More on the MBS-UniMelb Integration

Ameel Khan December 17, 2008

More details have emerged regarding the proposed integration of Melbourne Business School (MBS) and the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC).

According to Christina Buckridge, writing in the MUSSE newsletter, the integration has already been agreed upon in principle and the University Council is now establishing a due diligence committee that will carry out an “intensive consultation process” on the integration proposal. In other words: Now that they’ve decided that they’re going to integrate, they’re going to sit down and decide how they’re going to integrate.

The consultation process that Buckridge refers to works as follows:

A consultation committee is established. This consists of representatives from the relevant parties (i.e. staff and faculty from MBS and the FEC), most likely someone from UniMelb administration, and other experts or advisors (as required).
Committee members come up with ideas for the integration and they ask everyone involved (or affected) to submit ideas, advice, and opinion as well. They put all that together and come up with a draft plan that is made public.
Everyone then gets an opportunity to comment on the draft. Those comments are taken on board and a final plan is written up.
The final plan then gets approved by the University Council after which it comes into effect. (In this case, it’ll probably be an agreement that will get signed by all the parties involved.)

The proposed structure of the resulting integrated entity is what we thought it would be: a new Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE) under which all graduate degrees will be offered by MBS and all undergraduate degrees will be offered by the School of Economics and Commerce. It is still unclear how Mt Eliza is going to fit into this new structure.

The most interesting thing in that post, however, is the last paragraph which states:

A Heads of Agreement is under negotiation which, with the results of due diligence enquiries, will inform a Coordination and Management Agreement, with a view to integration by the end of March 2009.

If I’m reading that correctly, once the due diligence is done and the integration agreement is written and signed, they’re hoping to complete the actual integration by the end of March 2009. That’s a lot quicker than I expected but it makes sense that they’d want everything done as soon as possible.

So what now? Well, we first see what committee gets formed and we then wait for the consultation process to begin. I’m not sure whether this will happen before the Christmas break of after…but considering the speed at which they’re already going, it’ll probably happen very soon.

The Problem with Bad Arguments

Ameel Khan December 12, 2008

Here are three informal fallacies that people use when making arguments. And while these fallacies might sound impressive, they actually make for bad argumentation:

An ad hominem argument in one in which, instead of attacking someone’s actual argument, you attack them personally (i.e. you attack some aspect about them in an attempt to either change the subject or to somehow ‘weaken’ their argument).
Cherry picking is when you point out individual cases or data that confirm your position while ignoring others that may contradict that position.
An association fallacy (sometimes called guilt by association argument) is one in which you make a hasty generalization about something or someone based on an irrelevant association. (This is similar to stereotyping.)

How These Fallacies Get Used

Telstra’s Rod Bruem recently published a blog post called ‘Professor Gives Business School a Bad Name’ in which he uses all three of these fallacies to make his point.

For example, he claims that:

(A) Professor Paul Kerin hates Telstra and that he makes “silly” suggestions about what Telstra should do.
(B) Kerin is a “highly paid ‘Professorial Fellow’” at Melbourne Business School.

Thus:

Here is where the fallacies come into play in Bruem’s blog post:

Instead of actually arguing against the points that Kerin makes in his articles, Bruem calls Kerin’s arguments silly and half-baked; says that Kerin hates Telstra; and then uses the poisoning the well tactic when he sarcastically calls Kerin an “esteemed academic” and then compares Kerin’s proposals to those that would be “acceptable in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela”. All of this is argument ad hominem.
Bruem has also cherry picked only those articles of Kerin’s that support his argument. Other articles Kerin has written (and there are many of them!) that might show Kerin to be an accomplished economist, strategist, and business thinker are ignored.
Finally, Bruem makes a hasty generalization that leads him to condemn, by association, all of Melbourne Business School for the opinions that Kerin has on the topic of Telstra. Apparently, because Kerin “publicly preaches such hollow views in the media” and is a Professorial Fellow at MBS, all of the professors at MBS must preach their own similarly hollow views in the classroom thereby making MBS a terrible place of learning.

