Education, at least higher education, is finally changing and moving forward. And like a jar of olives after you pull out the first one the rest come out faster and faster.

The exorbitant cost of a college education and the spiraling debt of new grads have led many to question the value of a college degree; what no one questions is the need for continual, ongoing education just to stay relevant.

The need to constantly adapt is the new reality for many workers, well beyond the information technology business. Car mechanics, librarians, doctors, Hollywood special effects designers — virtually everyone whose job is touched by computing — are being forced to find new, more efficient ways to learn as retooling becomes increasingly important not just to change careers, but simply to stay competitive on their chosen path.

The recognition that the game needs to change is being combined with an entrepreneurial spark to form new ventures that could make all the difference.

“Higher education will change; the system is unstable,” says Kevin Werbach, a Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor, who is teaching a MOOC on Coursera this summer. “It’s an industry that will be in severe turmoil in the next decade. There are so many schools in distress, and the student loan burden is [huge]. In that environment, online platforms like Coursera are an interesting opportunity.” (…) In April, Coursera announced it had secured $16 million in funding from two Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Udacity is also venture backed. MIT and Harvard contributed a combined $60 million to launch edX, which is overseen by a nonprofit, but program directors have said they plan to make the initiative self-supporting.

The new efforts dwarf the few classes that started being offered online about ten years ago. There are no actual course credits, but with major universities, such as Harvard and MIT jumping in things are getting interesting.

In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

Other startups are jumping in along with edX to offer Massive Open Online Courses, AKA, MOOCs, which are true game-changers.

In a new report, Moody’s Investor Service calls MOOCs a “pivotal development” that has the potential to revolutionize higher education. Questions remain whether these online courses can be profitable and whether traditional colleges will award credit for them. But if successful, MOOCs could lead to lower costs for families and access to higher-quality instruction for anyone in the world who has Internet access.

As to the grads, according to the media most of them want to be entrepreneurs or are still looking for riches on Wall Street, but not all. What other career path is attracting interest these days—would you believe farming?

For decades, the number of farmers has been shrinking as a share of the population, and agriculture has often been seen as a backbreaking profession with little prestige. But the last Agricultural Census in 2007 showed a 4 percent increase in the number of farms, the first increase since 1920, and some college graduates are joining in the return to the land. (…) “You don’t get into farming for the money. You do it for the love of the game.” –Calvin Kyrkostas, 25

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

If your business provides a service over the Internet what value do you place on customer service?

An article about Hyatt CEO Mark Hoplamazian’s approach to employees and customer service (shades of Tony Hsieh) as a non-product business got me thinking.

Internet companies aren’t known for great customer service—they’re known for not having any.

The only way to reach most of them is by email or their contact form.

Assuming you actually get a response, it’s most often a form note that sends you to Help; Facebook even claims people prefer that approach.

Mr. Wolens said that Facebook believes that its users prefer “self-remediation” — basically, online solutions they find without help — to dealing with Facebook employees.

Comments like this make me wonder if Internet companes have any understanding of humans at all.

Do they (you?) really believe that the majority of people having problems using a product/service/whatever-you-call-it like digging through crappy descriptions of problems that never quite address theirs?

Enterprise, the car rental company has done a lot of quantitative work on the effect of customer service based on a customer rating system that goes from one to five.

“In my discussion with Enterprise, they said that people who give a ‘five’ are three times more likely to return than those who give a ‘four,’” Hoplamazian noted. “And the people who give a ‘four’ are twice as likely [to come back] than [those who give lower numbers]. Below a ‘four,’ and you might as well forget it. The only thing that matters is customer satisfaction.”

I’ll bet similar stats hold true for Internet companies; not just for returning, but for recommending.

It is too-big-to-fail arrogance, such as you find at Facebook and Google, that result in no customer service.

And that attitude trickles down to the entrepreneurs who emulate them.

(My apologies for not posting yesterday.)

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Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

People are often faced with the quandary of deciding how honest they should be when responding to some version of the classic “does this outfit make me look fat” question.

