I cannot imagine missing the Singularity Summit. It will take me 45 minutes to get there from my house (thanks to public trans).

October 13-14th, 2012 in San Francisco.

Put this in your stash — mp3s of brilliant people selling inspirational ideas. That’s a recording of every Singularity Summit from the beginning, in 2006. I remember sitting in the second row at that one. Frame-changing insights. Interspersed with a few odd balls.

Internet Time Alliance directors Jane Hart and Charles Jennings with new company car. Salisbury, Wiltshire, U.K.

I can see why Gina Bianchini resigned. This is not the deal we signed up for at all. From $0 to $50/month? I don’t think so.

This is the email I received today:

Hi Ning Network Creator!

As you may have already heard, we’re going to be making some big changes at Ning over the course of the next two months. We’ll be phasing out our free service so we can focus our attention on pleasing our most passionate and successful Network Creators – people like you. You can read more at http://about.ning.com/announcement

As members of the Strategic Relationships team, we wanted to send you a personal introduction and let you know that we’ll be here over the coming months to discuss these company changes with you and help you transition seamlessly into an offering that works for you and your Ning Network.

We realize that you’ll have a decision to make about how to proceed with your Ning Network and which pricing plan will work best for you, and we are here to help!

If you would like us to reach out to you to address any question you have, please take a quick minute to fill out our brief contact form. A member of the Strategic Relationships team will make sure to get in touch with you as soon as possible to discuss your options, answer your questions and help guide you in the right direction.

In order to help process requests as efficiently as possible, we ask that you please fill out this contact form no later than May 14, 2010. Click on the link at the bottom of this email to complete the form.

Thank you!

The Ning Strategic Relationships Team:

Charles Porch
Jonathan Hull
Peter Slutsky

* One-time annual pricing

Several large LMS companies added “informal learning” to their sales shticks this week. One says “All documents accessed can be tracked as informal learning events.” (Documents are events?) Another firm claims to have added a “social learning platform layer that enables customers to securely empower their employees to find, create and share knowledge assets and expertise with their colleagues as they leverage an extensive” online book collection.

Tony Karrer picked up some of the disconnects in a post entitled Social Learning Tools Should Not Be Separate from Enterprise 2.0. Read the comments to get the full flavor of the argument.

Xyleme‘s Dawn Poulos points out:

If we look beyond our training silos for just a bit, we’ll see that that big social implementations are actually taking place outside of the training department. These implementations span multiple business units, functions, geographies, etc., have huge user communities and encompass social learning activities such as employee on-boarding, internal collaboration and expertise location. Rarely are these initiatives driven by the training organization. So, it’s perplexing to see why training yet again wants to separate itself from the enterprise and use their own set of social tools. This only serves to marginalize the training department even further.

Dan Pontefract, over at TELUS, puts it succinctly:

This is why we need to federate the LMS into the ‘collaboration’ platform, be it Jive, SharePoint, Connections, Confluence, whatever. Once we do this, we can link in the formal content/registrations with the social connection side of the E2.0 platform. I don’t want the LMS as the place whereby social interaction takes place – that’s just ‘lipstick on a pig’.

One naive ID blogger praised informal learning and wrote “Here is one awesome presentation about this very type of learning and steps organizations can take to organize their informal learning.” Unfortunately, she points to Articulate’s witty April Fool’s Day spoof.

(It’s a joke.)

I’m delivering a presentation on The Cluetrain Manifesto at the Swiss eLearning Conference next week. I suggest LMS vendors catch the Cluetrain in time. Here’s how The Cluetrain Manifesto begins:

A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies.

These markets are conversations. Their members communicate in language that is natural, open, honest, direct, funny and often shocking. Whether explaining or complaining, joking or serious, the human voice is unmistakably genuine. It can’t be faked.

Most corporations, on the other hand, only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.

But learning to speak in a human voice is not some trick, nor will corporations convince us they are human with lip service about “listening to customers.” They will only sound human when they empower real human beings to speak on their behalf.

While many such people already work for companies today, most companies ignore their ability to deliver genuine knowledge, opting instead to crank out sterile happytalk that insults the intelligence of markets literally too smart to buy it.

Related:
Informal Snake Oil

What really is informal learning?

