JoelFoner.com

Bias and Discrimination – Where Are We Headed?

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 31 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Bias and Discrimination – Where Are We Headed?

Bias and discrimination get lots of focus in both general discussion and political arenas, and have for many years. Have we made substantive progress to date, and regardless of that answer, where are we headed? What is the likely trajectory of both public discourse and the “reality on the ground” for bias and discrimination? Are we headed for a world that demonstrates less bias and discrimination, or will they be presented in different and perhaps more disguised fashions (or both or neither)?

This week we will talk about the nature of bias and discrimination, how they are found and presented today, and where we think the public and private path leads going forward.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

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Open Forum and SLCC 2010 Thoughts

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 17th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

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This Week’s Topic

Open Forum and SLCC 2010 Thoughts

This week will be an open forum discussion, no doubt with some comments and debate about results, implications and futures mined from the just-concluded Second Life Community Convention.

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

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Aug 9, 2010 – added links:
NY Time Op-Ed by Timothy Geithner “Welcome to the Recovery”
CS Monitor by Bill Bonner “Welcome to the Recovery? No, Mr. Geithner, the Twilight Zone.”
Human Capital League by Gautam Ghosh “10 Ways Work will Change over the Next Decade”

Why is the “Economic Recovery” of 2010 Jobless?

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 10th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
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This Week’s Topic

Why is the “Economic Recovery” of 2010 Jobless?

The “economic recovery” of 2010 has been good for Wall Street and the financial markets, and essentially non-existent for jobs, housing valuations, foreclosure and personal bankruptcy rates. Unlike recent recessions, where job recovery lagged, but could be measured in months, predictions suggest that a return to previous unemployment levels will likely take years.

Why is this recovery jobless in a long-term, persistent fashion that has not been seen for decades? Pointing at one symptom or cause at a time makes good press. It makes good politics. It is also a highly simplistic view of the problem .

What are the key trends and drivers for the jobless nature of this recovery? What part of the jobless nature of the recovery is due to offshoring, technology, global wage and cost inequity, politics, the behavior of financial institutions or are the key drivers elsewhere entirely?  Is the current state of the job market an indication of a very slow recovery, or of the start of a double-dip? Will the jobs lost be recovered, or is job recovery based on creation of new job markets (that themselves will not be supplanted by technology)?

Some commentary points to the elimination of middle class job opportunities as an outcome of current trends. If that is the case, will the restructuring stop there, or is this the start of a continuing erosion that will wipe out jobs at ever-higher levels of the work complexity and skills pyramid, until only a small fraction of careers are left?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon!

Read more…

Social Media Applied – How to Get Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

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every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, Aug 3rd at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
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This Week’s Topic

Social Media Applied – How to Get Consulting Projects, Recruiters and Hiring Managers to Find You!

Techniques for finding consulting projects and full-time jobs have changed radically in the last few years. Some of the changes have been driven by the emergence of social media. Others have appeared through changes to recruiting and hiring processes (for full-time positions), changing beliefs and strategies employed by hiring organizations, and large dose of new recruiting automation technologies.

While plenty has been written about social media marketing for products and services, little information is available to help job seekers understand how these changes affect what it takes to get found on this new playing field.

The number of applicants for any project or position outweighs the number of available opportunities by a wide margin (in recent times this number has been as high as 6:1, and is still almost 5:1). The large gap between supply and demand, coupled with new, advanced technologies, have changed the landscape of recruiting and seeking work in fundamental ways.

There is good news. Once you understand the new recruiting model, how the “recruiting ecosystem” fits together, and how companies, hiring managers and recruiters look at the process today, you can change what you do and obtain better results.

Instead of submitting your resume to job boards and wondering why you can’t get any results, you can know which possibilities to focus on, and how to get recruiters and hiring managers to start sending you messages asking if you’re interested in what they’re offering!

