Apps for Working on the Go Tablet App Roundup

 

Apps for Working on the Go Tablet App Roundup

Published on Tech | Apartment Therapy | shared via feedly mobile

Whether you're a road warrior or someone who prefers to take their work outside via their tablet, we've brought together several apps that are all about using your tablet to work. While tablets are fun for games and consuming media, they're also nifty tools for taking your work with you, and here are several apps for both the iPad and Android that will help you do just that. More
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Going all in: How to run a company on 21 apps in the cloud

 

Going all in: How to run a company on 21 apps in the cloud

Published on VentureBeat | shared via feedly mobile

A lot of companies are debating whether — and what — to move to the cloud. The company I work for, Australia-based Proactive Accountants Network (PAN), made a pretty unusual decision to go all-in on cloud technology and made the leap in a span of 10 weeks, dramatically changing our IT infrastructure. So, for those of you still debating, here's a look at life on the other side.

We were once dependent entirely on legacy software. We now run our business on 21 cloud applications, including Google, Salesforce.com, BetterCloud, Cloud Sherpas, Okta, Silverpop, Xero, Citrix, iHance, and Cvent. With a detailed plan and a clear conscience, we went from being a company that was challenged to support workers in multiple countries to an organization that is nimble, flexible, and capable of making incremental versus bet-the-farm bets on new technologies.

For us the decision to go all-in with cloud wasn't a means to an end. Sure, we wanted to get away from our on-premise email and CRM systems, VPN connection, and 3G data speeds. But the real impetus was much more philosophical: Why force a square peg into a round hole? Our firm employs 40-plus consultants who are based — and spend the bulk of their time — outside our primary country of operation. Legacy software simply wasn't built to support geographically versatile, highly mobile workforces. Fortunately for us, the cloud was.

I came to PAN with a strong cloud background, having worked extensively with applications like Salesforce.com. I knew the cloud would allow us to operate more efficiently and easily scale our business.

We knew from day one what the application environment was going to look like, but for management and performance purposes we opted for a phased rollout. Okta, Google Apps and Cvent came first. Then, 45 days later, we added Salesforce.com, and 30 days after that we deployed the other applications.

For the larger application cut-overs like Salesforce.com and Google Apps, we had dedicated launch days.  We brought in beanbags, frisbees, and digital cameras as well as a dedicated support crew consisting of our internal product team and our application partners. We went from a 100% legacy environment to the cloud in a fraction of the time it takes legacy software vendors to update a single system, an extraordinary accomplishment shared by our vendors, partners, and internal staff.

Here's what our life is like now that we've made the transition:

Recruiting and retention: I recently hired an extremely sought after person to join my product team. In the interview she turns to me with a concerned look and says, "Do you use Outlook?" Naturally my response was "Gosh, no, we use Google Apps." Suddenly she looked relieved. The new generation of workers expect "proper" business tools. If you want the best people on your team, you need to provide the best tools — or risk losing them to a competitor who is meeting the expectations of a new wave of workers.

Location, location, location: Our office in Brisbane is nearly half empty on a daily basis. Most execs would be scratching their heads wondering what on earth is going on. The answer is simple: any team member can grab their laptop, log on, and see everything as if he/she were at their desk. Why should you have to be tethered to a desk to do your job? If a worker wants to do his or her job while sitting on the beach or on a mountain overlooking a vast canopy of trees, why shouldn't they? We can still track performance to ensure tasks are completed on-time and with quality.

Security and control: Another comment I hear often from peers is, "That sounds great, but we wouldn't want sensitive content all over the web." I get that, which is why we teamed up with BetterCloud.  BetterCloud provides amazing enterprise-grade security tools — all for the price of a couple of cabs around Sydney, by the way. BetterCloud's DomainWatch tool helped us build a "digital barbed wire fence" for everything created in our Google Apps environment. No matter who's using or sharing data, we can see it and control it. This puts our senior management team at ease. BetterCloud has anticipated what businesses require to deploy a cloud suite in a secure way.

