E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

The Business Value of Serendipity: Improving Your Presentation Skills

You gotta love serendipity, specially, when it is facilitated serendipity coming through to you, as if by magic, through your multiple daily interactions with your social networks, whether internal or external. Earlier on today, I had plans to put together a blog post on the topic of finding experts, referencing this superb piece at WSJ’s “Who Knows What?“; however, those plans have now been parked for the day thanks to a wonderful internal status update shared by my fellow IBM colleague James Taylor with a clear reminder on something I’m going to find incredibly helpful next week when I embark on a presentation frenzy at conference events and customer meetings. Yes, of course, I am talking about learning plenty more about killer presentation skills.

That’s right! Earlier on today, my good friend James shared a couple of updates (One of them external) talking about a “superb tech talk” on “presentation skills” where he shared an Intranet link to some really fascinating resources around Presentation Zen. I am not sure whether the slides would be available out there for public consumption or not, but in one of them there was a link to one of those short YouTube video clips that one cannot but help find it incredibly resourceful in trying to figure out further how to fine tune your own presentation skills. So, seeing how much I’m going to need it for the next few days, I thought I would go ahead and share a couple of resources on this very same topic, and I will leave that other blog entry on “Finding Experts” for a later time this week.

If you have got a bit over 7 minutes to spare, I can surely encourage you all to have a look into this YouTube video under the title “Killer Presentations Skills“, which, funny enough, is nearly 5 years old!, but still wonderfully accurate on the state of not just “Death by PowerPoint“, but overall presentation skills in general. In it, you will see J. Douglas Jefferys spending a few minutes covering some of the Dos and Don’ts of delivering presentations successfully, whether at conference events, or with your customers. And although yours truly has been doing quite a few of those events already, over the course of the years, there is always plenty of room to learn more! If anything, it is always a learning experience! I don’t think I have ever delivered the same presentation with the same speech twice; ever. They always evolve. You evolve. You learn new things you then try to incorporate along the way, hoping to eventually improve your ability to deliver the right messages accordingly to the right audience(s).

Even for seasoned speakers it would still be a rather helpful resource on improving their own skills in this area. So when I bumped into the video clip I just couldn’t help, but watching it through in its entirety and, must confess, that not only did I find it incredibly funny and entertaining, which is perhaps one of the most effective and powerful methods of delivering a speech successfully to whatever the audience, even smaller ones!, touching base on the whole concept of having fun@work, but I learned a couple of tricks as well! Thus I thought I would share the embedded code over here of the video, so you, too, would have an opportunity to play it along, and perhaps it may help you learn new hints and tips for that upcoming presentation you may not have even started just yet! Here it is:

I am sure you may have found it quite an interesting watch-through, worth while sharing across as well. Here is a shorter video clip from JD along those very same lines. But the beauty of this serendipitous knowledge re-discovery is that it surely helps open up the door to re-findability. Yes, that’s right, while I was watching the video I couldn’t stop thinking about that brilliant presentation that Alexei Kapterev put together over 4 years ago! under the rather suggestive title “Death by PowerPoint (and how to fight it)“, which is probably one of those fundamental bibles that one needs to always keep at hand whenever you are working on a new presentation. Thus why not add it over here as well, right?, and share it across as a good reminder for us all:

Not too bad for this blog post to have originated as an accidental discovery, right? And then people keep telling me that they don’t see the business value of using Status Updates, Activity Streams, Microblogging, Microsharing or whatever other fancy term to go along with one of my favourite quotes as of late: “narrate your work; it will make you smarter. And everyone else, too!“

What are your favourite tips on improving your own presentation skills? The Dos and Don’ts that have worked with you very well over the course of time? I will let you know about a couple of mine: 1. Prepare, prepare and prepare some more, in advance, for relevancy and 2. Be yourself! Be spontaneous, don’t pretend to be who you are not. It won’t work neither for you nor your audience! :-)

So, what else? What are your best tips? Let’s hear, errr, I mean, read them in the comments …

KM, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business: One and The Same

Another week at work gone by in a flash, another business trip to visit one of our customers in mainland Spain done and dealt with and back to the grid again, till the next upcoming trip happening in the next few days… That seems to be the story of my life lately, which means that blog posts are getting more and more scattered around, so I better do something about it, right?, before you all go away and don’t come back again! So here I am again, thanks for sticking around and for all of the insightful comments shared across so far! It’s greatly appreciated, as usual. Seriously, I need to figure out a way I can do moblogging effectively, since I know the business travelling is not going to ease up any time soon. Any ideas out there folks would want to share across? Thanks!!

