Greg Smith, The Secret of Viral, And The Chamber of Engagement

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Roan Yong

This article was published in Social Media Today on 18 March 2012 by the same author.

Check this out: Greg Smith, a vice president in Goldman Sach, posted the reason for quitting his job in the New York Times. And said that his former boss was at fault for the deteriorating corporate culture. Goldman, he said, cares more about profit than its customers.

Greg Smith stories went viral on the internet. And scores of career consultant throw their hat into the ring by offering opinions on career management. Did Greg Smith commit a career suicide? You bet. Whatever Greg Smith does in the future, it won’t be related to the banking industry. His banking career is over!

I totally agree with Amber Mac, a respectable career consultant, on why you and I shouldn’t follow Greg Smith’s example. Like Amber Mac said in the article, you should quit your job gracefully when you know it is over. And one way to do so, is to keep your (negative) opinion about the job to yourself. Just because you want to quit, it doesn’t mean you have to burn the bridge.

Since this blog isn’t about career management, I’d like to offer social business’ perspective to Greg Smith’s story. There are two thought bubbles that pop up in my head when I read the story: (1) Why did Greg Smith’s story go viral? What’s the secret sauce of viral stories?; (2) What should be the platform for real conversations between management and rank-and-file staff?

The Secret Sauce of Viral Stories

Greg Smith’s story is by no means unique. Watch the above video clip. And you would see another man, Joey DeFrancesco, who also quit his job publicly. And like Smith’s story, his story went viral in the internet. This begs the question: Why the seemingly ordinary stories of people lives can go viral?

The main reason is empathy. We can empathise with both stories because of the bigger picture. DeFrancesco quits because the unfair treatment that hotel employees usually receive. He becomes the voice of all hotel employees who silently suffers from the gross mistreatment. While Smith quits because the deteriorating corporate culture in Wall Street (read: greed).

Those reasons appeal to many people. And because we can relate to Smith’s story and DeFrancesco’s story, we feel the urge to like or to forward the story to our friend, colleagues, or family members. That’s how the story went viral.

So the secret sauce of viral story is the emotional hooks that the story has. Can you position the story to appeal to many people? Can you make people feel emotional through your story? If you can do that, then there is a high chance that your story will go viral.

Social Intranet is The Right Chamber for Employee Engagement

Greg Smith and Joey DeFrancesco wouldn’t be folk heroes if what they say doesn’t make any sense. Organisations need to do more about employee engagement than just conducting the infamous corporate climate survey.

It is unfortunate that Smith and DeFrancesco used the wrong media to tell their story. In the age of social intranet and social organisation, they could have expressed their displeasure within the corporate walls, i.e. via internal blogs, discussion forum or video repositories.

If they are brave enough to tell their opinion in social media, then surely they are brave enough to share it with all their colleagues. The management could then conduct closed-door honest conversation with the relevant people.

No matter how bitter they are, Smith and DeFrancesco should have given the management a chance to tell their side of the story. By going public, they are killing off the opportunity to do real dialogue between them and the management. The social intranet, not the social media, is the right chamber for engagement and conversation.

Arguably, a real dialogue is only made possible if the management doesn’t punish people for expressing their opinion in the social intranet. But at the very least – you, I, and other rank-and-file staff, should extend our hand and give the management an opportunity to prove that they care about employee satisfaction.

When all else fails, look for another job! Discreetly of course.

Comments? Do you agree with me?

Want to Uncover Linsanity? Use Big Data

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Roan Yong

Much has been written about the Harvard-graduate, Asian American, Knicks’ point guard, Jeremy Lin (a.k.a. Linsanity) and his sudden, spectacular rise from obscurity to stardom. Everybody, from the media to the bloggers, is captivated by his “linderella” story.

I think the main reason behind Linsation is that we all saw a piece of ourselves in Jeremy Lin. I mean, how many of us longed to be recognised in our work? How many of us are dying to be given that one opportunity to showcase our god-given talent?

All of us want to have our “Jeremy Lin” moment, i.e. the magical moment where all our hard work paid off. Alas we may not get our chances because of prejudice against our gender, race, or religion, or perhaps because of perceived lack of experience.

Frank Deford asked this question in Sports illustrated: how many “Jeremy Lins” out there who never got their chance? I asked the same question in my head. I think it is a sad fact and unfair to write people off without first, giving them the opportunity to shine.

I reckon millions of people around the world change their job, become “zombies” at work (translation: completely disengage with their work), or become depressed because they never got the chance to show what they are capable of.

