HRpreneuring - Latest Comments

Re: The CAST (Cars – Armadillos – Social Media – Talent) of Social Media Characters – Part 2

jer979 — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:45:32 -0000

Agree that the social recruiting track is wide open. I saw last week that Accenture (as one example), plans to recruit 40% via social media. Solid post.

And, thank you for the shout out!

Re: Bullish on Brand

Glenn Raines — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 23:09:33 -0000

Great insight Sue in what is now evolving in this reset (not recovery) period.

I talk to a lot of folks, particularly those who recently acquired "career transition" status, who are going through their own version of the 12-step program towards realizing they must reset, because we're never going back "to the way things were."

I've witnessed a transformation in people when I ask them "why I should care about you?" Through their defense, they find their passion voice, partly from anger, partly from a real fear of the new "what's next." But in the end, I see they get a glimpse of their own unique "compelling and interesting" which ultimately shapes their own unique brand essence.

I'm optimistic about this reset that is making people move from entitlement to self reliance. From no longer being affected by change. But affecting change. The personal branding process is a great springboard to something much more human and significant. Cheers.

Re: Reflection on Words of Wisdom from the Social Recruiting Summit

Brian Weidner — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:38:35 -0000

Sue,

Nice video. I agree that social media can begin the conversation within the recruitment process.

The problem is finding the time to develop relationships with the wide variety of "potential" candidates. Most recruiters are too busy to invest the time.

Brian

Re: Making a Difference: Lessons from SHRM and Jack Welch

Ed Rankin — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:54:27 -0000

one of my favorite jack welch quotes..."i never fired anyone too soon".

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Steven Bonacorsi — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:36:06 -0000

I currently run a number of social network groups, blogs, etc... I have also led numerous training courses in Lean Six Sigma. One of the techniques I used to get students to return to class was to play short 3-5 min video clips. Everyone would be quiet so as avoid the hard looks of their peers, most were attentive, and soon, students would be looking forward to breaks and the next video. Back to social networks and the groups I have led, where I have some of the most successful groups on the internet with over 22M subscribers, how did I grow the groups so big, why do so many come back? Same concept I learned in the classroom, where I added video to the social networks, made them fun and appealing, and others come to watch and participate. Innovation does not just mean creating something new, but in applying something old in a new way that can create a new paradigm, change, emotion, change, that others want or need.

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Russ N. — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:22:45 -0000

As an IT person, I'm one of several working with our HR and Comms teams to get them more comfortable with the collaboration technologies available. Many people in both groups see the need to try new things, and several have taken up our grass-roots efforts to "open source" the intellectual property in the organization and make the means of getting to the content experts easier. We've been trying this for nearly three years and are just now getting significant traction - a fair amount has to do with having to do things different in a tricky economy.

Slowly but surely people are getting that good ideas can come from anywhere and we're working to challenge the idea that only a select (perhaps chosen) few innovators come up with the new, big idea. Even if the new, big idea is a tweak of something that's been done for years.

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Desmond Pieri — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 10:08:18 -0000

@MarkPalmer, at lunch today I plan to ask specifics about your comment, "introducing Twitter changed the way I blog, and changed the way I think about communication" Des

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Joseph Mello — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:44:20 -0000

The importance of, and in my experience, limitaitons of organizational culture cannot be stressed enough. Working for a leading health care firm, I have lately seen our staid, inflexible culture assaulted by several intrapreneurs. I am in a technical group that is attempting to lead change in some key areas that will change the relationship between our IT department and internal customers, and empower the organization by focusing technology on business goals, and not on the technology itself. I kept feelers out in some other departments and recently tied in our group to a small HR team that has an overlapping goal - to drive organizational excellence.

It takes concerted effort, initially at great cost, to drive cracks in a corporate culture and open up opportiunity for flexibility and collaboration (in our case). This plays off Hugh MacLeod’s idea of "initial resistance".

It is exciting to see the power that intrapreneurs have to challenge the status quo and start to gain their initial successes.

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Mark Palmer — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:42:55 -0000

As the CEO of a VC-backed company that was founded by innovative MIT computer scientists, and having been involved with dozens of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial enterprises, I struggle to choose one story for you. But my most recent experience holds perhaps the timeliest lesson - to look for new sources of innovation during the most challenging economic times. The story is about the communication innovation - specifically, about leveraging social media to revolutionize the way companies communicate with customers, prospects, press, and analysts.