This Rule serves as a good filter to help you decide how to respond

“Never confuse
telling people what you think
with telling them
what they want to hear.”

That doesn’t mean you should always provide the latter and not rock their/your boat.

Sometimes people really do want to know if the outfit makes them look fat.

The trick is to evaluate the situation in order to decide how to handle it.

Flickr image credit: istolethetv

Wally Bock writes one of the few blogs under the “leadership” banner that I like, mostly because he writes common sense, keeps it simple and (usually) sees leadership through a lens similar to my own.

In a recent post Wally writes about people.

People are emotional. Some economists write like they think it’s not so. Some philosophers think it’s bad. But it’s the way we are. Our emotions affect everything we do and every choice we make.

People are perceptive and insightful. We notice things and reach conclusions without the need for advanced programming.

People are creative. Human beings are natural idea generators. Just let us show up and watch us go.

People are both consistent and inconsistent. As a species we’re pretty predictable. Once we’re past young adulthood, our previous behavior is a good guide to our future behavior. But individually we’re a source of constant surprise.

People have knowledge. Knowledge is information plus context. On a good day, we can generate wisdom.

People have relationships. They are a source of strength and support and insight. They are also a source of biases.

People have lives. We have a life at work and a life at home and a host of other lives. They are all in play all the time.

That post reminded me of an ancient Cathy comic from the Eighties in which a computer salesman tells Cathy he knows hardware and software, but isn’t fluent in wetware.

Unfortunately, a lot of managers aren’t as fluent in wetware as they need to be to generate high levels of success for both their team and themselves.

For that matter, people in general aren’t always wetware aware, let alone fluent.

However, they seem to be both fluent and aware when it comes to meware.

The problem is that meware won’t raise productivity or drive innovation; it won’t produce responsible, well-rounded kids or create viable relationships.

When it comes to life, wetware is really all that matters, whether professionally or personally.

Flickr image credit: ThisParticularGreg

Today is Blog Acton Day.

Founded in 2007, Blog Action Day brings together bloggers from different countries, interests and languages to blog about one important global topic on the same day. Past topics have included water, climate change, poverty and food with thousands of blogs, big and small, taking part.

This year’s topic is The Power of We.

See stories from supporting organizations, such as Oxfam, HelpAge International, Greenpeace and others that highlight The Power of We and more through your favorite social media under #PowerOfWe, #BAD12 and #Blogactionday.

Just how powerful is WE?

Can you name one topic or task where I can do more than WE to accomplish the goal or at least move it forward?

But ME seems to be the daily focus.

ME tends to filter WE through personal ideology and opinions.

ME tends to join WE only when the ideology and opinions are in sync as opposed to working for a common good.

When I lived in San Francisco I volunteered for a decade on the Aids Walk fundraiser. I formed a WE team that included on guy who was an Evangelical Christian. He believed homosexuality was a sin, but saw a greater sin in leaving human beings to fend for themselves while suffering.

Think about it.

It takes a truly evil person to withhold help for no other reason than the needful are “different” or think differently from them.

Become a WE today.

Together WE can change not only the world, but our little corner of it, also.

Image credit: Blog Action Day

There is an Indian saying that a journey of 1000 miles starts with a single step, but as Anonymous reminds us, “If you don’t start you won’t arrive.”

You will travel further if you follow Alan McGinnis’ advice, “Focus on your potential instead of your limitations.”

Life is a long journey during which it is good to remember the words of Arthur Koestler, “Courage is to never let your actions be influenced by your fears.”

Years ago Dear Abby responded to a reader in her mid thirties who had come into enough money to follow a dream and become a doctor. Friends were discouraging her because by the time she finished her residency she would be in her mid-forties and she asked what Abby thought. I’ve never forgotten the answer; Abby said that while it was true she would be in her forties when she became a doctor in ten years she would be in her forties no matter what she did. A shorter version is offered by George Eliot said, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

In that same vein are the inspiring words of Mary Engelbreit, “If your ship hasn’t come in—swim out to it.”

