There's a great insight here for how to treat customers. Marketing is not about bringing a product we've built to the market and persuading people to want it; it should be about discovering what the marketplace wants and needs - and feeding the results to those in the business who ...

How many companies pay an invoice, by electronic funds transfer, the day it's been approved for payment? How many companies encourage their employees to take 'thinking time?' How many companies have an informal rule that senior managers leave the building within minutes of the end of the official working day, and encourage staff to do the same, to counter the temptation to work around the clock? The client I'm working with this week does all these things, and very many more, because of a deeply held ethical commitment that emphasises the importance of people in the business (customers and suppliers as well as employees) instead of the pursuit of wealth at any cost.  How many companies have a sensitive alcohol policy? My client does not reimburse alcohol when entertaining business contacts; but, so as not to embarrass the guest by revealing that, if they take someone to dinner and the guest wants a glass of beer or wine with the meal, the host will settle the bill w...

About to embark on a new software development project I was talking last week with Barry, our genius programmer and head of development. He was glad to hear that we're once again starting a new code base. He explained that each time he starts over he does things a bit better than the last time: maybe the tools available have improved; or just simply he's found by trial and error the best way of doing things; or something he learned later down the track on the previous journey would have proved useful at the foundation stages and now he has chance to build that learning in... It's similar to the drive I took this morning to a client: first time I went, I had to pay close attention to the GPS. Next time it was easier. Today I could tackle the journey confidently, allowing for traffic (even if that did mean an 05:30 start!) There are lots of reasons for adopting what's called the "agile" method, moving forward in short sprints before huddling down and prepa...

I was travelling on public transport when I came across the first news of the Japanese Tsunami, via Twitter not the mainstream news media. Around a week later I saw this: NewEarthquake   Earthquakes Tsunamis     by MikeSchorah 6.0 earthquake, Babuyan Islands region, Philippines. Mar 20 4:26pm at epicenter (15m ago, 111km NE of Laoag, depth 37km). http://j.mp/hugbiE 1 5 minutes ago   Favorite   Undo Retweet   Reply Along with hundreds of others I did an immediate Retweet while the mainstream media is still focused on Libya and Japan with no mention at all of an event in the sea between the Philippines and Taiwan. Presumably it's not of much Western economic significance! Twitter is confirmed as a mainstream piece of Internet infrastructure and the US Library of Congress archives every single public Twitter message. Amazing. Get more like this

So, you've created your profile on LinkedIn , and you've built your network , and you have optimized your profile . Is that it? Can you ignore LinkedIn from now on? If you do, you'll get the results you deserve ;) No one has much time to spend on routine maintenance activities. But if you will invest just 15 minutes two or three times each week then you'll gradually discover a pay-off. How to spend the time? Deal with anything in your LinkedIn Inbox: that could be connection requests or direct messages from your connections about a variety of subjects ... If you're a senior executive then it's probably best to keep your network small , confined to people you have a close business relationship with; for all others, consider accepting all incoming connection requests as a matter of course - you can always remove the connection later if it's not working out for you. Several times each week try to reach out to add a couple of more connections to your netwo...

One of the issues many of us face in this age of multiple social networks lies in tying it all together. There are so many ways of self-publishing on the Internet that it's becoming necessary to provide directories and splash pages to try to simplify things.  About.Me is another opportunity to do this. And it's free of charge, at least for now. It's not obvious how this will all unfold ( .tel seemed like a great idea, but is probably more useful for businesses than for individuals, for example ). But you should grab your preferred URL to enhance your 'personal brand' before anyone else does! e.g. http://about.me/MikeSchorah  Apart from anything else, doing this will help your personal search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, pushing you higher up the Google list! It's such a simple service, basically a place-holder for you to enter your name and some brief bio information. Then you can link your about.me space to your presence on Twitter , Blogger , You...

So, you've created your profile on LinkedIn , and you've built your network , but how do you optimize your profile? Change the LinkedIn header from the default 'Job title at Company' format to reflect your core skills and interests - position yourself for the next  job rather than the one you currently have! And you have 120 characters available to shout out who you are, what you do, what your ideal client is, etc. Remember that your name, profile picture and this headline section will show up on whatever you do across LinkedIn;  Change your present position job Title field to reflect more of your core skills and interests rather than merely a generic job title such as 'Sales Director.' In the Summary section you have up to 2,000 characters to represent your skill set and achievements. Draft your entry first in MS Word and copy and paste into LinkedIn. That will help to spell check, and you might be able to pull through some bullet point formating also. Use...