(Funnily enough, Bruem’s association fallacy argument has the opposite effect on me because, instead of thinking: “Oh no! A professor at MBS has a strong opinion, I must therefore stay away from this business school”, I find myself thinking: “Cool. Having an opinionated professor means they probably have some awesome classroom discussions at MBS so I really should look into this place some more.”)

So what was the point of Bruem’s article? I think he really just wanted to vent about Kerin and couldn’t think of an angle to take. That’s when MBS came into the picture because it helped him frame his argument. Indeed, MBS is used only as a lead-in and lead-out for Bruem’s rant about Kerin.

Also, a headline like ‘Kerin is Clueless About Telstra’ would have made the blog post sound a lot less impressive.

Please Make Good Arguments

I have no issues with people ranting about someone whose ideas they believe to be wrong or even “silly” [1]. That said, rants are not meant to be taken seriously; indeed, they’re often mean to be funny. I don’t think Bruem’s post was meant to be funny and he didn’t intend it to be a rant. In that case, you have to analyze it as if it’s a proper argument – which it was not.

My point, then, is that if you’re going to make an argument, please address the topics you actually have issues with instead of arguing ad hominem. Also, don’t bring irrelevant points to the table because they just waste time.

- - - - - - - - - -

[1] I was almost tempted to call this blog post ‘Blogger Gives Telco a Bad Name’ and make this into a rant myself…but then we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere, would we?

MBS & Melbourne University: Deeper Integration

Ameel Khan December 6, 2008

According to a news item in the most recent MBS Alumni Newsletter, Melbourne Business School (MBS) is in talks with the University of Melbourne to “explore the possibility of a deeper level of integration of MBS and the University”. And while that write-up didn’t go into the details of the proposed integration, an article by Andrew Trounson and Luke Slattery in today’s Australian did discuss some of its key points.

But before I talk about the article, let me give you a quick background on the current situation:

Melbourne Business School:

MBS is a non-profit organization jointly owned by the University of Melbourne (45%) and the business community (55%).
It’s run by an independent Board of Directors but is a proper School of the University of Melbourne so it has a Dean and all of its programs, courses, student administration, grading, and degree granting are done through Melbourne Uni.
It offers the MBA, EMBA, PhD, and some targeted diploma and masters degrees in the areas of Innovation and Marketing.

The University of Melbourne:

Melbourne Uni, meanwhile, has a Faculty of Economics and Commerce (FEC) that runs under the University of Melbourne Corporate Structure.
The FEC is much bigger than MBS and offers a range of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral degrees in the areas of Accounting, Actuarial Studies, Business and IT, Economics, Finance, Management, and Marketing.

Though traditionally independent, MBS and the FEC have been working with each other quite a bit over the last year or so.

The Changes Made by the Melbourne Model:

In 2007, Melbourne Uni switched to the Melbourne Model of university education in which undergraduate-level study is general and graduate-level study is specialized. This is much like the North American university education model.
To support this increased specialization at the graduate-level, Melbourne Uni asked its independent Schools – which included MBS and the Victorian College of Arts (VCA) – to become more closely integrated with Melbourne Uni. The VCA accepted this offer and became a Faculty of the University but MBS declined and remained an independent School.
Because Melbourne Uni still needed a new graduate school in the business and management specialization areas, it created the Melbourne Graduate School of Management (MGSM) under the FEC to which the FEC then transferred all of its graduate and doctoral level degrees.
So now, if you’re studying business or management at Melbourne Uni, you do your undergrad in the FEC and your grad studies at the MGSM. The FEC and MGSM are actually the same Faculty, run by the same Dean, so this more of a logical division than an actual one. The MBS equivalent of this is the difference between MBS, which is where you do your MBA, and Mt. Eliza, which where you do your EMBA. Both have the same Dean, but separate Associate Deans, administrators, staff, faculty, students, buildings, facilities, etc.

