Archive for the ‘Professional Connections’ Category

Universities Ripe to become Woodstocks of Education?

Friday, March 8th, 2013

Living in a decade where number of graduates graduating in a year might be more than the number of graduates ever graduated in the human history, time has come for Universities and Colleges to re-evaluate their role in the future of education & pursuit of knowledge.

Congrats on graduating. Sorry we cannot hire you!

Graduate Inflation!

Graduates are suffering from what I call “dual forces of inflation” - on one hand we have too many graduates and on the other hand value of graduation is dropping by mile a minute. Jobs based economy is being sidelined by creation & collaboration based flat work environments.

Access Knowledge is no longer the concern!

Access Knowledge is no longer the concern!

With Knowledge Democratization happening across the industrial nations, how can Universities reinvent their role and continue to be relevant?

 

Universities are ripe to become Woodstocks of Education.

 

This blog is inspired by Thomas Friedman’s article about Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in New York Times.

Harvard Professor Michael Sandel visits Korea after a ton of Koreans learning from his “Justice” course via their national television. Professor Sandel lectures in Korea infront of 14,000 people – an opportunity that only opened up because of remote access to his amazing material to thousands of Koreans.

After a sold out album, rock group U2 did their U2 360 Tour in all the major stadiums for two years for their fans who already enjoyed their music album.

How different is what Professor Sandel did to what U2 or any Music group does? Not a whole lot.

 

What do I mean by Woodstocks of Education?

  • Students could visit various Universities to refine their knowledge learned via remote sources. Universities will start to shift to the next stage of learning – refining, polishing, experimenting and boot camps. 
  • Student Qualifications to come to these events will be based on frequent demonstration of their knowledge via standardized tests that are common for the current systems. With this, focus in current institutions is moved from providing “access” to knowledge to what can be done with the learning.
  • Professors with best online courses will attract the most attention and will also attract the brightest of the brightest students. So, unlike a music rockstar visiting your home town, students visit the Professor’s affiliated University to have that rich and immersive interaction.
  • Currently Universities are offering networking and incubation opportunities on top of their existing programs. The focus and emphasis will start to shift towards these new models over time. For example, while incubation, acceleration are in a sense 21st century version of vocational training programs, these will get upgraded to become the main staple of their existence.

Biggest knock against MOOC is lack of social interactions, networking abilities, co-located learning & collaboration. With Universities refining their models to foster “educational festivals”, that concern might be easily addressed.

With all these potential changes, its hard to imagine if the practice of getting “graduation degree” will stay the same. Employers need to look for something else other than a degree to assess their entry level employee qualifications. Could Entrepreneurship or some refined form of that play a role or filtering mechanism in future?

- This blog is intended to be provocative, drive discussion, ideation and ultimately action!

- @Vsistla

 

Posted in College, Disruption, Disruptive Forces, Education, Information Age, MOOC, Online Learning, Over the top, Professional Connections, Remote Learning, School, Schools, Teach For America, Universities | No Comments »

Startup Accelerators: Re-evaluate Processes Around Mentors & Advisors along with Entrepreneurs!

Monday, November 19th, 2012

Genotypes of an organism are inherited instructions carried within the Organisms genetic Code. Where as Phenotypes of an organism are what is resulted from Organisms genes as well as the influence of environmental factors and the interactions between the two.

From Wikipedia -

The interaction between genotype and phenotype has often been conceptualized by the following relationship:

genotype (G) + environment (E) → phenotype (P)

A more nuanced version of the relationship is:

genotype (G) + environment (E) + genotype & environment interactions (GE) → phenotype (P)

 

In the world of Entrepreneurship, Accelerators, & Incubators, no matter how great the mentorship is, how great the ecosystem is, ultimate success of the startup still depends on the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurs ability to respond to the ecosystem. Accelerators only empower the right entrepreneur.

That’s conventional conclusion and thinking;

What’s missing in the above argument is the relevant “qualification” of the ecosystem. For example just because a mentor is great at what he does or has been a successful serial entrepreneur, doesn’t mean that the mentor can create right support for a specific entrepreneur;

Entrepreneur’s ability to learn, grow and get influenced has as much bearing on him as it is on the accelerator and its ecosystem. 

Most of the accelerators pick mentors and advisors from their connections and networks well before they even know the entrepreneurs, their startup concepts and their needs & strengths. While the new accelerator model (assuming the 1990s version is original/older version aka IdeaLabs, etc) is less than a decade old, there has not been enough progress with respect to mentors, advisors and ecosystem customization based on individual entrepreneurs and enterpreneur’s startup ideas. Some of these accelerators get away by saying that we are investing in the entrepreneur rather than their idea – while there is some validity in that argument but am sorry, “no cigar”!

