If I can take the liberty of assuming that both design and business consulting are “problem solving” approaches. I have a case to plead for the design approach to problem solving:
• It recognizes ambiguity and explores multiple incomplete solutions
• Proposed solutions change with the process, as exploring them uncovers relevant issues and reduces ambiguity
• It is a forward looking qualitative approach as against a quantitative data driven approach to problem solving (Quantitative data may be used to come up with proposed solutions, but not for critical decision making).

This is an attempt map the creative process to the business process of problem solving:

( This post was buried in my other website; since I merged both of them, it seemed a good idea to post it here.)

I came across a few rants about “Clay Shirky’s rant about women” . He needs more women to say “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” even if they have no experience in that work.
I will not go into the correctness or morality of that assertion, a lot of discussion has already taken place on that.

I want to touch upon a different slant of the same paradigm. When I came to study in the US, the first thing I realized was that we South Asians lack the skill of self-assertion. I used to joke with my American friends that once you touch an airplane, you can claim to be from the aerospace industry ! While us South Asians would even cast doubts on our hard skills, even if we had had them for years.

Looking at it from a recruiter’s perspective: they are faced by an information asymmetry of the bad lemon form. A typical resume/interviewee is expected to amp-up his/her achievements. So most of the stuff an interviewee puts out there would be given a hair-cut, by a certain BS factor, which might vary by interviewer. This puts someone who is shy by nature in a bad spot. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that you find a lot of South Asians in finance & operations careers after their MBA. Its easier to showcase quantifiable skills. We feel more secure in tangible territory.

My solution to this problem. Truth be told-
- lets get out of our comfort zone: Even if it is culturally unacceptable to go out there and sell ourselves, we have to find our own ways of doing it. If “I” have taken the decision to move to the US , I have to get used to use the word “I” more in a week than I would use it in a year back home.
- Be Findable : Its inevitable that people who are more google search friendly have a better chance of getting the phone call from Steve Jobs . But that does not mean we put out laundry lists of our work history everywhere. Tell a story that people want to hear. Dont spin , but know the right side of the coin to present .

Last week, IU’s New-Media expert Christian Briggs tried to enlighten me on the ontological and psychological aspects of “immediacy” & “Hyper- immediacy” but as you can make out from the big words it took me some time to come up to speed. The points he made were still confusingly fresh when I saw:

The video just hit he nail on the head. So I deduced my own layman definition of Immediacy & hyper-immediacy, for designers:

All interaction is though a medium. We seek the interactions to be immediate, for achieving this we try to reduce the need for a medium. The lesser the dependence on a medium – the more “immediate” is the interaction . Eventually the goal is to achieve hyper-immediate (no medium required) interaction.
What Zong is trying to do here is two fold:

• Reduce the number of steps involved ( one always remembers the phone number; a credit-card has to be found in the wallet at the other end of the room.)
• You no longer have to travel the psychological distance of giving out the credit card to the infinite web. ( I know, I know. There are issues with giving out the phone number too – but I hope you get the point of : medium, distance & immediacy.)

If you want an even simpler definition – My designer friend in Dubai always said “I design for my lazy self.”

Daily Need to prove my Sanity : I have unexpectedly become a social media misfit at a  traditional consumer marketing & life sciences powerhouse. As people say “destiny/god works in mysterious ways” I wouldn’t be where I am had it not been for the innocent concern of my Kelley classmates . Everyday I have to prove to them that my love for social media is not me falling for a fad. Had I been surrounded by believers somewhere in California I wouldn’t be as well versed in my field of choice.

Mid-western flexibility:  If you are passionate about something, Kelley will figure out a way to help you accomplish it. The  MBA program chair Prof. Phill Powell truly represents the flexible and down to earth nature of the faculty and staff at Kelley (Although he is a southerner, lets don’t go into the details here). His emotionally charged leadership style has been a steady source of inspiration for students in this tough job market.