The Confusion This Caused

While the MGSM doesn’t offer the MBA or EMBA (according to the MBS-Melbourne Uni agreement, only MBS is allowed to offer those degrees under the University of Melbourne name) it offers pretty much everything else and thus there are problems with this set-up.

For starters, the MGSM’s existence muddies the market for graduate-level business, management, and marketing education because students, clients, and customers may find it difficult to differentiate between the University’s “management school” and “business school”. For example, future students may find it hard to choose between the Master of Management (Marketing) degree offered by the MGSM and the Master of Marketing degree offered my MBS. (Until they look at their fee structures, of course, and notice that MBS charges about twice as much!)

The creation of the MGSM also causes some brand confusion issues. Right now, MBS is a sub-brand of the University of Melbourne. This is because, while the University of Melbourne brand has greater overall market recognition, MBS has excellent recognition as a business school both in Australia and around the world. The two brands put together, then, make for a powerful combination. That’s why MBS’s logo is the way it is:

The problem occurs when, say, both MBS and MGSM send Company XYZ their brochure for the management training courses that they offer. Both brochures carry the University of Melbourne brand so all this ends up doing is further confusing Company XYZ and, more generally, the entire market for professional business education.

The Proposed Solution

This is why the new solution is, in theory at least, very welcome and has the potential to be quite awesome. Instead of MGSM and MBS working against each other, they will now work with each other. How exactly they will do that is not yet clear – and discussions are still continuing – but according to the Trounson-Slattery article:

A new, broader Faculty of Business and Economics (FBE) will be created at the University (i.e. the Melbourne Uni Faculty model will be used) but it will be led by an Executive Dean and a Board of Directors (i.e. the MBS leadership model will be used).
I’m guessing the Executive Dean and the new executive-level Board will sit at the Faculty level, above any Schools, and will probably do coordination, inter-School liaison, and overall strategy work as opposed to actually running the institutions on a day-to-day basis. This will be like a corporate layer that sits over its component companies. [I’ll be writing more on the corporate strategy aspects of this integration in a later blog post.]
The article goes on to say that MBS will keep both its name and brand but doesn’t explain what will happen to the MGSM. All we know is that all current MGSM “faculty and [graduate and doctoral] operations” will be transferred to MBS. Does that mean that MBS is going to absorb the MGSM and will start running all the latter’s degrees? According to this article, that seems to be the case.
It’s still a unclear, however, how this arrangement will fit in the overall Melbourne Uni leadership system. Presumably, MBS and the FEC will retain their existing Deans, administration, staff, students, courses, degrees, buildings, etc. and will thus remain full Schools in their own right. However, MBS will move from being an independent School to one that’s part of this newly-created Faculty. So this new Faculty of Business and Economics will have two Schools: the FCE and MBS (with the MGSM having been absorbed by MBS).
The question then is: How will the new FBE operate? If it has its own Board – that too a proper one that it has to answer to – how will that work within a University system in which a Faculty is supposed to answe
r
to the Provost (who runs the central, university-wide Academic Board) and Vice Chancellor? Or is that the deal Melbourne Uni offered MBS: “Come into our fold but, you know what, we’re going to make that fold a lot more independent”? And is this what the FCE wanted?

So, while the article is useful because it gives details of some of the integration ideas being thrown around, it also quotes both MBS Dean John Seybolt and FCE Dean Margaret Abernethy as saying that they are far from reaching an agreement and they themselves aren’t sure if any of the new proposed structures are workable. And since there are no publicly stated deadlines for any of these discussions, we have no idea when next we will hear more about this topic from either of them.

Further Implications

There are numerous further implications that I want to talk about – covering things like corporate strategy, branding, systems and operations, incentive systems, uses of buildings and staff, and so on – but I think it would be best to wait till we have more information about the proposed integration before I continue to speculate.