Moving from blindly submitting resumes, and getting no response, to having an inbound queue of recruiter and client requests is not instant. It does not rely on magic. It does not rely on luck. Each step is fairly easy, although some of the pieces involve new skills. There is real work involved, but this work can be done bit by bit. These new skills will pay you dividends for the rest of your career – so now might as well be the time to learn them!

Our session this week will be a slightly different format, in that I’ll start off by presenting some techniques and approaches developed and proven from experimentation, interviews with recruiters, and discussions with hiring managers and consulting firms, followed by a group discussion about how to best get from “Where do I start?” to fielding regular inbound queries asking “Are you interested in this opportunity?”

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Does “Instant Access to Everything” Cause Polarization of Opinions?

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, July 27th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wells/97/56/27

This Week’s Topic

Does “Instant Access to Everything” Cause Polarization of Opinions?

I’ve often heard the comment that the Internet exposes people of all types to more diverse opinions, with more facts and background, than ever before, that this is inherently good for discourse, and good for the generation of better ultimate decisions – whether in terms of political process or other decisions. Phrase in another way, this is “wisdom of the crowds” at global scale. On a gut level, this makes sense. More people and opinions ought to create a more balanced view, and although there will be some with extreme opinions, it is generally thought that the wisdom of the crowd will corrall them in workable fashion.

The Boston Globe ran an article this week titled “How Facts Backfire” (listed in the reading links below as well) that really got me thinking. The article pointed to work done at the University of Michigan (the published paper is also linked below for reference) that indicated a tendency for people to take more extreme positions in the face of corrective facts. This seems to fly in the face of the basis of an informed electorate providing the best case for a reasoned choice, and seems to call in to question the idea of wisdom of the crowds.

From a different perspective, the explosion of people posting raw information, sometimes carefully edited or not fact-checked, on blogs, Twitter, Facebook and many other social media systems, has created the appearance of a deluge of (maybe) factual information that is so vast we have no hope of ever understanding it all. The politicized, highly public debate about Shirley Shirrod’s at-first edited words, and then the publication of the full video, provide one view in to how our society handles the new hyper-speed, influence-driven environment in which we now find ourselves living. I’ve included a link to one blog post about this incident, in particular because it has both versions of the now-infamous speech on one page. You can find plenty more with a few clicks if you’d like!

The indexing of the web has generated an apparent global fact overload, available in seconds from a simple search engine query. Does this fact overload trigger the polarization reflex revealed int he University of Michigan study? Does it lead to moderation? How can our propensity for instant gratification, and lessened chance of correcting factual mistakes, lead us to the land of better, more informed discourse, given both what we have seen to date and this new research?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

2010-07-19 Added reference link to blog post by returning Second Life CEO Philip Linden “Update on Strategy”

Virtual World Success and Failure Factors – Past, Present and Future

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, July 20th at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wells/97/56/27

This Week’s Topic

Virtual World Success and Failure Factors – Past, Present and Future

Virtual worlds grabbed the attention of marketers, companies and educational institutions several years ago, in no small part driven by the fast growth of Second Life™ and offerings for younger children such as Disney’s Club Penguin and many others. Some predicted that virtual worlds would “replace the 2D web.” Over the course of several years many competitors appeared on the marketplace. Today it is far less clear whether this evolutionary replacement will occur in the mid-term, if ever.

In this discussion we will analyze three phases of virtual world development, using the Second Life environment as a model for discussion (since it is the one that most participants in this group know the best).

We will look at Second Life’s initial strong growth phase, discussing which factors seem to have driven and limited growth even during that fast adoption period.

A second phase appeared, in which more targeted uses of virtual worlds appeared, although also through this period usage growth appeared to have stalled, and in many ways retrenched (from public data, it would appear that concurrency has fallen to levels roughly comparable to two years ago after a peak in early 2009). Although on a typical day about 10,000 new registrations are logged, only about 2% of these registrations result in active users (from data presented in a public forum around the launch of Viewer 2).

The third phase has yet to unfold, as we go forward to some form of global financial recovery (with or without jobs, a related but separate topic). Will this third phase look like continued decline for virtual world use, or growth, and what drivers will determine its shape?

