The Competitive Advantage Of Letting Your Employees Leave at 5:30

I am and have always been a working mother. When I had my first job at a communications company I felt how many do. You have to give a 1000% and never wanted the fact that I had an 18 month yr old child to affect the perception of how hard i worked. To the point that while in the middle of a very stressful week with a client, as a co-ordinator, i was told that even though my daughter had a fever i was not allowed to go home (my only choice was to bring her in and put her on a mattress in a spare office - and by the way, i'm not kidding).

As you move up in your career you get braver. You realize that how much you work or when you work isn't and shouldn't be the marker of what makes you great at what you do.

It's why i love this article with Sheryl Sandberg about how she leaves every day at 5:30 to be with her kids but makes sure people see she is the last and first to email.

And it's funny bc my business partner and I had that exact conversation the other day. He said he likes to be the first in and the last out of the office -- and I laughed and said i like to be the last to email to which he laughed.

What does this all have to do with competitive advantage? The truth is, we all have different lives and different situations. Being flexible enough to allow people to live their lives well will make them not only want to work with you and more importantly on behalf of your brand.

In a market place where who you recruit and retain can make the difference between being just good or absolutely brilliant, it's time to rethink our traditional lenses and understand the competitive advantage of a truly flexible workplace.

(h/t to Katherine Emberly for the Sandberg article)

Innovate By Focusing In On What Makes You Great

Always innovating is a tough game. RIM more then anyone has had a tough go of it recently. Jon Evans has a piece in Techcrunch today that I really relate to. If you are from Canada, it's hard not to want to see RIM turn themselves around. There are a tonne of smart people at that company and they simply transformed the technology market place here at home.

But evans isn't optimistic. He talks about the inevitable demise of RIM. He thinks it's one of ability. They don't have the product development prowess of a Google or Apple in his mind and never will.

I just don't buy that.

I have friends who have gone to work for Google - they'd probably come and work for RIM. I know a huge amount of smart product people working in startups all over Canada -- they'd go work for RIM. Facebook bought Parakey -- many people say only to get Blake Ross as part of their team.

Ironically i wrote about RIM in the context of a post back in 2009, reinvent or die. Might be good to read that one again.

But reinvention won't happen by focusing on the competition. There is no light at the end of the "trying to be like Apple or Google tunnel".

Moreover, RIM definitely shouldn't waste its time focussing on why people AREN'T buying their products -- they need to start reframing their challenge by looking towards how to unlock their incredible potential just like Hermes did.

So my advice?

Innovate by focusing in on your amazing strengths and what has made you great.

And if this helps at all, just remember you still have an army of brand advocates sitting here waiting for you to succeed.

Chilling Real Time Decisions In A Real Time World

James Armstrong is live Tweeting the Tori Stafford murder trail and wrote a post called "Tweeting from the Rafferty Murder Trail" about his experience which is well worth a read.

I have to say, as a Mother of a 16 year old daughter, and a 3 year old and as someone who worked with the amazing Leslie Parrot, mother to Alison, this story has actually kept me up at night. I find myself conflicted as to what I want to know as a human being, what I should know as a parent and what I should just stop myself from reading.

Armstrong said this:

"Though Twitter has been used effectively to live-tweet elections, riots, and revolutions, to tweet a murder trial is different. The words ‘tweet,’ and ‘murder’ sound diametrically opposed – two things that at first glance, just feel wrong"

In a real time world, we are now in a situation of facing real time decisions. What is right to one person, is completely wrong for another.

For those who work as social strategists, they often tell clients to use common sense, but there is nothing common about any of this.

Armstrong says:

"But tweeting the trial, I believe, helps provide another layer to the coverage. It gives people who may not want to sit and watch a two-minute piece, complete with the editing and storytelling journalists take so much pride in, a chance to digest the story as it happens"

We call it the future of news, but really it's the future of trust because as it happens creates an entire new level that is required -- how we determine what is right and wrong, what the audience should know, wants to know and what role if any, that very audience plays in the building of it.

Training Hybrid Thinkers

Companies want training in all sorts of things. But what if instead of social media, digital marketing or project management training, you actually taught yourself to be a better problem solver? After all, 90% of what we all do every day would be THAT much better if we actually asked the right questions and deconstructed problems in a systematic way from various different angles.

That's why i heart this article by Co Design about the Girl Guides. My favourite part is about training hybrid thinkers...

Solving the ambiguous problems that plague our society, such as health care or access to clean water, will require working across multiple disciplines. Instilling the value of hybrid thinking--the mashing up of disparate disciplines--will ensure that we have leaders ready to tackle pressing issues.

I've always tried to build cultures of hybrid thinkers. It isn't about one school of thought, it isn't even that i think hybrid thinking is a school of thought in itself. It's about different ways of thinking and different thinkers coming together to solve complex problems.

And that's the key:

Complexity doesn't mean we have to individually get smarter, but we have to smartly bring collective experience to the problem solving Team.

Being a hybrid thinker and being open to hybrid thinking just makes it that much easier.

The University Of Me

Yesterday, Fred Wilson announced Union Square's investment in a new start up Code Academy. Cee got totally pumped and joined right away. A couple hours later she had been through the beginners and was wondering what the second language was that was required to go through the intermediate stage.

A couple hrs later, she was testing out her costume for Halloween. As part of it, she ended up with a harmonica (which she had never played) and with the help of Peter and the Web, she had learned Blowing in the Wind within a couple hours.

And it's not just cee. It's an entire generation of kids hacking education in a way that we could never have imagined it. They set themselves a learning goal, go to their devices and with a bunch of patience and a whole lotta discipline, they can get up to speed on the basics within hours.

It's the 'DIY Generation' welcoming us to the biggest campus on the planet, the "University of Me"

Brand Is In The Details: Ode To Steve Jobs

A commenter over at AVC this morning posted a great story from Vic Gundotra.  Net net, Jobs called Vic on a Sunday with this urgent issue:

"I've been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I'm not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn't have the right yellow gradient."

Jobs was one of the greatest markers in the world.  His Agency partner Lee Clow said it best:

"There isn't a single thing Apple does that isn't a message that confirms or reinforces how you feel about the company.  I often tell people that the best ad we ever did was the Apple Store.  We do great TV commercials, we do wonderful billboards, but you walk into an Apple store and you're now immersed in a brand that's going to change your life."

Jobs said that Apple stood for People with passion can change the world.  He executed to that vision in everything the company did - from products, to packaging, to the advertising, the website, the store - the vision was the culture at the core and everything became an expression of it.   Brilliant brands are in the details, and Steve Jobs was the master of all of them.

"… You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."  (Stanford University June 2005)

Social Opinion Vs. Public Opinion

With a Provincial election coming up, lots of people are watching social streams in order to gauge public opinion on a wide variety of subjects.  But similarly to Toronto's last municipal election, what the social opinion in our various networks happens to be and what the reality of how the majority of voters may act, may not in fact, be the same thing.

It's an important to remember as we collectively utilized social data and user comments to drive everything from product development to marketing approaches, that it is only a mere 10% to 15% that like to comment within the social sphere and that they do not necessarily represent the other 90%.

Social opinion does not automagically equal public opinion - and assuming that it is, may end up being a mistake.