I belong to a site called WoT, for “Web of Trust.” Celebrating its 10th birthday, WoT has a significant following:

Number of rated sites: 26,776,620
New this month: 508,265
Number of dangerous sites: 3,017,017
Number of comments: 6,127,216

WoT warns you away from malicious sites.

I get no joy from hurting people, even those with larceny in their hearts. So if you’re tempted by the offer of a “free” book, be aware of WoT’s ratings for its source:

McKinsey Quarterly is a great online publication. Astute. And partly free.

This month McKinsey reveals the results of a global survey on building organizational capabilities.

Nearly 60 percent of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey¹ say that building organizational capabilities such as lean operations or project or talent management is a top-three priority for their companies. Yet only a third of companies actually focus their training programs on building the capability that adds the most value to their companies’ business performance.

We defined a capability as anything an organization does well that drives meaningful business results.

Further, some three-quarters of respondents don’t think their companies are good at building the capability that is most important.

So far, so good. Now, for the sand in the Vaseline,

Lack of alignment

Despite the importance of capability building on the strategic agenda, executives’ responses indicate they’re not very good at executing: only about a quarter think their companies’ training programs are “extremely” or “very effective” in preparing various employee groups to drive business performance or improve the overall performance of their companies (Exhibit 2).

Calling Bob Mager.* Why do the execs think a flaw in their culture is a training problem? You no more use training for culture change than you’d use Google to learn to swim.

What else goes wrong

Companies also struggle to measure the impact of training on business performance: 50 percent of respondents say their companies keep track of direct feedback, and at best 30 percent use any other kind of metric. In addition, a third of respondents don’t know the return on their companies’ training investment. Because companies don’t know the impact of training, they appear to set their agendas using different measures, including prioritizing by employee role, which may not actually result in the most impact to the bottom line.

This is piffle. If a company wants to know whether its training is effective, it needs to talk with a sample of employees to find out if the learning is showing up on the job. It should check with supervisors to find out if workers are performing better. Besides, business people bet on uncertainty all the time. What’s the value of a CEO brought in from the outside? Which ad dollars drive sales?
_______________________
* Mager famously asked, “Could he do it if you held a gun to his head?” If he could, you’ve got a motivation problem, not a training problem.

A friend gave my wife two $50 VISA debit cards from Walmart. Supposedly as good as cash, the cards are actually issued by General Electric Credit.

When we tried to buy $95 worth of electronics at Walmart in Mountain View this afternoon, the cashier said the cards were unreadable. Had we made purchases on them? No, we had not. Well, we couldn’t use them. We asked to her to call the store manager.

A flustered customer service rep arrived. She couldn’t find the manager. In time, she called in the card numbers on her cell and told us each card had a balance of $48.12. (GE charges monthly interest on these cards!) However, our cards were no good; perhaps we should call the bank.

We said we didn’t want to call a bank. Walmart sold the cards. They knew they were worth $96.24. Walmart could call the bank.

She said friends had warned never to buy these cards. The woman behind us in line said the same thing had happened to her but shehad just let it slide.

The customer service rep found a superior who said they could exchange the cards for Walmart Gift Cards. Okay. Twenty minutes later, maybe thirty, we received the gift cards. The superior told us “These Debit cards are a lot of trouble.”

Why, then, does Walmart continue to sell them?

Perhaps to get into the banking business through the back door. In mid-2007, MSNBC reported:

Wal-Mart, furthering a lucrative push to offer financial services to its customers, will sell prepaid Visa debit cards that would allow millions of low-income shoppers who don’t have bank accounts to keep up with an increasingly cashless society.

Wal-Mart is following other retailers who hope to tap into a large pool of consumers who deal mostly in cash, but want the convenience of plastic. As the world’s largest retailer, Wal-Mart would be able to reach an enormous number of those consumers.

Three months after dropping a bid for a bank license, the world’s largest retailer said Wednesday it will add hundreds of in-store centers to bundle the financial services it already offers, such as payroll check cashing and money transfers.

On the web, I found these complaints:

“I tried customer service to no avail. I cannot speak to a rep. Where is the $27.34. It says I will get charged if I speak to a real rep. I could not even find a way to do that.”

“Try GE MONEY BANK website and tells me to go to Walmart.com then walmart tells me to go to the company that issued the card. DO NOT BUY THE WAL-MART VISA GIFT CARD EVER.”