Once you have completed your LinkedIn profile the next major step is to start to build a network of professional contacts. Remember, though, that the main value from LinkedIn comes when you build a network of people you have a genuine business relationship with, at present or in the past, rather than being 'socially promiscuous' in the way that networks like Facebook encourage. If you're a senior executive on LinkedIn it's not a good idea to accept random connection requests from people you've never worked with. They actually advise that it's all about the quality of your connections, not the quantity . So it's even a good idea regularly to trawl through your network to remove connections that are no longer relevant. (Though it's fair to say that others disagree with this advice and encourage random linking on the rather mercenary basis that you never know when someone might be useful to you in future!) But to build up your list, look for people in ...

Following yesterday's initial assessment of the recent release of LinkedIn News I promised a short introduction to LinkedIn in a mini-series over this week. LinkedIn is increasingly being used in preference to the traditional job-hunt process and for recruitment. For many professionals it is vital to have a rounded and credible LinkedIn profile. But build it up gradually over some weeks: a sudden flurry of activity might concern your present employer that you're looking for a move, and to outsiders looking on it might seem a bit desperate ;) LinkedIn is for professional relationships and I've recently reduced my connections by over 100 - it's not (like Facebook) a place to be electronically promiscuous with people you might have heard of once! So, register at www.LinkedIn.com and a complete profile requires you to fill out: Your current position Your two past positions Your education Profile summary Profile photo (a recent upgrade allows viewers to zoom in...

Almost every day some new feature gets added or tweaked at one or more of Twitter, Facebook, Google or one of the other major Web 2.0 properties. Regular users find that sometimes these changes are huge: significant rather than merely cosmetic. One of the larger changes came last week with the release of LinkedIn News. At present in the web world it's fashionable to talk of content being "curated," breathing ever-changing dynamism into a term dating from stuffy libraries and museums. LinkedIn News offers a new way of content curation: it's an attempt to filter the volume of daily generated news by the significance attributed by people I know in my network. This is a major step forward. LinkedIn hopes that it will increase its value, giving users more reasons to return and spend time in the network each day. For users, there's a stronger incentive to build a genuine network of business contacts with none of the promiscuity of the more casual Facebook "frie...

Sitting watching the unfolding news of catastrophic loss of life and property in Japan I am shocked like many others, feeling powerless to help. Then, though, I see @gustodeli tweeting about delivering lunch to a private jet sitting at the airport in Cheltenham for delivery to clients in Geneva. Their Twitter stream says they don't know who it's for this time, but last time it was Take That. Lunch delivered internationally by private jet seems wildly inappropriate in the light of the chaos and suffering in Japan. It seems even more inappropriate to Tweet about it!

On Wednesday I wrote a simple piece about taking control of your online identity . It followed on from stuff earlier in the week but I really didn't expect too much reaction as I dashed it off quickly before a very full day of intense meetings... However, I got a long and thoughtful email from one reader who asked for more. I just hope the lesson is not that I should rattle off posts without thinking too deeply in future! I got told, "...the first page of things that come up for me are a fair reflection on who I am and what I do so I shall keep working on getting the good stuff out there. The only problem I can forsee for myself is that people could start posting negative and detrimental articles and then I won't be able to do anything about it. What would be useful is a check list of things that we can all do to keep our public profiles up to date and secure..." The BBC News warns of cases where a person's reputation has been harmed by something they'd r...

A bit of light relief today: I came across a quirky news report that just made me laugh. According to the Arab Times the Kuwait Ministry of the Interior is encouraging all illegal residents to visit the department so that they can be fingerprinted. They will then be issued papers so that they can legally leave the country. Is it the language translation, or is there something genuinely odd or funny about this? It made me giggle as it sounded a bit like Alice in Wonderland logic.

I had several meetings yesterday and one group of people picked up on this week's blog posts from me: Monday we wrote about locational privacy with apps like Foursquare Tuesday we commented on the use of cell phone data to plot a person's movements on a map It's fair to say that reactions were mixed: One point of view couldn't really see the problem, and decided it's all going to happen anyway so why kick up a fuss? There's nothing you can do... Others took the extreme (often called ' Luddite ') view: I'll have nothing to do with this technology then... If they were at the extremes, the bulk of the group were somewhere in the middle, but expressing astonishment at what the technology is bringing about, seemingly with no forethought.  Here's the simple thought: don't be a Luddite; but don't fall into the other two camps, either! Rather, take responsibility, take control, for what you do and how you do it. Don't just broadcast in...