Since 2011 and 2012 we are starting to see industry specific accelerators – for industry such as Health Care IT, Fashion Tech, FinTech, Entreprise, etc. While these might address some of the problems common in generalist accelerators (by bringing specific mentors in a particular industry or sector), they also bring their own set of challenges and problems.

Going back to mentors and advisors, best way to improve the accelerator model is to start focusing on mentors & advisors as well – not just on entrepreneurs.

Here are some recommendations -

  • Some Mentors and advisors should be changed for each semester based on the entrepreneurs, their backgrounds and their startup ideas.
  • Mentors and Advisors should be accountable for their contribution – not just at the equity/compensation level, but some open/independent review of their contribution to the ecosystem.
  • Mentors and Advisors cannot be part of the management or shareholders of the Accelerators – this creates a conflict of interest for the management to be critical of mentor’s performance/actual contribution.
  • Mentors/Advisors who are also investors also creates weird situations – for the entrepreneur who is getting mentorship and the management. This scenario needs to reviewed appropriately – on a case by case basis.

@Vsistla

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Posted in Accelerators, Advisor, BioMimicry, Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurship, Incubators, Influencer, Innovation, Professional Connections, Startup, Statistics, TechStars, Y Combinator | No Comments »

Linkedin Skill Endorsements Gone Awry? Initial Review & Recommendations!

Wednesday, October 10th, 2012

As many of the active LinkedIn users are aware, LinkedIn’s latest feature – social endorsement of “Skills & Expertise” – is in later stage of its beta release and growing like rapid fire in the past few weeks. What’s interesting is LinkedIn brought social validation by your network to this feature they started testing since Feb of 2012 – a social proof for your skills and expertise.

After studying this feature for a few days, I decided to do few social experiments & surveys and my past few weeks of results have been nothing short of eye openers – with respect to user behaviors. While my data set is only limited to my own network, I am quite certain these results would be very akin to majority of LinkedIn users.

While most people endorse as a social convention – “you scratch my back and I scratch your back” – very much similar to how most of us used LinkedIn Recommendations, unlike LinkedIn “Recommendations”, skill endorsements can be removed any time you want after you endorse.

Similar to tweenage kids, I am already seeing immature behavior – where people endorse skills and delete the endorsements if you don’t endorse them back or if you don’t endorse them as many as they endorsed you.

Also, from a sheer value standpoint, an individual’s recommendation for you will always be more valuable than that individual’s endorsement, even though in the long run, # of credible endorsements speak a lot about you than recommendations.

Here are some of my thoughts and conclusions around this social experiment -

  • Reciprocity seems like an unspoken rule – This seems to be an overwhelming expectation – with my own direct experience as well as with people I spoke with regarding endorsements. Times when people solicit you to endorse them in return for their endorsements and other times they straight up harras you. This is very much akin to some of the spammers in the world of Twitter – You follow me and I will follow you.
  • When it comes to Endorsements, huge egos are at play – I have purposely ignored to see what would happen if I didn’t “endorse back” someone who deserves some endorsements. To my surprise, their original endorsements have been removed after few days! This is a big shocker for me.
  • Mutual friends & partiality in endorsements don’t get along – When you rate two peers inconsistently on skills they both pride themselves (like endorse Product manager to only one even though both of them are equally good and skilled at Product management), you start a pissing contest – most of the time without any straight confrontation.
  • That’s not a skill I am proud off – re-endorse me! – Thanks to LinkedIn’s auto recommendation of skills based on your profile, most of the people I spoke to were unhappy about some of the skills that were automatically chosen for them. I heard one person contemplating to contact all the people who endorsed him on a particular skill to re-endorse for some other more relevant skill. Another wished he could change the skill text without losing the endorsements for that skill.
So, how can LinkedIn make these endorsements more credible and experience less controversial/painful? While it is too soon to conclude where the crowd sourced endorsements could go for LinkedIn, here are some recommendations -
  • Endorsements are not same as Follow! – People should not be endorsing others and then remove them the next day. If they are not sure about endorsing someone, they should not endorse to begin with.
  • If you insist on leaving “undo” feature, then at least insist on getting rational feedback on why someone wants to undo their endorsement just a few days after they endorsed that person.
  • For Credibility, lets focus on Quality than Quantity- LinkedIn can make these endorsements more credibility by offering rich data around individual endorsements and individual motives behind endorsements. Such as  -
    • Displaying # of endorsements given vs # of endorsements got will give you some understanding of the value of endorsements.
    • Publish like an Endorsement Gradient that is calculated based on – # of endorsements given by those who did not get an endorsement vs # of endorsements given by those who got an endorsement.
    • Maybe an infographic about who (as in relationship – professional or personal) actually endorsed to learn why they endorsed – if all your endorsements are coming from your family members or close friends who never worked with you, then we know how valuable your endorsements are. 
    • Percentile the endorsements by skill or overall – When you crowd source people to endorse, some kind of percentile for individual skill endorsements or total endorsements – based on industry, education qualification, # of years of experience, etc – would be very useful.
  • Educate your users that endorsements are not social convention! – This is very important. When someone on the street says hello to you, you say hello back to them – that is social convention. Endorsements should not be social convention. Period! Educate your users with proper “coach marks” and alerts.
As per LinkedIn users, to create more credibility for your endorsements, stick to following principles -
  • Tell your endorsors to only endorse if they feel strongly about it. You do the same.
  • Tell your endorsors that you will not be reciprocating them back. Reiterate that endorsements should not fit social convention. If they try to obligate you, be polite and say that you don’t know enough about them on that particular skill to endorse.