Our lives and who we are reflect our experiences. Most people believe we each have only one life to live, but you can live many lives through books as Charles Scribner reminds us, “Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.”

In closing I offer the sage advice of two very different people, one from the world of music and the other from the world of sports.

Ray Charles said, “Don’t go backwards, you’ve already been there,” while Will Foley reminds us, “The world is full of cactus, but you don’t have to sit on them.”

Both are ideas I work hard to adhere to.

Image credit: luke_wes

Robert Tanner and his blog Management is a Journey are both pretty cool dudes and he did a superlative job narrating the October Leadership Development Carnival using a back to school theme. I thought it would make expanding reading on a Saturday and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

BACK TO SCHOOL

As a leader, is it important for your team to respect you or like you? The good news is that it is not an either/or decision. As Wally Bock of Three Star Leadership explains both Liking and Respect will happen if you concentrate on helping your team and team members succeed.

Shakespeare once said, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them.” What type of leader are you? This is the subject Neal Burgis, Ph.D. of Practical Solutions explores in his article, Characteristics of a Natural Leader.

If only those working with you could see how great your idea is! What’s the matter with them anyway? Many business leaders have felt this way a few times in their career. In his article, Why Can’t Those People See that this is a Great Idea, Kyle Dover of Anyone Can Lead provides tips to significantly increase the chance of getting other people to adopt your proposals.

What does it take to manage an organization’s culture? As S. Chris Edmonds of Driving Results Through Culture explains in his article, Feel How to Keep Culture on Track, it’s more art than science. It’s similar to effective auto racing. “It’s not about pure speed. It’s about feeling the car ‘in the moment,’ every moment.”

As a business leader, Do you Measure your Emotional Capital? This is critical as Anna Farmery of the Engaging Brand explains with her signature quote: ”People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did BUT people will never forget how you made them feel.”

What’s the insider secret for building a strong organization? It turns out that the “secret” is known information. Strong Organizational Foundations are Rooted in Timeless Truths as Chery Gegelman of Simply Understanding explains in her slideshow of leadership quotes.

Deadlines — competing, missed, impossible to meet, have to be met — they are a regular occurrence for leaders! What’s the solution for busy professionals? In his article, Meeting deadlines! Here is how to do it!, Bernd Geropp of More Leadership provides 10 tips for getting deadlines under control.

Sometimes all it takes is a reminder to put everything in its proper perspective. This holds true for leadership and organizational problems as well.  In his article, How You See Problems Helps You Solve Problems, Tim Milburn of Developing Lifelong Learners explains how problems provide an opportunity for leadership.

There’s a Rodney Dangerfield problem for some in the workplace. It seems they cannot get any respect! As Miki Saxon of MAPping Company Success explains getting respect is not that difficult.  You just need to put your Ducks in a Row: When It Comes to Respect You Get What You Give.

What does it take to achieve a high level of organizational performance? As Jim Taggart of Changing Winds explains in his article, Are You a Passionate Leader, it takes passion to propel an organization forward. “Having a burning passion is a requisite to instilling a sense of mission among one’s followers.”

Servant leaders focus on developing the talent of those they lead. It’s easier to work with those star performers, but how can leaders develop their poor performers?  In her article, A Performance Development Tool for Servant Leaders, Mary Ila Ward of Horizon Point Consulting provides a guide for starting the conversation with poor performers.

What’s the value of a referral? For leaders, a good referral can mean finding high performing talent to help the organization achieve its objectives. In her infographic article, It’s All About Who They Know, Meg Wheaton of Gagen MacDonald explains how leaders can use social media and other tools to find new talent and build a culture of collaboration and inclusion.

Now that we have been properly schooled on the practice of leadership, our next group of contributors will provide their insights on the art of leading transition.  Something all leaders must do themselves and help others to do as well!

TRANSITION

“Every year a stream of nameless, faceless executives withdraw from their offices and gather somewhere offsite as part of a long-standing corporate ritual called strategic planning.” How effective is this process in practice? David Burkus of LDRLB tackles these issues head-on in his article, Strategy is About Choice.