Following on from yesterday's post about privacy concerns around using location-based services (think Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, Google Buzz and a host of others)... A German politician, Malte Spitz, obtained six months' worth of data held by his cell phone carrier Deutsche Telekom and had it turned into an animation by German newspaper Zeit Online . If you don't speak German then the detail will be lost on you, but the point is conveyed by the animation: Click on the map image here and zoom in using the map controls to see really specific detail! Dynamic map e.g. Monday 31 August 2009 6 Incoming calls 21 Outgoing calls Duration 1h 16min 8s 34 Incoming SMS 29 Outgoing SMS Internet connection 21h 17min 25s What do you think? You can control how much you share with Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and similar. But you can't do anything about the cellphone tracking without leaving the phone at home.  Cellphone companies m...

I've resisted playing with the selection of location-aware apps until recently. But now some client needs push me towards them. Take, for example, Foursquare. It claims in excess of 7m users and is easy, even fun, to engage with: register at www.foursquare.com , or just download the app and register from there... They say, "Foursquare gives you & your friends new ways to explore your city. Earn points & unlock badges for discovering new things." It's bizarre how addictive it can be; and how weirdly rewarding it can feel to gain nothing tangible, just a few 'points,' for checking in to a venue or being told you've become the 'Mayor' of a place. It reminds me of how we were able to train our tiny children with a sticker on a chart for good behaviour! But, then, there are the concerns: by travelling around, adding places, correcting details, taking photos, writing tips ... we the users are populating what will become a really valuable da...

BBC News today is celebrating the rise in home working and global businesses apparently run by bright young things in pyjamas! The article points out that technology enables people to start up a business with few overheads and yet a global reach. "...people have realised that you don't really need offices - you just need talented people and thanks to technology you can connect people up." It's not all plain sailing because businesses find that it's sometimes hard to keep everyone on the team 'in the loop.' That just means you have to work harder at communication, perhaps running a daily newsletter or conference call. And being with other people is more stimulating, leading to better ideas. That's why, in Cheltenham, there are initiatives like #LaptopFriday and #cheltsocmedcafe  to get people out of their home and experiencing some of the serendipity of traditional water-cooler conversations. Of course, this blog post was written from the #Lapto...

Why bother? Some are shocked by the hints of  Runaway Jury  in real life after recent reports in the Wall Street Journal that " Facebook is increasingly being used in courts to decide who is—and who isn't—suitable to serve on a jury ." The article explains that TV viewing, hobbies, religious affiliation, photos and other clues as to a juror's values help lawyers decide which jurors they prefer to have hearing the case. But we shouldn't be surprised: after all, 'nothing' gets deleted once it's on the Internet. And a generation brought up from birth to assume that every grandma's handbag contains at least one mobile phone, and everyone  publishes photos and personal musings constantly finds nothing strange. Instead of fretting, take control: there's a growing industry in people advising others to become the " CEO of you " and that includes each of us learning to become our own Marketing Officer. Simply put, it's not enough now t...

Why buy a paper shredder to protect against identity theft when sites such as Facebook will share your info? I've already committed " Facebook suicide " - see even more The Huffington Post has reported that "Facebook will be moving forward with a controversial plan  to give third-party developers and external websites the ability to access users' home addresses and cellphone numbers in the face of criticism from privacy experts, users, and even congressmen." Facebook consistently erodes users' data privacy settings, for example by encouraging the sharing of limited information with friends, then changing privacy policy and settings to open up the information to a wider circle. I'm already hearing anecdotal evidence that users are disengaging with Facebook: absolute numbers of users continue to rise, but there's a trend against posting updates, just reading what others have written. Social networks encourage a 'virtuous circle' of a...

Would you send your customers to another company ? It was really nice to have a positive reaction to a recent client proposal; but better still was the conversation with the European Managing Director who gave me the feedback. He took time out to emphasise his company's values and their focus on serving  the customer base. He told me that he encourages his colleagues, especially in marketing and sales, to understand that the company is all about serving , to the extent that they encourage customers to go to a competitor if they can get better value elsewhere . In this way, he believes that his team will outperform other companies and give such great service  that customers keep coming back, and encourage others to become customers, too. With tens of thousands of B2B customers and a customer retention rate in excess of 95% his company is doing lots of things right and I applaud them! I'm very much looking forward to the continued engagement... Get more like this