Bloomington : Any one talking about Kelley cant leave Bloomington out; its a town which at first glance feels too small to fall in love with . But it turns out to be a city as liberal and diverse as San Fransisco, at Midwestern prices ( $$$) what more can a turban sporting impoverished MBA student ask for !

Team spirit – a cure for my bipolar disorder : If there is one thing that stands out for Kelley, its “Teamwork” which is an integral part of all activities here. When one is down and out the team doesn’t let it be so . In the same vein one is entrusted with responsibility towards the team. These are valuable relationship lessons that I don’t think I could get any place else.

Lastly the phenomenon called Prof. Wayne Winston : I am am a designer, with a serious aversion for Microsoft Excel . But the spreadsheet wizardry that he imparts, lets me boast my analytic skills without shame.

Go Hoosiers !

As usual, I was bragging about the power of online networks and recent emergence of “social answer engines” like Aardvark to one of my finance MBA friends ( u know, the ones who love Microsoft products,  have a faith in efficient markets but feel social media stinks as it doesn’t smell of future cash flows ). I will call her FinMBA from hereon.

FinMBA said, lets give it a try – being from Croatia, she wanted to figure out the best way send a ton of books she had bought here back home,in the cheapest way possible. Now, being a self proclaimed Aarvocate , I rushed to vark.com typed in the question & prayed to the network gods. This is what happened. ( p.s. the emails are in Croatian.)

So , what happened is:

1) Aardvark sent it to the person when seemed to answer the most questions about Croatia
2) it turns out that he is a family friend of my classmates, so he fwds the email to FinMBA’s husband
3) he Fwds it to FinMBA, along with a few laughs
( here is the text of the email translated in English
Croatian guy’s message to FinMBA’s husband: Hahahaha… look where this guy is asking this from…
FinMBA’s husband to FinMBA: ” Hehehe… I told Cacan (Croatian guy’s nickname) that this is our friend who is probably trying to do us a favour…   )

Frankly speaking she is the best person to answer this question – I mean only a Croatian living in america with a ton of books would know the cheapest way to send it accross !

(btw. i love aardvark , and I have a aardvark t-shirt to prove my love – will upload a pic )

Recently I sent out a single question survey to graduate students. The question was:

How would you like Recruiters to connect with you ?
1) LinkedIn
2) Facebook
3) Both
4) Others ( suggest)

Here are some simply obvious results from the survey.

70% of the students wanted recruiters to connect with them only on LinkedIn

btw. the most suggestions for other networks were for Twitter. I guess I should have included it as an option in the survey. One creative student suggested Carrier pigeons as another option, unfortunately I had to take him out of the data-set.

I still need to send this out to undergraduate students . Would the results be different for them ? Not very much, I assume.

Outlined below is a 5 step process to evaluate the communication needs of the company and how social media could change or improve the current paradigms. This process is from the perspective of an internal consultant, who has a sound understanding of the companies vision and strategy. (This is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome.)

1. Based on the vision and strategy, Identify key entities/groups that interact/or should interact with each other ( e.g. prospects, consumers, Sales force, Mkt , Competion, Regulators, Govt.)
2. Define the optimal mode of interaction between those entities (e.g. listening, responding, interaction, broadcast)
3. Identify a communication paradigm that best facilitates the interaction
   

   matching social tools to communication needs

4. Evaluate existing tools on the basis on these paradigms. ( the example below is an evaluation exercise for the career services department at a business school)
   

   Identifying communication needs and areas for improvement

5. Propose changes and new solutions or else congratulate the company on a comprehensive communication strategy!

Once again, this is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome!