Anyway, that’s not the topic of this blog entry for today, although I suspect I will be covering it at some point in time. I actually wanted to share with you folks a reflection of something I have been hinting already over here in this blog for a while now, as well as in some of my twitterings, and which, as time goes forward, is starting to become a dangerous reality. For a good number of years you have probably heard me state how Enterprise 2.0 (Now morphed into Social Business) has started already to follow the same path that traditional Knowledge Management did back in the day. To the point where I have been mentioning how some of the key aspects from both Enterprise 2.0 and KM are, essentially, one and the same! Including making some of the very same mistakes KM went through back in the day. And that’s when it gets tricky, because, if you ask knowledge workers out there nowadays, their thoughts and opinions of traditional KM are no longer that positive anymore. Actually, quite the opposite! For a good number of years, KM has been enjoying, unjustly to be honest, a rather negative reputation, even more prevalent with the emergence of social computing within the Enterprise.

And now am I stating they are both one and the same, because they seem to be following a very similar path, only with 15 years, or more, in between one and the other? Really? Well, probably so! If you ask KMers about Social Computing, Social Networking or Enterprise 2.0 they would probably tell you how uncomfortable they all feel about that unstructured chaos of data that these social tools seem to foster more and more by the day. If you flip the coin and you ask social software advocates about KM they all freak out at the whole concept of attempting to manage (your) knowledge, stating, very vehemently, how you can never manage, nor even attempt to, one’s own knowledge. It’s just an impossible task to achieve.

Well, they all bring up very good points; they are both quite right, too! Of course, there are plenty of good things, and not so good things, for both Enterprise 2.0 and KM alike; yet, they share lots of commonalities that we seem to keep ignoring time and time again, to the point where I am starting to feel like we haven’t learned much in the last 15 years of what went wrong with KM and we are bound to make the very same mistakes, as we did back then, with Enterprise 2.0, now Social Business (Yes, I know, I still distinguish, very clearly, between one and the other). If you don’t believe me, have a look and check out this recent presentation that one of my all time favourite, the always insightful and KM blogger extraordinaire, David Gurteen (A good friend and long time KM mentor, too!) put together under “Don’t Do KM!“.

But, hang on in there for a minute; before you actually go ahead and do it, let me point you as well to a recent blog post that he put together under the title “Knowledge, Awareness and Understanding“, which surely highlights some of the main key issues behind traditional KM, just as much as Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business today. I am pretty sure that, after you have read that article, you will be agreeing with me how close both Enterprise 2.0 and KM have always been and how we seem to have entered that dangerous road that I referenced above already. In fact, it’s a bit too scary to see how similar things have evolved in between all of those years!

Ok, let’s move on. Let’s see what I mean with both of those concepts walking hand in hand and try to help us identify those areas where we need to be extra careful. David’s presentation will work wonders for us in this particular case. He starts by saying something we are all rather familiar with: “Most KM Projects Fail!” (Does it ring a bell for E2.0 as well?); then from there onwards, he comes to share across four different KM related questions that are exactly the same ones that we have seen being proposed for E2.0 as well all over the place. To name:

1. “What are the business problems we are trying to solve?
   
2. How do we ensure support from senior management and how do we sustain that support?
3. How do we engage the people in our organisation?
4. How do we clearly demonstrate success?“

Too close for comfort, don’t you think? Let’s keep going. Not going to spoil the rest of the presentation, but his overview of how little thinking is taking place at the moment in general is very much the same scenario / background from when KM first came about, back in the day. There is just one slide in there on the whole concept of “Best Practices“, for instance, that demolishes the entire concept altogether, along with it! And I can surely see me reusing it time and time again! Just as much as thought provoking as these other two quotes from that same deck:

• ““People will not share their knowledge” is NOT a business issue
• “Implementing a knowledge sharing system” is NOT a business outcome”

Replace “Knowledge Sharing System” with “Enterprise 2.0″ and we are even getting closer by the minute, don’t you think? Well, the follow up slides from those quotes certainly put it together nicely on what are business outcomes and what not, also very much applicable to E2.0 and, yet again, we are falling under the same trap! But it gets better and closer home, as you flip further through the charts…

Like, for instance, the set of slides on the topic of Motivation and Rewards, for instance. Once again, prepare to read about some interesting insights on what most businesses are thinking nowadays in terms of those two concepts and what KM attempted to do, back in the day, at some point in time. Very thought-provoking!