Right now, though, I’m both excited and concerned and I hope things work out well.

Article on the MBA Degree in The Age

Ameel Khan November 28, 2008

The Age's Leon Gettler recently wrote a good article on MBA degrees in Australia and had good things to say about Melbourne Business School:

Melbourne Business School is the only Australian business school with an Executive MBA program to rank among the world's leading programs. The rankings were compiled by Britain's Financial Times, which recently released its 2008 ranking of the top 95 Executive MBA programs worldwide.

According to the FT index, the Melbourne Business School EMBA program came in at 45. That put it in the company of such prestigious institutions as London Business School, INSEAD and Wharton.

He also quotes Jenny George, the Associate Dean of Academic Programs at MBS, and talks about MBS's new Professional MBA program.

MBS Employment Statistics for 2008 Graduates

Ameel Khan November 10, 2008

Melbourne Business School recently published its employment statistics for the graduating class of 2008 (i.e. my class). 80% of the students responded to the survey which told us that:

Over 95% of graduates were either employed or had received an offer of employment within three months of completing their program
The average starting salary package for an MBS MBA grad is A$133,569, which is a 63% increase on the average pre-MBA salary

Awesome. You can read the full article and download a PDF of the results on the MBS website.

Meeting MBS Bloggers

Ameel Khan October 27, 2008

It's happened twice now: I've gone to MBS for a presentation and someone's come up to me and said something like, "Hey, you're the blog guy!" -- referring to the list of MBS bloggers that I maintain and that they're one of the people on that list.

That specific quote is from Ronjon, who I met last week at an alumni event. A couple of weeks before that, I met Cynthia at a talk given by two of our professors. [Thanks for saying hello, both of you.]

It's fun when this happens and it's always great to meet current MBS students (who I met a lot of at the recent alumni event, by the way). Maybe one of these days I'll organize an MBS bloggers meet-up. Then again, if we keep bumping into each other at all these events, I might not have to.

Remember: If you know anyone who was or is at MBS -- whether student, staff, or faculty -- please let me know so I can add them to the list. Thanks.

Internet Censorship by the Australian Government is not Opt-Out

Ameel Khan October 17, 2008

It appears that Australian Internet users will be unable to opt-out of the Australian Government's Internet content filtering scheme. The scheme was launched last year and will use ISP-level filtering to block access to content deemed "illegal" (nice and vague, huh?) by the Australian Government.

We were promised that we'd be able to opt-out of these filters but, according to an Internode network engineer, you can only opt-out from the "additional material" part of the blacklist and not the main, "illegal material" part.

You can read all about this here:

Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng's writes 'Net filters "required" for all Australians, no opt-out'
Computerworld's Darren Pauli writes 'No opt-out of filtered Internet'

Pathways for Finding Information

Ameel Khan October 16, 2008

My previous blog post was about the importance of a website's About Us section. And, though I didn't mention it explicitly there, I should say that the whole point of an About Us section is to build trust -- which, as we know, is all-important on the Internet -- because, the more your site visitors know about you and your company, the more they will tend to trust you.

However, the broader point of that blog post was to say that the language used on websites -- in both text and hyperlinks -- plays a major role in getting information across to site visitors. Of course, that isn't the whole story. There are two other elements of a website that are equally important:

The site's design -- which is the way in which elements are laid out on the page, the colours and images that are used, and so on.
The site's information architecture (IA) -- which is the way the site's content is logically structured.

Information Architecture

I won't talk about site design here, but I do want to address the importance of a good IA. First off, a good IA is one that is "logical", not to someone as knowledgeable about the company as you, but to someone who knows nothing about the company. It's important to remember this otherwise IAs tend to get very convoluted very quickly.

Also, a good IA isn't all that useful if you don't complement it with a good site navigation system. This can be in the form of a left or right navigation bar; a top navigation bar; a nested, multi-level, or drop-down menu system; or a combination of all or any of these. As long as it's easy to use and your hyperlink text is simple and clear, you should be okay.