“For organizations to thrive in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, leaders have to learn how to build a culture of trust and openness.”  In his article, Four Strategies to Increase Organizational Trust and Transparency, Randy Conley of Leading with Trust shares tips for building a culture that will unleash creativity and innovation in organizations.

As Joel Garfinkle of Career Advancement Blog explains, for most people, changing careers is a process, not an overnight, snap decision. This process does not get easier with time. In his article — My Job Isn’t Satisfying: Changing Careers at 30, 40, or Even 50 — Joel provides tips to successfully make this transition.

When you care strongly about developing effective leaders, it’s frustrating to find out that support for leadership development and training is on life support in your organization! In A Strategic Story About Strategic Storytelling, Karin Hurt of Let’s Grow Leaders shares the approaches she used to revive a stalled leadership development project.

You’ve made the jump to management!  You’re no longer just an individual contributor responsible for your own work only.  You now are responsible for the work of your entire team. Now it’s starting to hit you!  What exactly are you supposed to do with these people? Dan McCarthy of Great Leadership has some help for you in his article 25 Tips for New Managers.

Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) is a management philosophy where leaders evaluate employees on results — not on their presence in the office. Is this new philosophy, where employees can independently manage their own time as long as the work gets done, viable for companies? Jennifer Miller of the People Equation provides insights in her article, 7 Considerations for Launching ROWE at Your Company.

“If you think you’re leading and no one is following, you’re really just taking a walk.” Jesse Lyn Stoner of Seapoint Center gives real world proof to this saying in her article, The Process is as Important as the Product: 7 Tips to Manage Both. She explains why creating a “critical mass” of employee support is critical to implementing any change.

“To lead for innovation, leaders need to become comfortable not having the right answers, and instead think about possibilities.” Linda Fisher Thornton of Leading in Context provides these and other insights in her article, Failure is Part of Innovation.

While transition is never easy, some aspects of leadership can be scary especially when leadership is exercised ineffectively. Our last contributors for this month discuss barriers to effective leadership.

SCARY SEASON

A wise grandmother often shared the following with her family: “What you believe about people is how you’ll treat them.”  Robyn McLeod of Thoughtful Leaders builds on her grandmother’s wisdom in her article Are your Beliefs Getting in the Way of Better Leadership? “As a leader, being aware of our beliefs and being flexible and open enough to shift our beliefs when necessary is a skill that pays off in many ways.”

Mention the word poison and you will get people’s attention! Poison brings harm and destruction. While the natural world has its sources, so too does the business world. Leaders can and do inflict poison on their work teams. The result — whether accidental or intentional — is the same: damaged and destroyed working relationships! In a post from my blog, Management is a Journey, I share Seven Ways to Poison Your Relationship with Your Employees.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho and Great Leadership

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Last week KG Charles-Harris provided an overview of Vator Splash; today he asks questions critical to every entrepreneurs success and sanity.

Am I becoming jaded?  Is there something I’m missing at conferences that others experience?

I recently attended Vator Splash in San Francisco, and unfortunately it was a disappointment.  Yet another startup conference where some high-powered, successful speaker repeats the “5 Steps To Success” or some other topic addressed in a very superficial or trite manner.

There is never serious discussion around failure or how to deal with it.

I made an informal survey at the conference by asking two questions of most people I met:

“Have you maxed out your credit cards to fund your startup?”

“Have you received VC or Angel financing that has enabled you to get rid of your debt?”

Being a social guy, I made the rounds and spoke to a lot of people.  Almost every entrepreneur I met had incurred significant debt to form the venture.  And almost no one had received VC or Angel funding.

This aligns with the huge number of fellow entrepreneurs I have gotten to know over the years.  Most have sacrificed greatly to see an idea or venture born.

Unfortunately I have never attended a conference that speaks to this topic – how does an entrepreneur get to the next step.