It started 4 years ago when I started "experimenting" with a blog. In preceding years, one of my fellow execs and I had published over 50 articles in traditional print publications. I ran a division of a $1B public company, and they were looking for volunteers to experiment. I volunteered. The blog took off - it attracted over 40,000 unique visitors in the first year, which is about the size of many print publications in my market (electronic trading in financial services). The awareness of my division, began to eclipse the awareness of our parent company, even though we generated a tiny fraction of the company's total revenue.

Fast forward - 4 years later - I moved to my current company (StreamBase), and, in the first year, we have changed our entire approach to communication. We fired our PR agencies. We started a blog. And we’ve started to use Twitter.

The results? The communication innovation that social media affords has lead to some compelling quantitative results. Since beginning this transformation, we have simultaneously cut marketing spend in half and tripled our awareness, as measured by lead generation volume, cost per lead, press coverage, and so on). This was the purpose of rule #1 in a blog post I wrote recently called "26 Twitter Lessons for CEOs," which you can read here:

http://streambase.typepad.c...

I think many of the key tenets of intrapreneuring are illustrated in this story including:

- Allow innovative efforts to be independent (my old company let me blog without corporate shackles)
- A bias for action (I communicate what I want, when I want)
- Come to work willing to be fired (I went out on a limb with my opinions)
- Course correct quickly (introducing Twitter changed the way I blog, and changed the way I think about communication)

Mark Palmer, president and CEO, StreamBase

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Sue Marks — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 12:11:08 -0000

All great comments ... thanks! You are right, John, how did CBS fail to see opportunities CNN saw? How did GM miss the minivan? Why didn’t Borders Books produce amazon.com? and my favorite two: Why haven’t newspapers harnessed the internet ... still and why didn’t the large staffing companies invent RPO? So let's at least take this to the reasonable level at which HR can "invent" and "execute" better ways to ensure the organization meets its objectives. Bruce, kudus to you for the idea, the execution in pilot form and most importantly, the measurement! Track it all the way thru to store revenues, share, profitability, etc. Finally, Asheen, I LOVE your comment on either "nobody" or "everybody" likes your new idea. Which is one of the points Hugh makes ... ideas change things, people, circumstances, etc.

Any of you have specific requests for Hugh's note to you on your book? John, I have a couple I can think of for you!

Thanks for your comments and let's keep the dialogue going.

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Bruce Dodge — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 09:29:16 -0000

Talking about getting a huge ocean liner to make a turn, try selling that "development stuff" to some old time restaurant folks! The good news is they saw enough benefit in my idea to allow me to put together a targeted high potential manager group to allow us to provide some EI development for potential GMs and provide our company with a pool of candidates. Today we are having the fifth workshop with our first group and so far have promoted 5 of the 10 members. And now we are in the process of selecting the members for the second group. So while the idea was unique to the world, creating a sustainable program like this in a smaller restaurant company (we own 69 Applebee's) was, and so far its legs are growing.

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

John Sumser — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:42:15 -0000

You pose an interesting challenge, Sue. In order to be effective, HR is often in charge of maintaining the status quo. Conventional wisdom is the stock and trade of the industry. Real intrapreneurs in HR are rare indeed.

It's not at all clear to me that 'lots of little conversations' do, in fact, pave the way for innovation. My sense is that innovation very rarely happens within the confines of an established market leader. The blinders of conventional wisdom are so severe that most interesting innovations are delivered by upstarts. Currently, our culture is littered with the carcasses of incumbents who couldn't innovate.

IBM couldn't have started Google (nor Microsoft, for that matter). None of the big last generation players invented Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or ten thousand new enterprises.

New ideas are resisted for a variety of reasons. My good friends Claudia Faust and Alise Cortez are trying to make a company called "Improved Experience" gain some traction. The idea is to use survey tools to assess candidate experience on corporate employment websites. It's a good idea that I sunk $150K into about 7 years ago.

No one was interested back then because it was too early. Claudia and Alise are having somewhat better results than I did. A great idea at the wrong time is a particularly useless thing.

It's also worth pointing out that great ideas are the cheapest thing imaginable. While there is a massive surplus of great ideas, there is an enormous shortage of good execution.

Give me good execution over a great idea any day.

Re: Entrepreneurial Success Story Contest

Asheen — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:36:48 -0000

Having worked as the second employee of a successful biotech startup and picked up my MBA from the top Entrepreneurship school in the world (Sue, you know Babson well!), I thought I understood well what it takes.