Wouldn’t the world becomes a happier place to live and to work if everyone has their “Jeremy Lin” moment? I believe so. In fact, I would argue that to succeed in today’s economy, organisations have to uncover the invisible Jeremy Lins within their workforce, to improve productivity, increase innovations and retain talents.

Relying on the big data to uncover more Jeremy Lins

The key to uncover the hidden gems at the workplace is to rely less on instinct and more on numbers. Let’s face it, no one could tell in consistent manner, who would be the best man for the job / the task. We have cognitive bias such as the Halo effect that impair our judgment when comes to picking talents.

Fairness (or the perception of it) is another reason to use numbers to uncover talent and to assign tasks. People are more receptive when they are told that they don’t get the job because they are short of the necessary statistics, than because they are instinctively disliked by the management.

Believe it or not, numbers were used to predict Jeremy Lin’s rise. Ed Weiland, an amateur number cruncher, foresaw the incredible rise of Jeremy Lin. Amazingly, he even predicted that Lin would score less when Anthony Carmelo (the star player) returns to Knick’s lineup.

The technology to collect and analyse big data is already here. Web 2.0 enables us to track performance / work activities and to instantly number-crunch the data. This means we can derive a new perspective from the work that we do. For example, Linkedin offers InMaps that allows you to visualise the relationship among your communities.

Furthermore, more people like Ed Weiland, now can have opportunity to learn and can gain access to business intelligence software such as QlikView (free). This trends is going to further increase, thanks to the ubiquitous mobile platforms like iPad / iPhone, the cloud technology and the decreasing cost of the software over the years.

So for the sake of happiness, and for the sake of innovation and productivity (translation: profits), organisations have to use the big data to analyse the performance of their staff and to assign challenging work according to their best ability.

Only then we can have more Jeremy Lins and less disgruntled zombies at the workplace.

Thoughts? Comments?

P/S: I’m learning how to be a Chief Data Scientist, so that I could harness the power of big data. It’s time for you to learn business analytic too. There is a pent up demand for people with deep analytic skills.

My Life (1981 – now): A Review

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Roan Yong

Happy Water Dragon Lunar New Year! (Gong Xi Fa Cai!) With new year, comes new hopes and aspirations. So I thought I’ll do a review of my life thus far. This is my first time doing a life review.

What triggers me to do a life review? Well, time flies and life is short. So I need to examine whether I have been living the way I want it to be. It’s the right time for a review, because the year 2011 (metal rabbit lunar year) had been so special to me in many ways:

January 2011: I got married
April 2011: I got promoted (my first-ever promotion in a job)
July 2011: I hit the big 3-0 (I’m 30 years old)
September 2011: I traveled to central Europe for the first time. I had a super good time there.
November 2011: For the first time in my life, I spoke in front of an audience about something that I’m passionate about (no, it’s not directly related to my work).
December 2011: the biggest achievement in my life so far: I became a father.

Not bad eh? After all those achievements, you probably think that I’m contented and happy.

But I’m not…

Hold your judgment. I’m not a greedy ungrateful dude that you think I’m. I’m not contented because I miss my life, back in 1999. That’s when everything in my life went so well. I managed to prove people wrong. No one believed I could achieve my dreams. But I did it! I went to National University of Singapore, and I got a pretty girlfriend.

Ah, the sweet taste of victory. This movie clip pretty much described my feelings in 1999.

Oh gosh! Now I get it. I know the result of my life review now. Here it is:

My current life sucks

Yep, that’s true. My life sucks. Despite all my achievements, I don’t feel any glory like the one that I had in 1999. And my current life doesn’t lead me to shout: “I’m the king of the world!” (that’s how I felt back in 1999). I have nothing to shout about now. My life thus far has been average. Average in happiness and success. Simply average in every angle!

It’s not about being grateful for what I have (I’m grateful for everything that I have now). But it’s about being outstanding – not being average. It’s about wanting more and about shaping the world around me, the way I want it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Listen to Steve Jobs in the interview clip below, and you’ll see that I’m not so crazy after all.

I know I’m capable of achieving so much more. I believe in myself. I believe in my ability – because no one else will.

It’s 2012 (water dragon lunar year). And I have bigger dreams now. I won’t tell you what these dreams are, because according to Derek Sivers, I have to keep my goals to myself. But mark my words: I will make these dreams come true – just like I did in 1999. (I will “go get it. Period.”)

Using A.S.H.E.N to discover what you know (or lost)

Posted on July 7, 2009 by Roan Yong

Michael Jackson (MJ) is dead and the world wept for him. Some people claimed that there will never be another MJ. His talent in song writing and singing is exceptional and unique. As we lament the lost of a legend – a magnificently talented singer – we might also be affected by our reliable and talented colleagues or employees who hand-in their resignation letter.