Have you noticed the language being used on twitter ? Just have a look at random posts corporate executives, who presumably are using the most appropriate and decent form of Twitter-English ie. Twinglish :

jeffBooth “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world” – Jack Welch. New blog post on why I agree. http://tinyurl.com/cfha22
gweston: There so few companies we trust absolutely? I trust Costco, Southwest Discount Tire? Isn’t “Trust” the best strategy for all businesses?
Padmasree Good article, like the analysis. Prefer gender neutral terms NOT “top young guns and older bulls” Come on @vwadhwa http://j.mp/h2BDi

A few points to note:

• To the point- practical use of language
• No flowery intros. No “good news-bad news-good news” formatting
• Minor grammatical mistakes are OK !
• Bullet point talk is trendy

So here is my point, the 140 char limit is a cultural leveler. First language or not everyone has to fit their thoughts into 140 char. This makes internationals (Europeans, Chinese, Indians), who are in the habit of writing long-winded sentences – cut back . On the other hand it also prevents native English speakers come straight to the content. It does not give them a chance to begin with ” I like the work you have done here . Vere interesting, but can redo the whole thing because ……” . In Twinglish you would have to go  staright ” We will need to redo … because…”

This gives English an engineering approach . I think this is a trend for the better, but you might disagree.

With all the hullabaloo around Social media Marketing and its ROI. A facet of this paradigm shift in communication tools is being ignored. I am talking about microbloging tools for internal knowledge sharing, no not just twitter. In-fact not twitter at all.
The paradigm of communication, where “whats on ur mind” or “what are u working on” or “what do u need help with”, can be made self evident to a whole legion on individuals who are empathetic towards you, is simply amazing. (if your employees are not empathetic to each others needs, then you have a bigger problem at hand.)

Having worked in knowledge based industries like software development and Automotive design, I realize the importance of being able to ask for help passively and receive it at the right time. All those who have gone through the onerous process of post -project harvest meetings, must share my pain? You must have questioned the fact – will anyone ever be able to reach this document that I am creating ?. The motive behind these Knowledge management practices was noble. But was it accomplished ? Were we ever able to leverage the past experience of another employee sitting at another campus ?

This is where tools like Yammer, status.net (open source) , Identi.ca (based on status.net) come in the picture. Here are more if u want to explore. Say for instance, your organization is in a closed microbloging environment like Yammer , i.e. all ur yams (tweets) are only visible to people within your organization. Now you wanted to know if there is there is anyone in the organization who has implemented a open source CRM tool. Will you send out an email to everyone ? Will you rummage through a repository of harvested projects ? I would rather just Yam “hey, working on an open source CRM project. need help!” . And I guess within , even the largest of organizations- your degrees of separation from the right person would not b more than 2. ( yes I know I need to substantiate wild claims. But it seems sensible enough.)

To really substantiate these ideas I would love to talk to an organization that might have implemented internal micro-bloging tools. let me know if you know of one, either in the comments or @gagantweet (twitter).

The web has always been hailed as the great leveler, as it allows equal access to information. But information has greater relevance if available at the right place and the right time. Shortening this gap between information-need and answers is the goal of  search tools, which fall into the following categories:

Search Engines: It all started with Archie Veronica and Jughead in the pre-web days, reaching their present form in Google, Bing and ask. Their basic function being the ability to crawl, index and search the web. In other words a an “algorithm” decides what matches our queries and presents the results.

Decision engine (specialty search or activity based search): Although Bing would want to call itself a decision engine, the real decision engines are, specialty search sites like expedia, priceline or amazon. A user goes to these sites to to make a decision or perform a certain task. The UI is designed for specific interactions, as against a generic interaction paradigm in the case popular search engines.

Knowledge engines: Websites like Wolfram Alpha, can provide complex answers to knowledge based questions , instead of just links  to website.

Social engine / Help engine: Real time help engines like Vaark , malaho and Yahoo anwers take search to the next level. Instead of connecting people to information, they connect people with others who have knowledge about the subject. This is more true about serveries like aardVark which gather information on people’s expertise and learn with time.

This is not to say that the relevance of search engines is less, but now their role has been restricted to stuff that is not real time and information that we expect to be common enough to be documented somewhere. But as social engines learn and build on accumulated interactions, the paradigm for searching information would surely change.  People would have the choice to ask real people or ask a web repository.

Where would Wikipedia fit ? Would it be an answer engine or a social engine ?