The What Goes Around Blog

Google Mania

I spent Tuesday at the HRTech Europe Spring warm up event in London. In the time I had at the event I heard four people talk, here’s a brief summary.

I enjoyed listening to Mark Martin, Group HRD for Direct Line, anyone who prefaces his talk with ‘I could be mad, I could be right.’ is usually worth a listen. Mark went on to talk about how the transparency being driven by technology highlights the gap between what people say and do like never before. He also talked about how the user adoption of (HR) technology is much more important than its capability, yet a lot of vendors still sell on that capability, wise up HR!

Jason Averbook, Chief Business Innovation Officer from Appirio followed on and delivered his piece with humour, despite a somewhat reluctant crowd. He talked about self reliance being the new self service, the importance of being able to visualise (big) data and another thumbs up for user adoption, and how important it is for the user to feel they’re getting something useful back.

Next up was Caitlin Hogan, People Analyst from Google. This is where things started to get a little weird for me, as after telling us that Google has People Operations – that’s what other companies call HR, a lot of what followed was prefaced with little Google Badges (my choice of term), as if somehow putting the word Google on the front of stuff makes it like, waaaay cool. So we learned that people who work at Google are in fact called Googlers. If they are older, they are called Greyglers, and the gay community at Google call themselves, yep, you guessed it, Gayglers.

We learned that Google has an annual employee, sorry, Googler survey, in order to learn what is ‘top of mind’ for Googlers (actually, Caitlin had reverted to using the term employees by now but hey, I’m living the Google dream so don’t try and stop me). They call this survey the GoogleGeist. Pretty much every company I know has an employee survey (yawn), but stick a cool name on it and kaboom – it becomes double interesting. And pardon me – but if Google is so cool, can’t they find a way to check what is ‘top of mind’ among the Googulation (OK now I’m making these up myself) more than once a year?

Google does all kinds of cool stuff using Googalgorithms and the like in order to mine the data in the kajillion CVS they get from aspiring Googlers each year. They sift through all this stuff trying to find people with the right cultural fit. Now – I could be wrong here, but I reckon if you preface all the longer words in your CV with Google – you’ll sail right on in. In addition – they use the same maths and technology to search externally available CVs too. They do this to try and seek out aspiring Googlers who don’t even know that’s what they aspire too. Joking apart – I think that is quite an interesting thing to do, although how effective this is in increasing diversity as Caitlin suggested, I’m not sure.

We then moved on through what effective managerial behaviour in Google looks like. It’s basically the same as everywhere else (caring, coaching, productive, communicative, good at making up Googlewords etc), as is what makes a crap manager. For example, at Google, managers struggle when they demand authority and respect rather than earn it. Hold the front page.

I wonder if GoogleThink is becoming the new Kool Aid? This was one of the oddest, and for the most part, unrevealing talks I’ve heard in a long while, yet because it was Google – boy did it seem to go down well. I’m guessing that by now their global CV harvesting machine has rejected me, I’ll live with that.

Lunch was yummy and after that John Sumser took to the stage and blew me away. I’m still processing the crazy stuff he shared with us and I will write a piece about his talk, titled ‘Where do Ideas Come From?’ soon.

There are two streams on Wednesday’s agenda, which sadly I can’t make. Based on John’s talk today and based on a great TEDx talk I’ve seen by by Felix Wetzel, I’d go to the one they are both in. Whichever you choose to attend, have fun.

Creative Leadership – Memorative Art

My latest trip to the USA was great fun. I met a lot of friends, saw some fantastic sights and did some really interesting work. All these things are memorable, and is there something that really anchored the trip in my mind?

Maybe it was that I happened to be in Chicago at the same time the Art Institute was showing an exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work? I’m a huge admirer of Picasso. I find his work often moves me to tears, it’s incredibly powerful stuff. Bold, abstract, conventional, unconventional, prolific. The exhibition in Chicago is a remarkable walk through the life of Picasso. You get to see aspects of every kind of art he produced and although the exhibition contains mainly lesser known pieces, its breadth and depth is outstanding. The exhibition also referenced a piece of public art I was previously unaware of.

Picasso donated this untitled sculpture to the city of Chicago in 1967 without ever explaining what the sculpture was intended to represent. I got talking to a woman at the exhibition who told me most people think it represents a horse. She also explained where the statue is located so I headed off to take a look. Checking in at 50 feet tall and weighing over 160 tons, it is huge, quite a sight to behold. You can walk right around it and I did, stopping here to appreciate its beauty from another angle.