Most of these conferences seem to have a specific business model, i.e.,

• pick a successful entrepreneur as main speaker (usually a Stanford, Harvard or MIT graduate);
• present VC or Angel financing as the primary path to success;
• target people who didn’t attend any of the above mentioned institutions and make them believe that they can attain the same networks and capital as graduates from these institutions.

They sell the dream of VC funding without providing actual advice on how to

• penetrate the networks (let alone provide introductions);
• manage rejection;
• know when to give up before losing it all;
• manage personal finances, etc.

How useful are these conferences?  Where can the masses of entrepreneurs who don’t fit the golden mold receive practical advice?

We need more than these events offer – we need something that helps us create success and assists us when dealing with failure.

KG Charles-Harris is CEO of Emanio and a special contributor to MAPping Company Success.

If you are planning a startup with advertising as the main path to monetization you may want to think again.

This article recommends partnering with major brands as a way around the problem, but what it doesn’t mention is that the startups it cites are not B2C; they are B2B,  i.e., enterprise startups.

According to Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital, entrepreneurs are ignoring the potential $500 billion enterprise market in their effort to be the next Facebook, Zynga or Rovio.

“It’s shocking we don’t see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise. (…) In the last 10 years, there have been 56 IPOs in the enterprise space that have gotten north of a billion [dollars in market capitalization] and just 23 in consumer.”

Some say that young entrepreneurs don’t have the business experience to solve business problems, but that isn’t necessarily true; no more so than assuming someone with business experience can.

What’s needed is the talent to see what’s missing, but is rarely thought of that way.

Most of us move though our professional and personal life accepting what’s there, but sometimes we think…

• It would be better if…
• Why can’t I/we/they…
• I wish there was a product/service/way that…

Acting on thoughts like these is what differentiates entrepreneurs from the rest of us.

SUBMIT YOUR STORY
Be the Thursday feature – Entrepreneurs: [your company name]
Share the story of your startup today.
Send it along with your contact information and I’ll be in touch.
Questions? Email or call me at 360.335.8054 Pacific time.

stock.xchng image credit: spekulator

As an official digital dinosaur I never heard of Klout; now that I have I wish I could go back to my ignorance.

Watching stupidity unfold is never pleasant, but watching stupidity that has the power to destroy lives is much worse.

It started when I saw a recent article on TechCrunch, talking about a Salesforce.com job ad requiring a Klout score above 35.

I searched for more info and found what seems to be the earliest article from Wired back in April

Klout uses a proprietary algorithm to crunch your activities in social media, especially Twitter, to assign you a score.

The scores are calculated using variables that can include number of followers, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers, and the number of likes, retweets, and shares that your updates receive. High-scoring Klout users can qualify for Klout Perks, free goodies from companies hoping to garner some influential praise

Worse, employers are using them as a hiring make-or-break.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that [Sam] Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

I saw ridiculous job requirements in my 20 years as a headhunter and more since then, but to use a criteria that so easily manipulated is nuts.

There are four actions you can take to raise your score according to product director Chris Makarsky.

1. Tweet a lot more; this is strictly a quantity not quality thing, food porn works well.
2. Concentrate on one topic instead of spreading yourself to thin.
3. Develop relationships with high-Klout people who might respond to your tweets, propagate them, and extend your influence to new population groups.
4. Keep things upbeat. “We find that positive sentiment drives more action than negative.”

It works.

Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score.”

People are always looking for shortcuts to evaluate and rate the people they meet. I’m old enough to remember when the first question people asked upon meeting was “what’s your sign?”

With the rise of MySpace and Facebook it was “how many friends do you have;” then Twitter arrived and the questions was “how many followers.”

Now there’s Klout to promote arrogance or undermine confidence and accomplishments, damage people’s psyches, and give them yet another false yardstick that has nothing to do with skills, value, accomplishments or any of those old fashioned intangibles like loyalty, honesty, ethics, empathy, the list is endless.

But Klout doesn’t care.

Flickr image credit: seanrnicholson