Probably just as much as the overall final conclusion of that superb presentation where David quotes one, in my opinion, of the KM fathers that pretty much nails it down on thinking of KM and Enterprise 2.0 (And Social Business for that matter!) as one and the same. Of course, I am talking about Bob Buckman who once said: “Knowledge Sharing is your job. Do it!” and David kindly adds on to that final slide as well with “As a reward you may keep your job“.

And there you have it. If you thought that Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business do not have much to do with traditional Knowledge Management, after going through David’s excellent presentation, I guess we will have to think about it once again, because, in my opinion, it surely has. In fact, if folks have stated how Enterprise 2.0 is the father of Social Business I would venture to say that KM is the father and grandfather of E2.0 and Social Business, respectively. And that’s a good thing, for certain, as we get to close the loop successfully, as long we move further on and don’t make the very same mistakes as we did back then. Once again…

Google Me! Your New Business Card

Over at Harvard Business Review, Susy Jackson published, just recently, one of those articles you know it fits quite nicely with the current times we are living in, specially, if, over the last few years, you have been living your work life online, and still do today. She basically shares some interesting insights on how little most of us, knowledge (Web) workers, seem to depend nowadays on traditional business cards to keep in touch. Yes, the paper based ones! To the point where for a good number of us they may all seem to be rather antiquated and obsolete and do present some awkward moments whenever someone hands one over to you. Well, to me, it’s quite the opposite. Nearly five years ago, I decided to ditch traditional business cards and, instead, present my most revolutionary one… The one that, 5 years later, is still very much en vogue: Google Me!

I still get a chuckle or two whenever I am meeting new people and by the time our conversations are over and we all need to go back, everyone else is busy exchanging business cards and whenever they ask me for mine, I keep telling them: Google Me! That’s my business card. Actually, that’s my living and dynamic business card. It keeps evolving, growing, maturing over time and in multiple ways, whether you are searching for Luis Suarez (Or Luis Suarez IBM), Luis, Suarez, or elsua. All of them will present you with my credentials within the first Top 3 results (At least, at the time I am publishing this entry…). It even lists my Google Profile.

“We can’t escape our online identities [...] You are what you blog, so live with it“, as my good friend Susan Scrupski shared across a few years back and still amazingly accurate. However, it hasn’t always been like that. I still remember that painful experience, a while ago, where I lost my Google Juice and it took me plenty of time and good effort to get it back! Or how, just recently, and not sure why just yet, perhaps due to my lack of activity on that long hiatus I went through with my own blogging, I lost that Google Juice again vanishing completely into thin air. You start blogging again on a rather regular basis, and start engaging on a number of social networking sites and your Google mojo is back! As if by magic! Which is not the same I could say about other options out there, by the way…

The thing is that nowadays, everyone seems to be raving about their QR Codes and everything, as the coolest thing ever! And I still keep using, and relying, quite heavily on Bump, if anything other than Google Me!. However, while I keep thinking whether it makes sense to jump into the QR Code bandwagon, or not, I just can’t help pondering about one of Susy’s remarks on that HBR article:

“All of these methods allow people to keep in touch. But your preferred method says something about who you are, as much as saying it with funky fonts or trim sizes“

Perhaps I was never meant to go with business cards. As a starting point, I never had a business card during the 14 years I have been working at IBM (Just think of the thousands of trees one gets to save over the course of time! Ha! That is another advantage out there for you!) … and I am still planning on not getting any. I love the idea of having a poken, I still have it and all, my panda bear one, but unless other folks have it it loses its brilliance. I am not too sure just yet about the QR Code, would need to do some further thinking on it over the next few weeks, while I probably have to, finally, come to terms with the fact that I am a social online animal and would rather prefer not to have scattered around, all over the place, such information, if I can avoid it, and, instead, have it always available to me. And others. After all, isn’t that one of the main pillars behind building your own personal brand online, i.e. create, grow and mature your own voice and opinions on the topics you are rather passionate about?

What do you think? Are you sticking around with your paper based business cards, or rather your online social presence, or have you started already thinking about your QR Code? I am not too sure myself just yet, but it looks like I may be sticking around with my online social presence, since it seems that’s the easiest and, most effective way, so far, for people out there to find me. And probably to find you, too!