We will discuss the corporate model, technical, community, marketing and external cultural and business/financial drivers for the growth or lack of growth through these phases. Is there a path that would result in strong future growth for virtual world technologies, has the market splintered in a fashion that reflects strong but less visible growth, and under what conditions would a system such as Second Life return to strong growth, or has it reached its ultimate size based on the number of people who are interested in its philosophy and concept base? Will virtual world concepts become dramatically widespread, but in some other form than a single-vendor connected system? Are there drivers that indicate that the concepts must evolve to be of interest to a dramatically larger audience?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

July 6, 2010 1:54pm Added “The Neurotic Organization: Diagnosing and Changing Counterproductive Styles of Management” to the reference links section. Thanks to John Jainschigg for pointing out this title.

Can an Organization have a Personality Disorder?

Please join our global discussion group
every Tuesday at 12pm noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

This Tuesday, July 6 at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™
http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Wells/97/56/27

This Week’s Topic

Can an Organization have a Personality Disorder?

Organizations talk about internal culture and market it as a selling point, both to customers and to potential staff. organizational culture reflects a concept of shared personality, often described in flashy, positive terms.

If organizations have an organization-level personality, can organizations (collection of many people) have collective personality disorders? Do organizational personality disorders map directly to individual personality disorders defined by mental health professionals?

How can organizational personality disorders be resolved? Are such resolutions possible?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

If you do not have a Second Life account and would like a quick start to attend the session, please contact me for more information.

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

Personal Stress Management in a Chaotic World

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This Week’s Topic

Personal Stress Management in a Chaotic World

It goes without saying that today’s world events, financial and work situation, and lifestyle can create substantial stress. There are plenty of “you should just tell yourself to feel better” web sites and books, but this sort of advice is often of limited value in the real world. What stress sources are significant to you, and what are effective ways to deal with them? Are there techniques for creating positive results from stress?

What are your best practices for recognizing and handling stressful situations, relationships and events?

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon U.S. Pacific / 3pm U.S. Eastern time for an interactive discussion, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

We meandered through the Boston Museum of Fine Art today, and on the path I noticed a saying on the wall, in a gallery of photographic prints. In a flash, I realized it captures why I do photography, and it’s essence is why I am a coach, how I practice the craft of consulting and one of the key strategies to releasing project teams from obstacles so they can generate better results.

Revealing a subject in a new way is the core of so many things, as the generator of insight, as the trigger to see new approaches to help organizations and individuals to get “unstuck”, as the way to build collaboration and help teams to be more powerful, and often as the key in the lock of an issue that others haven’t yet found a way to open and solve.

Breakthroughs in coaching people and organizations, practicing the craft of consulting and navigating complex projects depend on a knack to take “what everyone knows” and turn it around to look at it from a unique direction. The moment this hidden vision is unlocked, new and sometimes seemingly impossible things become possible.

I think this I’ll put this one up on the wall here too!

The Many Faces of Corporate Announcements – A Case Study

Please join our global discussion group every Tuesday at 12pm U.S. Pacific / 3pm Eastern time

New Location! Tuesday, June 15,  we will be on the web using voice and group text chat (yet another platform experiment!)

This Week’s Topic

The Many Faces of Corporate Announcements – A Case Study

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life™, have announced the release of 30% of the company’s staff, in order to “Generate Efficiencies and Support Investment in New Platforms.” Along with an official press release, there have been interviews with the CEO and numerous blog posts attempting to both divine the future path that the announcement foretells.

Corporate press releases serve many purposes, and this week we will analyze this release and related commentary to explore how to mine such releases for evidence and facts. It is tempting to stick with emotional ”feel good thinking” or “disaster scenario thinking” responses to major corporate announcements, however it is often possible to reveal significant information from announcements by using critical analysis skills.

We will explore the stated and unstated elements of this announcement in case study form, in order to learn techniques for critical analysis of all manner of corporate and organizational announcements.
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