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Global Talent
In a recent article in the NY Times, SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, speaks about reaching out for global talent in the software industry. In a short Q&A forum, he illustrates what it means to be a ‘global’ (vs. multi-national) company in terms of sourcing talent. It’s all about comparative advantage - some of the best innovation in the world in software comes from Silicon Valley, so you had better have an innovation strategy that involves being in Silicon Valley as a global software company.
Here are a few of the relevant Q&A points from the article - emphasis mine:
Q. Why did you necessarily have to globalize your work?
A. There really is no alternative, for two reasons. It’s foolish to believe today that the smartest people are in one nation. The second is sourcing, at least if you are a big company. If you are smaller, and have a team of 100 or 200 engineers you can stay in one country and try to attract the best guys. But if you are a big company, you need to tap into the global talent pool. In Germany, we now have this big public debate about there being a shortage of engineers in the country. Well, I don’t care, or at least not as the chief executive of SAP.
Q. How does the global division of labor work? For example, what stays in Germany?
A. If it comes to deep application integration, we go to Germany. It’s where we have many people with deep knowledge of finance, manufacturing, human relations — those kinds of things, and knowledge of those functions in specific industries, the domain specific knowledge. That kind of deep knowledge is essential to platform work, designing the basic architecture of the core product.
Q. How about Silicon Valley?
A. In Palo Alto, we leverage the kind of innovation and creativity that is in Silicon Valley. It’s a place where a lot of new companies and technologies pop up and you can more easily integrate those new things into your thinking and your products. A lot of the Internet work has been done there, the technologies that open our products to others.
Q. And India?
A. India is mixed. But we do a lot of implementation of the design work in India. Our intent was to go there for the large talent pool. But we’ve been in Bangalore for seven years and we’ve grown somewhat gradually there. You cannot go in and hire 2,000 in a year and believe they are going to be ready to develop high-quality integrated software applications.
Technorati Tags: e2.0, NGE, Talent
The Future of Work in NGEs
Manpower is doing some interesting and innovative things in the world of social media. This video from YouTube is a great example of Manpower extending its brand into the social media landscape. It also is a great representation of the future of work in Next Generation Enterprises. The video speaks for itself.
I also favorited some other short 15 second edgy social media ads from Manpower which are also interesting. You can find them here.
links for 2007-11-09
links for 2007-11-08
Social Media and the value of weak ties
Andrew McAfee recently published two great posts helping guide companies through the choices of applications available in the Enterprise 2.0 landscape.
In his most recent post, How to Hit the Enterprise 2.0 Bullseye, he provides an interesting framework for how to match the e2.0 task with the tool, whether it is a wiki, social network, blog, or other. It appears to be a very good framework, though I’m still digesting some of the component/task matches and may come back with comments.
In that post, and this previous post titled, The Ties that Find, Andy hits on a very interesting point, pulling from the work of Mark Granovetter, titled “The Strength of Weak Ties” to articulate the value of Social Networking Software (SNS) to those executives that don’t quite see how all of these connections matter.
The notion, as McAfee puts it, that those people connected to you by “weak ties” bridge networks (of other potentially valuable folks for certain situations) better than those (fewer) people connected to you by “strong ties”, makes a compelling case for the value of SNS. Andy does a great job articulating this point, so I will not try to repeat it here.
It’s a common source of debate among those of us using SNS services such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. about how many connections to add. Many people are trying to limit the number of connections they have in these ecosystems. McAfee and Granovetter seem to suggest the more the merrier, and more productive.
At our BSG Alliance Senior Executive Summit, where Clay Christensen spoke to our member customers, the topic of thinking about your product in terms of the “job it does for its customer” came up, as you’d naturally expect. We discussed the Blackberry as a product that does the job of making knowledge workers productive during short snippets of down time (such as during a presentation!).
I find that Facebook and Twitter in part do the job of keeping me aware in short snippets of downtime each day as to what my extended network of mostly ‘weak ties’ are doing (both small things and major life/career shifts). The job these SNS services are doing for me in part is to keep me connected and informed of the whereabouts and whatabouts of a substantially larger number people than I have ever been able to remain connected to in the past. These snippets get burned into my brain and my searchable SNS services for recall in an On Demand manner when required. Yes, it’s also entertaining.
This is what is enabled by digitizing the social graph as the Facebook team would put it. I cannot imagine a company that would not want its employees to grow their ability to link their weak ties together. The value of this type of social graphing, while difficult to quantify, seems enormous.
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