Depending on the available budget and time, organisations often struggle to find a good replacement for their star employees. However beyond the constraint of limited organisation’s resource, more often than not, many employers are clueless in finding a good replacement for their leaving employee. Both the HR department and the immediate superior – the two groups of people who screen candidates – are often rely on job description, job requirement, and interview techniques.

While the above hiring mechanism may help in filtering out unsuitable and incompetent candidates, the tools are geared to discover the candidates’ skills, experience, and attitude – which do not add up to replace the lost knowledge assets. The knowledge that walks out the company door, due to staff attrition, needs to be replenished more effectively to prevent the deteriotation of corporate (or departmental) capability.

In this knowledge-age, organisations may led to believe that nobody is indispensable and talent is overrated. However, the impact of talent lost to the corporate competitive edge is real and can’t be underestimated. Unless the company has a robust succession planning in place, replacing a talent is always an opaque process. Even the mighty Apple, the producer of iPod and Mac, has problems to discover the value of Steve Jobs, their charismatic CEO. NASA lost its’ ability to send people to the moon because they unsuccessfully replace the old engineers with the new ones who have different types of knowledge assets.

A.S.H.E.N Framework

Dave Snowden, the Chief Scientist of Cognitive Edge, has proposed A.S.H.E.N – which stands for Artifacts, Skills, Heuristics, Experience, and Natural talent – framework to identify knowledge assets. Artifacts are things that produced by people, which include documents. Skills are expertness, practised ability. Heuristics are methods that people used to do work. Experience is an ability that is acquired through time. and Natural talent is an ability that is difficult to emulate.

With A.S.H.E.N model, organisations would be able to examine what their employees know, and to mitigate risks associated with the lost of knowledge assets. For example, an employer or a supervisor should find out from the employee who is leaving, the following items:

Artifacts. Where did he file his documents?, what types of documents did he create?
Skills. What are his skills?
Heuristics. How did he get things done?
Experience. What kind of prior experience he has that help him in his work? What sort of experience that he gained from the course of his employment?
Natural talent. What are the aspects of work that he excel in and noone can do a better job than him?

However, to minimise the impact of lost knowledge assets, the employer should attempt to transfer the knowledge in the leaving employee’s head. Transferring knowledge can be achieved through codification strategy – where the exiting employee documents what they know, personalisation strategy – where the leaving employee mentor / coach his successor, or both strategies.

Codification strategy is best used to transfer explicit knowledge – the artifacts, skills, and heuristics aspect of knowledge assets, while personalisation strategy used for transfering tacit knowledge – the experience aspect of knowledge assets. Unfortunately, there is no way to transfer the natural talent aspect of knowledge assets.

Knowledge Sharing Lessons from a Technician

Posted on June 8, 2009 by Roan Yong

My department, Data and Knowledge Management Department (DKMD), has recently concluded a corporate-wide event: The Knowledge Management (KM) Awareness Week 2009. It was held from 29 May 2009 to 5 June 2009, featuring 3 KM experts: Dr. Alton Chua of NTU, Mr. Kan Siew Ning of Singapore Police Force, and Mr. Ng Kok Chuan, the current president of Information and Knowledge Management Society (iKMS).

When I was busy preparing for the third talk, a complete stranger – a technician who was on duty to manage Auditorium and was not part of our company – shared his knowledge on improving lights and audio in our vodcast. Here is an account of what happened and the take-away from the incident.

On 3 June 2009, my colleague, Jaslyn, and I were rehearsing for the KM Awareness Week event the next day at the Auditorium. A technician from One Marina Pte Ltd was helping us to setup the projector and the speaker. When we tested the CEO vodcast on his thoughts about knowledge sharing, the technician suddenly pointed out that the image in the video was ‘soft’ – a term used to indicate that the image is too dark – and the sound was not clear.

Remembering that one should give constructive criticism instead of just criticism, I asked the technician on how to improve the video and the sound in that video. To my surprise, he told us that he used to work for a broadcasting company, and he shared that to improve the video, I could use a reflective material – such as paper or Aluminum foil – to direct the room’s light to highlight the speakers’ face, and to improve the audio, I should have placed the voice recorder closer to the speakers’ mouth. The technician shared his knowledge further by demonstrating the effect of light reflection, using a paper, on Jaslyn’s face.

I was delighted, not because he told me the image and sound quality weren’t good, but because he shared a constructive criticism – a practical knowledge on how to improve things. I had received similar feedbacks on the video’s image and audio before, but without knowledge on how to improve them.