Cost savings: When we went to deploy Google Apps, it was really just to address email and calendar. We thought we'd leave Docs on as a test strategy, just let the team play with it and find a home for it in their day-to-day lives. Three months in and we have hundreds of documents created and used on a daily basis.  While we haven't formally documented the savings, a heck of a lot more work is getting done, and we haven't added any new team members. On the same conversation, we also recently deployed Salesforce.com to the entire business. When we were doing our ROI analysis, the return was well over $100K per year. I can only imagine that the cost savings from implementing Google Apps is significant.

Tips and tricks: We use SherpaTools to dynamically insert marketing promotions into team members' signatures. We use Google Hangout more and more for team-level conversations about the applications we are making — with a global product team this is a real lifesaver. We partnered with Okta to deliver a complete single sign-on experience to all of our end users. That means one password and one URL for all our applications; no need to memorize URLs, usernames, passwords, etc. for over 21 applications.

Global expansion: The Google Apps suite has positioned us for rapid expansion around the world. In the last week, a senior manager relocated from Brisbane to Darwin and another colleague moved to Auckland to head up operations in New Zealand. Each move was made seamlessly due to our cloud-based infrastructure and applications. We no longer worry about version compatibility, licenses for different software editions, deploying VPNs, ensuring sufficient bandwidth, sketchy performance, etc. That responsibility falls to our cloud partners, who have done an amazing job. The fact that our users can be on a train, plane, boat, or spaceship and still work/collaborate effectively is testament to the technical sophistication of the cloud and our cloud partners.

Better tracking of sales and marketing activities: iHance was the answer to how we could capture emails from members, prospects, suppliers, etc., automatically within Salesforce.com. In the past, our team would have to add an email to our CRM manually. If they forgot or didn't do it, the communication never made it to our system. Now, with iHance, every email gets logged without our team having to lift a finger.

Easier events: We run a ridiculous number of events with complex pricing structures and billing needs. Cvent is truly a best-of-breed solution that has about 1,400 features. The events team internally can't stop raving about it. About 18 months ago we had no digital system for managing events (where we had thousands of attendees) — it was all paper driven!  Then we tried to build our own application. That worked for a little while, but as the business grew and evolved it became superfluous. We came across Cvent, and to date it still has more features than we use (great for growth), and they continue to maintain a strong history of new feature releases.

Simplified, tracked digital marketing:  A major pain point for us was integration, without which we would lack a vast amount of business intelligence. So, we really pushed for tools that integrate with Salesforce.com. Silverpop provided an enterprise-grade solution for mass digital marketing, including email marketing, landing pages, dedicated whitelisted IP addresses, and more.

Accounting solution that grows with us: Xero provided a fantastic SaaS accounting platform that integrated with all of the necessary systems. Further to that, we tend to look for application partners who not only have a strong solution but are backed financially, plus also have a strong history of feature releases that make sense to the marketplace. Not every solution will be perfect from day one, but as long as they are committed to improving their solution frequently, we will consider working with that vendor. At the moment, Xero delivers new releases every six weeks!

In addition to the apps mentioned, the others in our 21-app ecosystem are: HootSuite (Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn/Youtube), Google Analytics, Pivotal Tracker, SendGrid, Teamwork Project Manager, Asana, Community (a professional collaboration environment we built for our clients), AWS Cloud, and Azure Cloud.

Scott Gassmann is an Innovation Engineer at Proactive Accountants Network, one of the fastest-growing industry associations in Australasia. He has presented at the 2010, 2011, and 2012 national Australian CloudForce Tour as well as the 2010 global computing conference for Salesforce.com.

[Top image credit: 18percentgrey/Shutterstock]
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Going all in: How to run a company on 21 apps in the cloud

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Management Lessons from Star Wars

By Alex Knapp

updated 2/22/2012 12:47:23 PM ET

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My colleague Dorothy Pomerantz notes that this weekend, the re-issued 3-D version of "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace," pulled down about $23 million at the box office. This got my mind to pondering the mistakes that people make, ranging from making the "Star Wars" prequels to reissuing them in 3-D to actually going to relive the misery that was "The Phantom Menace" all over again.