Three Basic Pathways

Within your IA, however, it is my opinion that you need to provide three basic pathways to help site visitors find the information they're looking for.

First, you need deep links on the site home page that point to the most important or most frequently used site content. Often this feature is implemented via a 'quick links' box placed in an eye-catching location (such as in the right column, just under the top navigation bar).

In some cases, the links in this box may be dynamically generated (by the Content Management System) based on actual site usage in which case this is called a 'popular links' box. Sometimes webmasters will include both 'quick links' and 'popular links' boxes on their site's home page.

If you want to help your visitors out even more, you'll include a 'relevant links' box in your sub-pages as well. This list can be set manually (on a page-by-page basis) or may be generated dynamically based on content meta data (e.g. other articles on this topic or by this author).

Second, you should have cross links (i.e. links to other parts of the site) on the 'About Us' section's landing page to help users figure out where to go to next in order to find the information they want. These should link to information about the company itself (i.e. general 'About Us' information) and to pages that talk about what the company does. As a small example, look at my 'About Me' page for this blog and notice all the links within the text.

Third, you need a comprehensive 'Site Map' page to help clear any IA confusions that visitors might have. That is, should visitors be unclear about where in your website a particular piece of information will be found, this page should clear things up for them. And the bigger your site is, the more important this page becomes.

A Godsend and a Cop Out: Site Search

There is one more thing that you need to do to help your site visitors find the information the want: your site needs to have a great search engine. This is both good and bad. It's good because, if you implement it well, it's a really useful tool. It's also bad because it lets webmasters get away with a poorly thought-out IA. That is, even if your IA is crap, people might still be able to run, say, a Google search on your site to quickly get to the information they're looking for.

Regardless, to do site search properly you need two things: well-structured HTML pages -- ones that have good titles, text, and meta data (i.e. keywords, summaries, tags, etc.) -- and access to a good search engine (or you need to implement SEO practices so Google does all the indexing for you instead).

And There's More...

There is, of course, much more you can do to make your website go from good to great. For example, it's important to have an FAQ page, a 'Contact Us' page, a featured news/article/story/page section (often on the home page), a good footer, useful breadcrumbs, good images and graphics, and so on. But I won't be talking about all that here.

The point I wanted to make here is that your site's IA (and the information pathways within it) is as important as the language you use on the site itself. Hmmm...maybe I should review the five telco sites again, but this time focusing on their IAs. Maybe later :)

The Importance of Effective Online Communication

Ameel Khan October 16, 2008

Jakob Nielsen's 29 September Alertbox newsletter talks about the importance of the About Us section on a company's website. In my opinion, this is the first section you should look at when establishing (or, as is often the case for me, re-establishing) a company's online presence.

Nielsen points out that, unfortunately, not everyone gets this section right:

Task success for finding out what the company or organization does actually dropped, from 90% to 81%. In place of a frank summary of the business, marketese and blah-blah text ruled the day on many sites.

And it's not just "blah-blah text" that's bad, often there's no text at all: just a big list of links that leaves you wondering where you should go next.

Some Australian Examples

Since Nielsen's research was US-based, I thought I'd do a quick check of some Australian websites to see how they measured up in this area. Since I wasn't going to do a scientific study like Nielsen's I figured I'd pick an industry and take a subjective (though knowledgeable) look at the the sites of the largest players.