I believe that people appreciates knowledge sharing in general, but some of us – like me – dislike negative feedbacks or comments without improvement suggestions. The issue is less on the ability to receive criticism, but rather on having the knowledge to improve our work. We, at the receiving end of criticism – or knowledge sharing for some of us, usually know that certain aspect of our work can be improved, but more often than not, we don’t know how to improve our work.

Another interesting aspect of the knowledge transfer that happened between the technician and me was the fact that we barely know each other and he shared his expertise for free. In today’s commercialized world, most of us tend to believe that we ought to know and reward the person, who has the knowledge that we wanted, before that person shares his or her knowledge. But, the story above tells us otherwise. Knowledge sharing can happens between strangers and without extrinsic rewards – such as money, performance ratings.

A decision making model for pursuing further studies.

Posted on August 2, 2008 by Roan Yong

According to Business Times, 31 July 08. Over 50% of workers would like to pursue further studies. And a third have doubts about the career they are in. While three-fifths of Singaporeans are content with their career choice, 11% are convinced they are in the wrong field. But financial considerations are a deterrent to switching careers, while time and family also rank highly.

The above article seems to suggest that Singaporeans want to pursue further study to change career, and they are held back by financial considerations, time and family. Although obtaining higher education might seems logical move, one need to exercise caution. There is no guarantee that extra credentials will mean automatic landing on to the career of your choice. Many companies will look at factors outside academic achievement, such as work experience and interpersonal skills.

However, pursuing further studies could means extra salaries in your long term career prospects. According to Donald Asher, author of Graduate Admissions Essays, higher education has a strong positive impact on income, and strong negative impact on unemployment. For example, the unemployment rate for P.hD in 2000 in USA was 0.8%. Graduate school is probably the second best investment you’ll ever make in your life. (Note: In my opinion the first best investment you’ll ever make in your life is buying a house).

It is clear that extra credentials is one of the milestone of your life, and it needs careful considerations. To ensure that you make the correct decision before you embark on further studies, you can use Decision matrix tool. In order to use this tools, you need to determine weightage factors:

5 = Strongly agree; 4 = Agree; 3 = Neutral; 2 = Disagree; 1 = Strongly disagree

And list some pros and cons of pursuing further studies:

Pros = Better career prospects; Higher income; More knowledge

Cons = High cost; Demand on Time

The next step is to construct a table such that each factor is cross-checked against the others. For example: Career Prospect (A) against Knowledge (B) –> A is rated at 4, while B is rated 2. This means that I value A more than B. See below for details:

	Career Prospect (A)	Knowledge (B)	High Education Cost (C)	Less Time for social life (D)	Total
Career Prospect (A)	-	A4, B2	A4, C2	A4, D2	A = 12
Knowledge (B)		-	B3, C3	B2, D4	B = 7
High Education Cost (C)			-	C2, D4	C = 7
Less Time for social life (D)				-	D = 10

Total is computed for each criteria. For examples: A4 + A4 + A4 = 12; B2 + B3 + B2 = 7

The above table implies that I value career prospect more than other factors. Since career prospect is one of the pros of pursuing further studies, then I should pursue further study.

Singapore Job Market Q2 08

Posted on August 1, 2008 by Roan Yong

Taken From Business Times, 1 August 08.

The jobless rate stood at a seasonally adjusted 2.3 percent in June, up from 1.7 percent in December last year and 2 percent in March this year, according to preliminary estimates by the Ministry of Manpower.

Employment rose by 70,600 in the second quarter, lower than the 73,200 gained in Q1 but higher than the 64,400 new jobs in Q2 last year. The increase in employment in Q2 was largely due to a record jump in jobs created in the booming construction sector. The sector saw employment rising by 22,100 in Q2.

Taken from Today, 1 August 08.

Recruiters in certain sectors – such as transport, food and beverages (F&B) and business services – expect to keep hiring in the months to come, according to business sentiment surveys by the Economic Development Board (EDB). and Singstat. This could be in anticipation of the Formula One event next month.

The MOM report noted the rise in unemployment reflected “the increase in job seekers as this year’s batch of tertiary graduates entered the labour market and students looked for work during mid-year vacation”.

Those in manufacturing sector face less rosy prospects ahead. In particular, the chemicals sector – which has the weakest business outlook according the EDB report – has seen some plastics firms retrench workers this year.

On the flip side, there employers who find it difficult to fill certain vacancies. For example: employers in IT sector.

Lesson Learned: My advise for job seekers in Singapore

Look for jobs in IT for highest pay package.
If you just want to get jobs, look for jobs in services industry like hotel, transport, restaurants. Caution: F&B industry paid lower than other industry.
Avoid manufacturing jobs, especially those that deals with chemical.
If you already working, hold on to your jobs until market recovers.