But mistakes are learning opportunities. And in thinking about "Star Wars," let’s leave the prequels behind and focus on the original trilogy. It occurs to me that the "Star Wars" films have a lot to teach us about leadership styles.

In particular, the Galactic Empire strikes me as a quintessential example of how not to effectively run an organization. Let’s take a look at five of the Empire’s biggest mistakes and see how you can avoid them in your own organization.

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Mistake I: Building an organization around particular people, rather than institutions
Perhaps the biggest mistake the Galactic Empire made is its singular focus on the preservation of power for the Emperor and a few of his chosen lackeys. There is a constant we see starting with "A New Hope" and running through to the end of "Return of the Jedi" of the Emperor consolidating more and more power into his own hands and that of his right-hand man, Darth Vader. In "A New Hope," the Galactic Senate is disbanded in favor of regional governors hand-selected by the Emperor. By the time "Return of the Jedi" rolls around, the Emperor’s only advisor is Darth Vader, and his distrust in his organization is so complete that his only plan for succession is a desperate attempt to poach Luke Skywalker from the Rebel Alliance and get him to join his organization. Anytime your future plans depend on getting a rising star from a rival organization to join your team, you know that you have some serious institutional issues.

As the events of the movie make clear, the deaths of the Emperor and Darth Vader pretty much eliminated any opportunity for succession. A galaxy-wide organization was defeated simply by taking out two key individuals. Despite his decades of scheming, Palpatine’s organization barely lasted a day after he was gone.

Key Takeaway: Your organization needs to be structured so that talent is being developed on all levels of the organization, in order to ensure smooth functioning and ensure that it’s easy for people to rise in the organization in the event that key individuals leave. Responsibility should be distributed on several fronts, so that chaos doesn’t ensue if one person can’t be reached. Realistic succession plans are vital to developing an enduring organization.

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Mistake II: Depriving people of the chance to have a stake in the organization
By consolidating his power, the Emperor didn’t just ensure that his organization wouldn’t survive his death. He also deprived both his employees and the public-at-large a key motivation: a feeling of having a stake in the success of the organization. The Emperor disbanded the Galactic Senate, removing the idea of any democratic stake in the government. He wiped out all references to the Force, so there was no longer any guiding ideology. His sole idea for maintaining control of the Empire was building the Death Star, on the theory that, in the words of Grand Moff Tarkin, “Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.” Similarly, while in the first "Star Wars" film, there was a scene showing officers in the Imperial Navy discussing strategy, by "Return of the Jedi," it was clear that no feedback was being solicited anymore. The Emperor or Vader gave orders and that was it. No further discussion.

But as was ably demonstrated in this exchange in the movie "Office Space," this is the worst possible way to get the best work out of your employees. Fear, combined with a sense of powerlessness, only inspires the bare minimum amount of work:

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Peter Gibbons: You see, Bob, it’s not that I’m lazy, it’s that I just don’t care.
Bob Porter: Don’t ... don’t care?
Peter Gibbons: It’s a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don’t see another dime, so where’s the motivation? And here’s another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.
Bob Porter: Eight?
Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That’s my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Key Takeaway: In order to get the best work out of people in your organization, you need to solicit their feedback, engage them in the decision-making process, and ensure that they have a stake in the success of the organization

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Mistake III: Having no tolerance for failure
In an early part of the "Empire Strikes Back," the Empire attempted to wipe out the Rebel Alliance once and for all in the Battle of Hoth. However, because Admiral Ozzel took the Imperial Fleet out of lightspeed too close to the Hoth system, the Rebel Alliance was able to detect the Imperial approach and quickly begin its defense. Enraged by this error, Darth Vader used the Force to choke Admiral Ozzel to death. Captain Piett, Ozzel’s second-in-command, was then promoted to Admiral and given command of the Imperial Fleet.

