Great Leadership With Jacob Morgan

Susan Steele is the former CHRO at Millward Brown, the former CHRO at Deloitte Consulting and currently she is an Executive Partner of Global Talent & Engagement at IBM. Steele has had repeated success at building and turning around the HR function, driving new sources of revenue, enhancing client care and improving business results.

With IBM’s more than 350,000 employees around the globe, there is a great deal of innovation in HR. For example, when a candidate is using a cognitive tool called Watson – a job finder or candidate fit tool - it can assist them in the application process.  In fact, anyone can use Watson, just go to IBM.com and look for the career site. Watson is part of the career page.

Most recruiters are working on filling 10 -15 roles at any one time. Using Watson to prioritize the candidates is very useful. Recruiters also use Watson to use to see which candidates will be successful. Even with all the Watson technology, it is still only making recommendations to humans. It isn’t handing over all the decisions on a cognitive tool, people can overrule or go beyond it. “The tool makes recommendations rather than taking over the recruiting function.”

Once people are employed by IBM, internal mobility is encouraged. They use a tool called Blue Matching. It is a cognitive tool to assist locating different roles that might be a good fit for current employees. It is great for lateral or other internal moves and might include positions they haven’t thought of.  It is widely used.  However, this isn’t a matter of just getting technology and plugging it in. It also needs the support and culture of leaders that believe that internal mobility as a positive, rather than the employee leaving the organization.

A current focus at IBM is learning agility. Every organization is challenged to develop new skills quickly, be able to pivot and address new opportunities and market disruption. So, taking Watson and transforming the learning opportunity has been very beneficial. Imagine using your phone to get personalized learning opportunities. Like podcast? It would know that and recommend some of those. Prefer books? Again, it would use those in ‘bit size’ pieces. If someone had 5 minutes to listen to the learning as they are waiting in airport, etc. then serving it up in a using a very user friendly format improves access to the learning. “IBM  learning is through the roof”. Everyone is expected to have 40 hours per year and many are going beyond that because it is so engaging. “Learning is being turned on its head because of cognitive technology.”

One of the current challenges at IBM is finding the right talent with the right skills. To help solve this, they are taking a broader perspective. Their CEO is talking about a ‘new collar job’ – don’t need a college degree. This describes about 10 – 15 % of their employees in the US that they have recruited in the last few years. They have technical skills, coding, etc., but they not roles that require a full breadth of a college degree. 

Things you will learn:

  • How Block chain and HR work together
  • How the ‘internet of things’ will be applied to learning
  • How the future of HR differs from HR of the past
  • How Watson is used in IBM’s hiring and training
  • Insight into IBM’s current workplace flexibility
  • What IBM is doing to develop new skills quickly within their organization

Links from the episode:

Direct download: Susan20Steele20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 9:24am PDT

Bill Schmarzo, author of “Big Data: Understanding How Data Powers Big Business” and “Big Data MBA: Driving Business Strategies with Data Science”, is responsible for setting strategy and defining the Big Data service offerings for Dell EMC’s Big Data Practice. As a CTO within Dell EMC’s 2,000+ person consulting organization, he works with organizations to identify where and how to start their big data journeys. He is a University of San Francisco School of Management (SOM) Executive Fellow where he teaches the “Big Data MBA” course.

Big Data is a term. The adjective ‘big’ has no meaning. Most companies are interested in looking at the ‘boat load of data’ they have but are not sure what to do with it. Right now, companies are only looking at the data to see ‘what happened’. “The biggest challenge from IT side and business side is to understand how they can understand data to effectively power their business model.”

Dell is using data to do predictive maintenance on their equipment. The goal is to fix devices before they break. They do this with employees and health care. “We try to drink our own champagne – use data internally, so we can be credible in the marketplace.”

Why have data if you aren’t going to use it? “Data by itself is a glob of nothing. You need to have an analytic strategy to tell what data is needed.”

Organizations need to know what problems they are trying to accomplish then can make analytics on those. If you know the problem to solve, you know the analytics and data you need. Then it becomes easy. Ask the questions first. Business has to drive IT. Data is a business conversation about economics. Then you can exploit the use of data.