“When I checked the balance, it said $0.00. I was able to view past transactions and pending transactions online, but there were none, so I do not believe that I was given a used gift card.”

If this is representative, I hope these guys never get a banking license.

I took this shot of George Leonard at his home when we talked about informal learning several years ago. George died earlier this month. I went online and asked Google to find a photo to use in a memorial. I found several, none by me and none attributed to me.

One newspaper article stated: “The photograph of George used here was copied from the Web where it stated that there was no clear copyright or other source material provided.” I wrote the author of the piece, who promptly changed the copy to read “It has been brought to my attention that the photograph of George used here was taken by Jay Cross and is copyrighted by him.”

� All rights reserved

This is not a big deal (I’m hardly a professional photographer), but I wonder how common it is.

Ten years ago, the debate was about whether eLearning was better than face-to-face. As eLearning matured, we realized the answer is often a blend of both.

When I wrote Informal Learning, many readers argued that formal learning was superior to informal. In fact, all learning is part formal and part informal. What we shoot for is the best degree of formality in the given situation.

Today’s false dichotomy is social media. Should we allow Facebook, construct Wikis, and encourage Twittering at the office? Will employees fritter away their time? Will our secret sauce be spilled all over the internet? Will people watch porn at work?

Once more, we’re asking the wrong questions. It’s not “Should we or shouldn’t we?” It’s “How much?”

Social media is not either/or. It’s “some.” It’s already happening. Your employees do have smart phones, don’t they? And most have computers at home? This is not peek-a-boo; when you close your eyes, social networking doesn’t go away. Your employees, customers, and competitors are already involved.

Internet agility will separate the coming decade’s winners from the losers. That’s another dichotomy, but that’s the way it goes with life and death.

Yesterday I attended the Enterprise 2.0 conference, “the event that will make your company more agile.”

First up was a Google presentation about Wave. Bare-bones Wave is a snooze; I haven’t been able to see many benefits. But customized Wave looks like a winner and that’s how I think Wave will be deployed. SAP demo’d a business process management application with collaborative charting; prototyping with their “analysis gadget” looked slick. ThoughtWorks showed project task assignments; the individual tracking and comments reminded me of what I’d seen in Brainpark last month. Novell Pulse combined messaging and project management. All of these bolt onto Wave’s API. Wave enables collaboration. Some in the audience were skeptical.

Google said it plans to open-source most of the code. This happens through the Google Federation Protocol. From the Federation website:

Principles

Decisions are made in public: all protocol specification discussions are recorded in a public archive

Next up was a panel session entitled “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?,” hosted by Information Week’s David Berlind. The panel included representatives of MetLife, Alcatel-Lucent, Eli Lilly, EMC, Booz Allen Hamilton, Medtronic, and CSC. None of them thought Enterprise 2.0 was a crock. In fact, they were raving fans.

The panel addressed Enterprise 2.0′s crockiness along these dimensions:

Most of the discussion focused on workforce transformation. “We are shifting from waterfall design to agile development.” “We’re providing tools and technology to support change agents.” “This makes it easier for people to share and learn things.” It’s best when embedded in workstreams.

Booz is employing enterprise 2.0 to make business processes better, faster, and cheaper through bottom-up change. Others report cutting time-to-completion and speed-to-resolution. CSC has an Enterprise Social Collaboration Officer (who also runs KM.)

The Intellectual Property issue is the old trade-off of governance and democratization. The answer is to trust your employees. Workers have been able to betray secrets with email and phone; enterprise 2.0 is no worse threat.

The Religious Wars issue is recognizing that Enterprise 2.0 is a people endeavor, not an IT project.

Big benefits come from useful apps (like Excel Tips and Tricks), timeliness (realtime competitive information), and innovation (through crowd sourcing).

I mistakenly wandered into the keynote for VoiceCon, the co-located conference, where this character from Siemens was explaining their integration of social software and phone service. Translation: phone tries to make sense of Twitter messages. I tweet “Just arrived SFO,” and my phone resets itself to Pacific time. (Funny, I don’t have to do anything for my iPhone to switch time zones.)

More advanced: I tweet that I’m headed to lunch and my phone is automatically put in vibrate mode for the next hour.

Imagine the parody Doonebury could create around this one.

The expo was listless. People were gathering data sheets on SharePoint, Notes, and lots of undifferentiated collaboration tools.