This swift, decisive punishment of failure is a huge error of management. First of all, mistakes are inevitable — especially in times where quick decisions are needed to be made on incomplete information. Rather than simply kill Admiral Ozzel, Vader should have attempted to direct him to a course of action that corrected his error. Instead, he threw the Imperial Fleet into organizational disarray as countless numbers of officers were suddenly thrust into new roles and responsibilities without the opportunity to learn them. This organizational chaos was undoubtedly key to the Rebels ability to escape in mass numbers, even as they flew perilously close to the Imperial Fleet.

Even beyond this one mistake, by adopting a management style of “failure leads to Force choking,” Vader developed an organizational culture that was destined to be weak. People would be afraid to offer feedback or suggestions, choosing instead to follow orders to the letter. This ensures that decisions are made at a very high level, and anyone under those levels will lack initiative or the ability to act on their local knowledge. What’s more, by punishing failure so harshly, the Empire provides an incentive for people within the organization to actually lead their superiors to failure. After all, the quickest way to promotion in the Empire is for your boss to make a mistake, so it’s in your own best interests to ensure that he does.

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Key Takeaway: It’s essential to remember that failure is the engine of success. Mistakes are inevitable, but the key to making them is learning from them. It’s also vital to ensure that organizations are flexible, capable of quickly adapting to changing conditions and allowing for initiative and quick action at all levels, even if that leads to some mistakes.

Mistake IV: Focusing all of the organization’s efforts into a single goal and failing to consider alternatives
When it came to the success of the Galactic Empire, the Emperor had one single idea that he was absolutely obsessed with: building the Death Star. The completion of the Death Star, with its ability to destroy entire planets, was the singleminded obsession of the Emperor. At no point do we ever see any alternatives broached. No scenes between Darth Vader and the Emperor debating the wisdom of building a second Death Star so soon after the first one was destroyed. Nobody suggests to the Emperor that it might be wiser to develop more flexible ways for the Empire to destroy planets, such as combining the firepower of several Star Destroyers at once.

The only other goal we ever see the Emperor pursue, apart from the destruction of the Rebels, is to get Luke Skywalker to turn to the Dark Side and succeed Darth Vader and possibly the Emperor himself. As discussed above, having only one succession plan, based entirely around getting a key player from a rival organization to change his mind, showed remarkable lack of foresight. This singleminded obsession with one way to succeed is something that undermined not only the Galactic Empire, but also many other organizations throughout history. Kodak focused on film even after developing digital technology. Borders focused on brick and mortar years after it was clear that a strong Internet presence was key to the book business.

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Key Takeaway: It’s vital to be flexible and adaptable to changing circumstances. You should always consider alternatives to your course of action and develop multiple plans for achieving particular goals in case one or more plans don’t pan out.

Mistake V: Failing to learn from mistakes
The Galactic Empire devoted years, an enormous amount of money, and an enormous amount of manpower to building the Death Star. After it was built, the Death Star only successfully completed one mission before it was destroyed by the Rebels. And the Empire’s response? Build a bigger, newer Death Star to serve as a target for the Rebel Alliance. In the second case, the Death Star wasn’t even completed before the Rebels managed to destroy it again.

Despite the failure of Force choking Admiral Ozzel to improve performance by the Imperial Fleet, Vader Force choked Captain Needa after his failure to capture the Millennium Falcon shortly thereafter.

Both the Emperor and Vader were obsessed with turning Skywalker to the Dark Side of the Force, even after Skywalker made it clear that he’d rather die than abandon the Rebel Alliance or join the Dark Side.

Forbes.com: Why Apple should buy Yahoo

You may see a pattern emerging here. Perhaps the Emperor and Vader were blinded by their success taking control of a millennia-old Republic and turning it into an Empire, but it’s clear that they became very overconfident in their own abilities. Despite making the same mistakes over, and over again, they still moved stubbornly, blindly forward without ever changing course. And then kept on moving forward without changing their paths until the Empire was destroyed.

Key takeaway: While it’s admirable to not let setbacks hold you back from pursuing your goals, its vital to learn from every failure in order to correct your course of action. Failing to learn from your mistakes and repeating them will inevitably lead to the destruction of your organization.