There is a new position, the Chief Data Officer. It’s a good idea, but there has been poor execution. What has been happening is taking a CIO and giving them a

new title of CDO. However, it should be the Chief Data Monetization Officer. The job is to determine how to monetize the data you have available. This should be an economics person rather than IT person.

Schmarzo’s advice for people who are thinking about big data?

Business people: Read his book written for business people. Also, check out his blog as he frequently blogs about big data. He recently wrote about how to become intelligent like Netflix.

Everyday people: You need to understand the basics. Start reading, attending the free online classes, read blogs. Begin to understand what is machine learning and AI is all about. Don’t be afraid; just spend 15 minutes a day to become more familiar.

What you will learn in this episode:

● Why the term Big Data is a misnomer

● How Dell is using data

● The ‘mindset’ of data

● Why big data is about economics, not technology

● How much of a CIO’s background should be in technology vs. business and economics

● What role data plays in AI, wearables and machine learning

 

Links from the episode:

● Blogs: infocus.emc.com/author/william_schmarzo/ (Blog)

● LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/schmarzo

Direct download: Bill20Schmarzo20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 12:45am PDT

Jacob Morgan is an author, speaker and futurist living in the Bay Area. He recently started a new Facebook group called, The future if. This group is a global community of business leaders, authors, and futurists who explore what our future can look like IF certain technologies, ideas, approaches and trends actually happen.  

Jacob is also working on a new course called The Future of Work Crash Course. This will go live in a few weeks. It is a companion course for his newest book, The Employee Experience Advantage.  

He is looking at writing another book, sometime in the next few years. In addition, Jacob is looking at creating more interesting podcasts and interviewing new, fascinating guests. 

What themes have stood out for Jacob from hosting this podcast? 

First of all, Jacob says he’s learned a lot in the past 3 years and it turned out that a lot of people also enjoyed learning along with him. The podcast gets about 4000 – 5000 listens per episode, about 30,000 downloads per month.  

One thing Jacob loves about the podcast is that the guests are honest. In conferences, events, etc. the information that comes across is often sanitized. The guests don’t get an advanced list of the questions, so it feels like it is a coffee shop conversation.  

Jacob shares that he is amazed the future of work and the employee experience is getting so much traction. From HR to IT, a lot are paying attention to this. Jacob likes to think he  had a hand in driving some of that. He is pleased that companies are thinking about this. Jacob is always amazed to hear how far companies have come along. From workspace design to corporate culture and where employees want to show up.  

What is Jacob’s vision for the future of work? He believes that in 5 years – 10 years out, not much will be different. There will be some evolution but it won’t be unrecognizable. In 50 years, he feels there will be a heavy and strong emphasis on AI. Perhaps androids. Maybe. 

What should Jacob encourage leadership to think about? First of all, remember it’s People 1st, Technology 2nd. There is no substitute for people. No company can exist without people 

It is also important to build a company that people want to work for.  

How do you create systems to prepare people for the future of work? Jacob says you have to start by understanding the purpose of schools; schools don’t do a good job of preparing people for the future of their work. The purpose of schools is changing.  

What threats will companies face in the future around the subject of compliance and integrity? One thing is transparency – companies need to be aware that both positive and negative information is out there. Another threat is the pace of business (for example, Uber). And also putting the right people in positions of power 

What does Jacob feel is hype and what is reality? He says the most hype is around augmented and virtual reality and AI. He doesn’t believe we will see massive job displacement. Wearables are cool but they are on the fringes.  

There are some things that Jacob feels are likely to happen and the ideas and technology are there but we are the barriers to these changes. In 10 years or so out - Jacob expects scalable virtual assistants, autonomous vehicles (10 years or so out). Also, we will rely more on voice commands. But Jacob sees that there is a lack of discussion around timelines for these things. 

What You Will Learn In This Episode:  

  • What Jacob is working on now 
  • What things are hype and what is reality 
  • How to create systems to prepare people for the future of work 
  • What Jacob has learned during his time as a podcast host 
  • What threats will companies face in the future around the subject of compliance and integrity?  
  • Jacob’s vision for the future of work 
Direct download: Jacob20Podcast_DONE.mp3
Category:Business -- posted at: 7:22am PDT

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