I picked the telecommunications industry and looked at the 'About Us' landing pages of the five big telcos in Australia:

Optus has the worst page of the lot: 'About Optus' has no text, no explanation, and the none of the links in the main content area actually tell you anything about the company or where you could possibly go next to find the information you're looking for.
Vodafone's 'About Vodafone Australia' page does have some text...but it doesn't tell you anything either. You have to go to 'Company Information' > 'Company Overview' and then decipher the marketese to figure out what it is that Vodafone does (and even then you're not quite sure).
3 has a pretty bad page too: all you can tell from the 'About 3' page is that "It's good to be 3" and that this company seems to be Australia's first 3G network -- though, even then, you have to click on the 'Find out more about 3' link to be sure. At least they have a clearly-worded 'Find out more...' link that tells you where to go next for more information.
Virgin, meanwhile, has gone to the other extreme: its 'Company Info' page is chock full of words which is somewhat intimidating at first sight. Fortunately, the writing on this page is short, crisp, and clear. Strangely, the top three links in the left navigation bar ('Company Info', 'About Us', and 'Our Story') all point to this same page.
Telstra has a great page. Its 'About Telstra' page quickly tells you what the company is about, what it does, and what it wants to do. To complement that, the left navigation bar has clearly-worded links which makes it really straightforward to dig deeper for more information. And I love the "No one else can do what Telstra does." tagline :)

I guess Nielsen has a point, huh? :)

Seriously, though, have the web strategists (or webmasters or online marketing people) at Optus, Vodafone, and 3 not read something as basic as, say, Steve Krug's 'Don't Make Me Think'? I guess not.

Online Resources for New MBS Students

Ameel Khan October 1, 2008

Every few weeks I get e-mailed a couple of questions from someone applying for admission to the Melbourne Business School (MBS) MBA program (or at least someone's who is researching the MBS MBA). I always reply to these e-mails though, depending on my workload at the time, it sometimes takes me a few days to do so.

Less frequently, I get e-mails from people -- usually international students -- who have already been admitted to the program and are now preparing to move to Melbourne. These new MBS students almost always ask me about life at MBS, in Melbourne, and, more generally, in Australia.

I, in turn, recommend the following three resources to them as good places to do preliminary research before asking me more specific questions:

1. University of Melbourne Website

The 'International Students' section of the University of Melbourne's Future Students website is a great place to start your online research. You can learn about everything from how to apply for your student visa all the way down to what your first year here will be like. The 'Preparing for Study' page is particularly useful.

2. UMPA's 360 Degree Guide

Every year, the University of Melbourne Postgraduate Association (UMPA) publishes its excellent 360 Degree Guide: The All-Round Guide for Graduates at the University of Melbourne. This tells you pretty much everything you need to know about university life (though, as you would expect, it focuses more on Melbourne Uni than on MBS) and postgraduate student life in Melbourne. It is an invaluable resource for new postgrads.

The best part about this is that all postgrads are entitled to a free copy of the 360 Degree Guide. If you haven't been mailed one along with your admissions pack, you can pick up the latest edition from the Student Services office at MBS or from the UMPA office itself. Alternatively, you can download it in PDF format from the UMPA website.

3. MBS Student Blogs

Finally, for the most in-depth information about life at MBS (and not just life at Melbourne Uni) you should read the blogs written by current MBS students. I maintain a list of those blogs -- along with a list of MBS alumni, staff, and faculty blogs -- on my 'MBS Bloggers' page.

Unfortunately, MBS hasn't formalized the student blogging process like, say, LBS, Darden, Berkeley, Ivey, Wharton, MIT, Sauder, Rutgers, and Cornell have...but I'm hoping they do so in the near future.

Any Others?

Have I missed any other useful resource? If so, let me know in the comments. Thanks.

EIU Ranks MBS' MBA at #26

Ameel Khan September 29, 2008

The Economist Intelligence Unit's 2008 MBA rankings are in and there's good news: Melbourne Business School's MBA is now #26 in the world and still #1 in Australia.

This is quite an achievement because, when I joined MBS in 2006, it was ranked #88 in the world (though still #1 in Australia).

Read more about it in this MBS news article: MBS Ranking: Highest Ever for an Australian Business School.

The SouRCe Available Online

Ameel Khan September 29, 2008

The Student Representative Council (SRC) at Melbourne Business School (MBS) publishes a student magazine called The SouRCe and, as I recently discovered, anyone can now read this magazine because it's available on the MBS website (in PDF format).