It is this image which now evokes memories of all the other interesting and exciting experiences I had in Chicago.

This visual, artistic experience led me to think that often when we endure a presentation – there are lots of words on the screen. This creates a disconnect between the audience, the presenter, and the material as people tend to focus on either the slide or the presenter. Using a handful of words and a few relevant images to support your talk usually creates a much more powerful, memorable encounter. Often people will recall to me a talk I’ve given in the past, and their memory of it will be drawn from one or two pictures and phrases that have stuck firmly in the mind.

I think this has somethnig to do with Memorative Art. This method, which has been around for thousands of years includes ‘the association of emotionally striking memory images within visualized locations, the chaining or association of groups of images, the association of images with schematic graphics or notae (“signs, markings, figures” in Latin), and the association of text with images.’

I already use some of this thinking in my work, and I expect plenty of you do too, even if you weren’t consciously aware of the Memorative Art method. It’s a powerful example of the connection between art and work, and is part of what we can usefully employ when exploring pathways to creativity and collaboration.

What a Load of Rubbish!

There are lots of reasons why I love my neighbourhood. Keira’s school is less than a mile away, the local shops and train station with regular connections into Central London are just a little further down the road. There are lots of open spaces nearby and the country side is just a short mountain bike trail ride away. The immediate environment in which I live is also really clean. You rarely see any litter on our local streets, and I think its absence is one of those small things that make a big difference.

I appreciate the ease with which I can travel into London. Lots of my work is based in London and it is oozing with history and culture which makes it a place where there’s never a dull moment. It’s also dirty, filthy dirty in places. There’s litter and trash everywhere, it’s unsightly and it’s messy and I think it speaks volumes about how Londoners and visitors to London really feel about the place. And it’s not just London that has this problem. Despite the efforts of our diligent team of street cleaners, there’s litter on the streets of my local town Wallington, and plenty of other places too.

Some of you may recall how in the mid 1980’s, Margaret Thatcher became ‘appalled’ at the state of London’s streets. UK 2000 was established soon afterwards under the high-profile chairmanship of Richard Branson with the instruction to “clean up Britain”. It quietly folded four years later and the problem persists to this day. And as a global population part of our collective legacy for future generations is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which some reports suggest is ‘twice the size of the continental United States’. Way to go people of the world, that’s one helluva dump we’ve built there eh?

It strikes me that littering is something we’re quite divided on. Some do it, some don’t. I was in a local town a couple of years ago when someone walked past me and dropped their fast food bag at my feet. I picked up the bag, said ‘excuse me you dropped something’ and handed it back. I was met with an unexpectedly angry outburst – the woman whose rubbish I returned threw the bag back at me along with a side order of multiple swear words. She stomped off in a rage and before I could react – an older guy picked the bag back up, ran after the woman and rammed it down over her head. Cue much applause from the growing crowd of bystanders and much embarrassment for the bag lady.

Part of the problem with litter is it’s one of those big things that provokes a reaction like ‘Why should I bother to pick up that discarded plastic bottle over there, what difference will picking up that one thing make?’

On my recent visit to Chicago I was impressed by how clean the city appeared. When I met John, Susan and Sabrina for lunch we spoke about this and it turns out there was a concerted campaign to tidy the place up in readiness for the bid to host the 2016 Olympic games. For now at least, even though Chicago was unsuccessful in the bid, the clean up seems to have worked. And in The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell writes about how the New York subway was transformed from a crime ridden unwelcoming place into a thriving transport system after a persistent effort to clean up the carriages and rid them of the graffiti that had blighted the place for years.

I’d like to close today’s post by telling you about a conversation I overheard on the train yesterday. An elderly couple who didn’t know each other said hello and started to chat. At some point the conversation turned to littering and the woman said, ‘When I’m out walking I take a carrier bag out with me and when I see a plastic bottle, or a glass bottle, or a can, I pick it up, put it in the bag and recycle it. I keep a little note in my diary of how many of these things I collect and at the end of last year I tallied it up.’ She went on to tell her conversation partner the numbers. I didn’t note them exactly in my head – but they were in excess of 1,200 plastic bottles, 1,000 cans and 1,000 glass bottles. She closed by simply saying ‘And that’s just me, in one year. Imagine if we all did that.’ Imagine indeed.

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