As per endorsing me, take a wild guess!

@Vsistla

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Posted in Anthropology, Attention, Crowd Sourcing, Customers, Endorsements, Follow, Gamification, Influencer, Innovation, Linkedin, Motivators, Professional Connections, Psychology, Relationships, Social Capital, social networks, sociology, Twitter, User Behavior Data, Wisdom of crowd | No Comments »

When it comes to Relationships, Twitter delivers more than LinkedIn!

Friday, May 4th, 2012

I love Linkedin – at least I used to ….

Image representing LinkedIn as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

Linkedin allowed me to “connect” with my professional relationships, keep in touch and engage. At least that was the promise when you connected with someone via Linedin.

In the past 9 years, LinkedIn’s value creation for “relationship” has only gone down.

Case In Point: In the past 1 month (March 29th to April 29th), I have received about 45 LinkedIn connection requests and 20 of them are from complete strangers I have never met. Out of these 20 strangers, I have accepted requests from 15 of them based on mutual backgrounds and potential value the relationship could generate in the long run.

Anytime I accept a LinkedIn request from complete strangers – who requested the connection with the reason we are on the same LinkedIn group or went to same college, etc – I send a follow on email to find out what evoked them to send me a connection request and if we could have a quick discovery call.

Out of the 15 emails (suggesting them for a discovery/”get to know” call) to these complete strangers who have connected with me via Linkedin – only 2 people have actually responded back to me. That’s less than %15 success rate.

Here’s another stat that drives this message home: My success rate (receiving back an acknowledgement) when I “congratulate” my LinkedIn contacts – when they make progress in their careers is less than 23% on average.

Yes, my experience doesn’t stand for a scientific survey but I feel the writing is on the wall!

On the other hand, lets look at social & personal broadcasting platform – Twitter!

Image representing Twitter as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

I have been able to engage meaningful conversations – DMs – via Twitter – even with people who are NOT connected with me via LinkedIn. Most of the DMs to my followers get answered. In the past 1 month, I have initiated DM conversations with 8 different people and ONLY 1 person didn’t respond back to me. That’s just less than 90% success rate.

 

To keep my relationships fresh, Twitter seem to work out better for me than LinkedIn. That maybe the case for other Linkedin users as well. Most of the time, my LinkedIn emails to people I have known for a long time(or for that matter to new people) don’t get answered.

Here is the bottomline: LinedIn can ignore Twitter at its own peril. Twitter is becoming a relationship platform that could ultimately threaten LinkedIn.

When a user signs up for LinkedIn, currently they have options to either create an account with their email ID or by using Facebook connect.

It is time LinkedIn allowed people to not only sign up with Twitter IDs but also accept LinkedIn requests via Twitter handles – not just email address.

LinkedIn Sign Up Using Facebook ....

If I further dissect LinkedIn and Twitter – both these platforms have distinct roles to play in the world of networking, conversations and relationships.

The biggest reason LinkedIn still “rule the roost” when it comes to relationships is because of the features such as resume like profiles, ability to offer a dynamic rolodex and so forth. If Twitter can address those deltas, Twitter could potentially threaten LinkedIn’s business – if not immediately, maybe in the long run.

Also, traditional recruiters and head hunters are still using Linkedin as their primary source of talent search, but with detailed Twitter user profile pages that addresses needs of recruiters and head hunters, the shift for Twitter from being a broadcast/conversational platform to be a broadcast/conversational/recruiting platform.

So, either LinkedIn could wait for the inevitability or maybe strike a deal with Twitter to integrate LinkedIn Profile pages within Twitter User Profile pages – this way, LinkedIn can preempt Twitter from creating their own resume like profile pages.

Here is my bottom line – my relationships via Twitter are looking more richer and active than via LinkedIn and I feel that’s a sign!

@Vsistla

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Posted in Constant Innovation, Innovation, Linkedin, Network, Professional Connections, Recruiting, Relationships, Social Capital, social networks, Talent | No Comments »