MBS Video Content on Qantas A380s

Ameel Khan September 17, 2008

Thanks to the Deloitte Leadership Academy, all passengers flying aboard Qantas' Airbus A380s will have free access to business courses -- ranging from five-minute videos to 40-minute lectures -- supplied by Melbourne Business School, Harvard Business School (including Harvard Business Review articles), Stanford Graduate School of Business, Macquarie Graduate School of Management, and the University of New South Wales.

Awesome.

For more:

'Business school in all A380 classes' -- Australian IT news item
'Deloitte Leadership Academy and MBS' -- Melbourne Business School news item
'Would on-plane training appeal to you?' -- Lifehacker Australia discussion

Social Media in Management

Ameel Khan September 1, 2008

CIO Magazine's Sue Bushell has written an interesting article, called 'Management 2.0? That'll Be The Day', on the challenges that CIOs -- and companies, in general -- are facing with the advent of social media technologies in the workplace.

In his book, The Future of Management, Gary Hamel suggests that organizations today face a new set of business challenges that the existing management model does not match. The drone worker of yesterday is giving way to the engaged and vocal employee of today who expects a company culture that replicates the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 — in other words Management 2.0

The name Gary Hamel will, of course, be very familiar to anyone who has done any MBA and has studied the (frequently incorrectly-used) Core Competency concept.

The article is long but useful as it gives managers a lot to think about and hopefully look into:

Managers have a general sense of what Web 2.0 tools are — especially when it comes to applications they’re familiar with like YouTube, Facebook, or Linkedin. But they still struggle to understand these technologies, discover their real business value, address the risks and figure out how to best use them.

This, by the way, is where someone like me would come in: I know both management (theory and practice) and technology (uses and implementations) and can help senior management come up with an implementation of social media that enhances project management, decision making, and internal communication and collaboration.

The trick is that social media integration in an enterprise needs to be a long-term project and not something you hire a consulting firm to do for you in a few weeks. It needs to grow experimentally, possibly slowly, and from the ground-up. And while it will probably change a number of times as it develops -- which means it's not something you can really plan for in advance -- you can start with a few basic governance rules (who does what and what everyone is in responsible for), some content guidelines (that cover privacy, security, and intellectual property), and a simple usage policy (like the two-word "be careful" policy that is often a good start).

Speaking of governance...

Challenges of the Multi-Generational Workforce

The discussion on how to manage a multi-generational workforce -- which is an issue for many managers these days -- reminds me of a blog post on banning Facebook that Toby Ward wrote on the Intranet Blog about a month ago:

Beware of Facebook! It will crush your productivity and hijack your employees!

[...]

Employees prefer to be treated as adults. Judge their performance and actions instead of counting their minutes spent doing "productive work."

Trust me, the threat and problems stemming from a ban far exceed the embrace option. Prescient Digital Media’s Julian Mills last week highlighted the findings of one recent survey that warned of the perils of banning Facebook:

39% of 18 to 24 year-olds would consider leaving if they were not allowed to access sites like Facebook and YouTube
A further 21% indicated that they would feel ‘annoyed’ by such a ban
The problem is less acute with 25 to 65 year-olds, of whom just 16% would consider leaving and 13% would be annoyed

Of course "consider leaving" doesn't mean they actually will leave but it does mean that they probably won't join your company in the first place. Especially if they announce your blanket banning policy on the Facebook group about your company that you didn't know existed.

I know that I, for one, wouldn't want to join a company that bans sites like Facebook or doesn't let you blog, read blogs, pay your bills, read the news, check your e-mail, or basically have a life outside work while you're at work. Limiting YouTube usage makes a little more sense since there's a bandwidth cost associated with online video but, even then, it shouldn't be banned outright.

