1. The Business of Humor: I Can Has Cheezburger.
2. I know it sounds odd but this is a must read and surprisingly funny story about women and street harassment
3. Five Big Bookkeeping Tips
4. iPhone 5 shipping in September
5. TV shopping networks can teach you about making money
6. The Management Feedback Gap
7. Amazon bringing Kindle to 11000 libraries
8. Even with Verizon selling them, AT&T iPhone sales chugging right along
No matter how inane or frivolous your last tweet was, someone out there thinks it’s pretty important. It used to be that when a company wanted to get the pulse of “the man/woman on the street” they went to elaborate, expensive and time intensive lengths to do so. Well, thanks to the modern miracle of something called Sentiment Analysis, one man’s constant stream of trite, annoying and far too personal blathering is another man’s gold.
Sentiment Analysis, also known as the less confusing/more ominous sounding Data Mining, is defined as “the computational study of sentiments and opinions expressed in unstructured text documents”. In layman’s terms, companies take things like your tweets, Facebook posts, blogs and customer reviews and then change the way they do business to fit your mood. The best part of the whole thing? They don’t have to pay the social networker a dime. No focus groups, which means no moderator, no conference room and no free pizza and soda (my favorite part of the focus group experience.) Of course this isn’t a free ride, in order to wade through the mountains of text, and all those pesky 01011010 it cost money, but in the end it’s cheaper, faster and once again, no pizzas.
Of course there are some downsides to this 21st century tool. Matt Rhodes from www.freshnetworks.com compared old fashion human analysis with the seven leading automated social media monitoring tools (Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos). What he found was that when dealing with “facts of information” automated monitoring tools were as or more accurate than human analysis. But when it came to actually deciding if a comment was positive, negative or neutral the automated tools fall far behind. Rhodes points out that this is important to businesses because if you are reacting to and acting upon a large volume of negative comments that turn out to be positive (or vice versa) your entire operation can be compromised. Computers might be able to beat you at Jeopardy, but they still are having a problem deciding if you really loved that Nic Cage movie or you were in fact just being the snarky. And seeing that Twitter is about 95% snark, this is not a small problem.
Is this problem of perception a major stumbling block? If Mr. Rhodes is correct than yes, but with the way software and hardware are updated in the blink of an eye I am guessing this won’t be a problem for much longer. But for now you need to still be wary of any technology that claims to take away the need for at least some old fashion one on one human contact with consumers. Plus, I still want a shot at that sweet free pizza.
As a leader you want to be liked, or if you can make it happened…loved. If you can get and keep people on your side they tend to spend more time working and less time huddling in cubicles. quietly but passionately complaining about the boss. With this concept/desire in mind, the ever vigilant folks over at Glassdoor.com have just released a employee-generated report card for the CEO’s of the 12 largest tech companies. From Google’s much loved but soon to be ex-CEO Eric Schimidt (96%) to Microsoft’s not-so-adored Steve Ballmer (40%) the list gives us a decent snapshot of how these organizations are faring from the inside out. If your like me and you want to get a head start on next year’s Tech CEO Fantasy League draft, check out the entire list and anaysis at Glassdoor.com.
p.s. I am not sure there is an actual Fantasy League for CEOs, if there is please send me the link
Can you build a better boss? According to the brilliant minds at Google, you can. It’s odd because I personally thought that Apple would beat Google to the punch on this one (i.e. iBoss) I am sure as we speak, the big brains/egos down at 1 Infinite Loop are being told by their perfect boss to come up with the perfect boss. But I digress.
The New York Times’ Adam Bryant recently reported on Google’s Project Oxygen. Bryant explains that starting in 2009 Google “began analyzing performance reviews, feedback surveys and nominations for top-manager awards.” From this information “…they correlated phrases, words, praise and complaints” to come up with their Eight Habits of Highly Effective Google Managers.
Since Google has attempted to reinvent the wheel (and succeeded) over the past few years, you might be expecting some ground breaking and life changing stuff to be on this management list. Gems like “Take this green pill and you will become the world’s greatest leader” or “stop using Bing, it will kill you”. Sadly, this is not the case (I am not 100% sure about the Bing thing, but I am guessing you will be fine). Instead, the list is filled with common sense ideas such as:
1. Be a good coach
2. Empower your team and don’t micromanage
3. Express interests in team members success and personal well being
4. Don’t be a sissy: Be productive and results oriented
5. Be a good communicator and listen to your team
6. Help your employees with career development
7. Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team
Nothing earth shattering here, but after reading this list I bet you can find a few that you (or your boss) fail to do on a daily basis. And therein lies the rub: leaders today are ignoring the obvious.
After decades of convoluted leadership training, bosses and the bossed are confused and lost. Did we really need a detailed statistical study to tell us that it’s a swell idea to “be a good communicator and listen to your team”? I guess we do, because we are so bogged down by leadership mantras and how-to-lead books (type leadership books into Amazon and you get 57,602 results) that we don’t know which way is up.
The fine people at Google spent untold amounts of time to create a list that basically is telling us, “don’t be a jerk, don’t be stupid, and get your head out of your backside”. The sad part is that we needed them to do so.
What do you think? Did you need to be told how to lead? Or for that matter did you need to be called a sissy by a bunch of four-eyed geeks? (full disclosure, I am wearing thick glasses and writing a blog so…)
Take a look at the list, read Adam Bryant’s outstanding article, make up your own mind and please tell us what you think. We want to listen and we worry about your well being.
You can’t know everything. Omnipotence is better left to deities. The first step in global leadership is determining what you do not know. The second step is rectifying this gap.
Recently, Earnst and Young released a report that according to Kelly Dunst of Vadvert-UK outlines “practical techniques that business leaders can implement to capitalize on the valuable perspectives and diverse skills of their global workforce.” One of the big problems the survey found was that “3 out of 10 respondents say they have no representatives on their management team or board from outside their home country.” This lack of knowledge can lead to a lot of missed opportunities. To learn more about this problem and some of the solutions take a look at both the report and Kelly Dunst’s take on the whole situation.
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