But I've been running my own sustainable innovation consultancy for a year now, and it's been an eye-opening experience. Consulting practices are weird enterprises: easy to start with minimal capital expenditures, but (perhaps consequently) difficult to create and maintain competitive differentiation.

So here's what I've learned that I think is relevant and non-obvious: nobody, and I mean nobody, thinks your startup is a *good* idea. People either think it's a GREAT idea, can't fail, why didn't you start it six months ago?!, or that it's a terrible one, and here are a dozen reasons for your inevitable intrinsic failure.

The truth, of course, is that both groups are right. Entrepreneurship -- or intrapreneurship -- boils down to knowing when to sit down and listen, and when to stand up and speak. When you get the balance right, it's called leadership; when you're off, it's either arrogance or lack of vision. The trick is to find that balance!

Re: 20 Observations on Market Leadership in a Downturn

Joan von Sternberg — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:07:00 -0000

I loved # 20 - how true ...what is EQ, please?

Re: 20 Observations on Market Leadership in a Downturn

miltownkid — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:41:58 -0000

I think I liked #15 best:

"Fail early and often to succeed sooner."

I think more people need to understand this one. I always liked the quote "The road to success (well, ones worth talking about ;) ) is paved with failure."

Re: Get Your Head IN The Clouds: Technology Opportunities for HR in a New World of SaaS and Cloud Computing

Jonathan Goodman — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:16:41 -0000

Sue, this is a very thoughtful and well-reasoned post. Not surprisingly the recruitment-related vendors and practitioners have been leading the charge in cloud computing adoption and usage. Other than Workday, I wonder who you might point to as leading the charge in core HR. And do you see HR departments beginning to develop their own tools via platforms like Force.com or Zoho at least in the small to mid-market.

Re: An Economic Stimulus Package for HR Leaders

Dave Martin — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 09:27:11 -0000

Bravos, Sue. Well said.

Re: Embracing Technology Trends

Tony — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:37:37 -0000

Interesting take on things

Re: Musings on a few of my passions; HR, HR Professionals, Talent and Entrepreneurship

Gary Branger — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 11:26:03 -0000

The main point I take away from your post and comments you (and other entrepreneurs) have made is entrepreneurs not only share similar approaches to business endeavors, but an outlook on life.

This approach is characterized by an incessant belief everything is going to be great when you are focused on the right things and work hard enough. This is often regardless of present circumstances or what naysayers believe.

Realistic yes, but ultimately optimistic and a belief the world is abundance.

Re: Musings on a few of my passions; HR, HR Professionals, Talent and Entrepreneurship

miltownkid — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:04:01 -0000

:P Late night mistake... "I think too many people’s ..."

The correction will just make things look more active. :D

Re: Musings on a few of my passions; HR, HR Professionals, Talent and Entrepreneurship

miltownkid — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 08:02:10 -0000

"I’m convinced that what our organizations and our country need most today is an explosion of entrepreneurial behavior."

I agree 100% and the funny thing is, with all the downsizing and firing going on, all I can see is opportunity. I think too much people's entrepreneurial spark gets smothered out too early. The government is going to "fix" anything, the entrepreneurs are. :)

Re: Can I Do It In Three (3) … ?

miltownkid — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:31:37 -0000

Hello Sue Marks,

A trail of clicking and searching led me hear after seeing your name in the Twitterverse. Thought I would produce a comment since I took the time to read the post. :)

I'll share my thoughts of resolutions. I've never made them before 2009 (and I guess I'm keeping that trend up...) I always thought it silly to wait until the end of the year to make resolutions BUT this year was different. The events of my life last year led to me timing a new set of resolutions for the new year. When I was in the process of preparing my "plan" for '09, I ran into a blog post that said a personal manifesto was more likely to produce results that mere mention of resolutions. So '09 marks the first year (in a series of many I'm guessing) when I made a personal manifesto for the year. [Here are the details...]

I guess I'll also share... Some "contempt" I feel for the whole "corporate machine." IMHO the reason companies have trouble recruiting and keeping AWESOME "talent" is because it's mainly sheeple that last through a grueling 4 years+ of schooling and grooming for a corporate job...

OK. I'm all done now. :)

Re: Can I Do It In Three (3) … ?

Kris McDonald — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:02:47 -0000

Great post. Wishing you blog success!! I am *starting* on my resolutions today as well. :)