As Ward said in his article, companies shouldn't be taking the Taylorist approach to management. Of course you'll get employees who'll take 30 minutes to make themselves a cup of coffee or spend an hour on Facebook every now and then -- but that's okay as long as they (a) get their jobs done, (b) don't stop others from getting their jobs done, and (c) don't use-up too many freely-provided company resources (like bandwidth or, for that matter, coffee).

I guess all I can conclude with is that, with the advent of social media and the existence of a multi-generational workforce...well, the next five years are going to be really interesting

My Elevator Pitch & Unique Selling Proposition

Ameel Khan August 27, 2008

As I wrote in my previous blog post, I met with another recruitment consultant from Hudson this morning. In order to introduce myself to her, I did some work on my elevator pitch and further developed my Unique Selling Proposition (USP). In fact, I typed all this up and and gave her a printout of it. And, since I'm applying for an Internet-related position and the best place to learn more about me is indeed online, I added a section on that too.

Here's what I came up with:

(Extended) Elevator Pitch

Experience: Six years of experience in IT consulting and management, over five of which were spent in the strategic planning, technical development, business integration, and marketing of websites, web portals, intranets, and social media sites. Overall, eight years of work experience.

Training: MBA from the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Business School (see list of courses in this blog post, which I also included in the printout).

Immediate career goals: A management or consulting role that involves the alignment of business and marketing strategy with online strategy. This could include the formulation (i.e. research and analysis), implementation (i.e. administration and management), or further development (i.e. testing and advancement) of such a strategy. An online strategy includes internal and external marketing and communications and the use of social media to communicate with stakeholders internally and across the value chain.

Unique Selling Proposition

Uniquely positioned between IT, marketing, and senior (strategic) management – with a background in IT and experience in all three areas
Management and consulting experience in small start-ups, large multinationals, local and global non-profits, and government organizations
Have been developing websites professionally since 1997; specialize in the use of social media
Possess excellent written and oral communication skills; have experience in teaching and training

Online

Website: /ameel
Professional blog: /acme
Personal blog: /randomtangent
LinkedIn profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/ameelkhan
Twitter stream: http://twitter.com/ameel

Comments?

So what do you think? Does that sum things up nicely?

Career Update

Ameel Khan August 27, 2008

My contract job at Linfox finished recently (I'll write more about that when I continue my MBA-at-work blog post series) so I spent the last week watching the Olympics (which was awesome). Now that I've had a nice break, I'm back to looking for jobs.

An Unsuccessful Job Application

Actually, I did interview for a job during my last week at Linfox -- the recruitment consultants at Hudson are very efficient -- but, after three rounds of interviews and reaching the final stage of the process (with just two candidates in the running) I didn't get end up getting it.

This was unfortunate because it was a good job, at a good company, and I really liked the people I would have been working with. Oh well. Such is life.

The Silver Lining

It's not all bad, though: this was only my second serious job application since completing the MBA -- i.e. an application to a permanent position that I really wanted to get and could then see myself growing with over the following year or two -- and, in both cases, I reached the final stage before being dropped. [More on my job application philosophy here]

What this means is that I have what it takes to do these kinds of jobs -- that is, I have the 'can do', 'will do', and 'fit', as my interviewers from both companies told me -- it's just that one of the other applicants was more appropriate for that particular role at that particular time. In other words, that applicant's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was more suited to that role than mine was. In the job I just applied to, for example, the winning applicant had the marketing agency experience that the company wanted.

This is good: this means the company is paying very close attention to the people it is hiring and, when it happens that my USP is the most suitable for that role, that company, and that team, I'll win out over the other applicants and will know that the company did it for all the right reasons.

Next Steps

So, what next? Well, the people at Hudson have me on their radar -- in fact I met with another recruitment consultant of theirs this morning -- so I expect to get a good lead from them (they're very good at what they do). Hopefully that lead will come sooner rather than later.

Otherwise, I continue to look for jobs online and continue to network for openings in the hidden job market. Let's see how things go. If you know of anything I might be interested in, please let me know. Thanks.

Insanity Works

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