The bottom line: Ultimately, the Galactic Empire failed as an enduring organization because of incredibly flawed leadership at the very top. By building an organizational culture based on fear, lack of independence, and an unwillingness to adapt to changing circumstances, the Emperor set the stage for his own inevitable failure.

The Clicker: How much would the Death Star cost?

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Michael Schrage

Michael Schrage, a research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, is the author of Serious Play and the forthcoming Getting Beyond Ideas.

Higher Education Is Overrated; Skills Aren't

10:38 AM Thursday July 29, 2010  | Comments (84)

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With innovation, entrepreneurship and significantly smarter fiscal policies, America should eventually escape its "hireless recovery." But what won't hasten new hiring — and might even dampen job prospects — is the mythical belief that higher education invariably leads to higher employment and better jobs. It doesn't. Foolish New York Times stories notwithstanding, education is a misleading-to-malignant proxy for economic productivity or performance. Knowledge may be power, but "knowledge from college" is neither predictor nor guarantor of success. Growing numbers of informed observers increasingly describe a higher education "bubble" that makes a college and/or university education a subprime investment for too many attendees.
Are they right? I don't know. But painfully clear to many employers are serious gaps between elite educational credentials and actual individual competence. College transcripts spackled with As and Bs — particularly from liberal arts and humanities programs — reveal less about a candidate's capabilities than most serious employers need to know. Even top-tier MBA degrees often say more about the desire to have an important credential than about any greater capacity to be a good leader or manager. The curricular formalities of higher education — as opposed to its informal networks of friends and connections — may be less valuable now than they were a decade ago. In other words, alumni networks may be more economically valuable than whatever one studied in class. "Where you went" may prove professionally more helpful than "what you know." That certainly undermines "value of education" arguments. While higher education itself isn't marginal or unimportant, its actual market impact on employment prospects may be wildly misunderstood. In "Econ 101" terms for job-hunters: time spent cultivating your Facebook/Linked-In network(s) may be a better investment than taking that Finance elective.
Eduzealots have done a truly awful thing to serious human capital conversations and analyses around employment. By vociferously championing higher education as key to economic success, they've distorted important public policy debates about how and why people get hired and paid well. They've undermined useful arguments about "street smarts" versus "book smarts." Treating education as the best proxy for human capital is like using patents as your proxy for measuring innovation — its underlying logic shouldn't obscure the fact that you'll underweigh market leaders like WalMart, Google, Tata and Toyota. Dare I point out that Microsoft's Bill Gates, Dell's Michael Dell, Apple's Steve Jobs, Oracle's Larry Ellison and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg are all college drop-outs? The point isn't to declare a college degree antithetical to launching a high-tech juggernaut but to observe that, perhaps, higher education isn't essential to effective entrepreneurship.
We have a huge branding issue. Pundits and policy-makers jabber about the need to educate people to compete in knowledge-intensive industries. But knowledge doesn't represent even half the intensity of this industrial challenge. What really matters are skills. The grievously undervalued human capital issue here isn't quality education in school but quality of skills in markets. Establishing correlations, let alone causality, between them is hard. (Michael Polanyi's classic "Personal Knowledge" brilliantly articulates this.) A computer science PhD doesn't make one a good programmer. There is a world of difference between getting an "A" in robotics class and winning a "bot" competition. MIT's motto isn't Mens et Manus (Latin for Mind and Hand) by accident. Great knowledge is not the same as great skill. Worse yet, decent knowledge doesn't guarantee even decent skills. Unfortunately, educrats and eduzealots behave as if college English degrees mean their recipients can write and that philosophy degrees mean their holders can rigorously think. That's not true. Feel free to comment below if you disagree....
As Atkinson's anecdotes affirm, there's no shortage of "well- educated" college graduates who can't write intelligible synopses or manage simple spreadsheets. I know doctoral candidates in statistics and operations research who find adapting their superb technical expertise to messy, real-world problem solving extraordinarily difficult. Their great knowledge doesn't confer great skill. Nevertheless, you would find their research and their resumes impressive. You should. But focusing on their formal educational accomplishments misrepresents their skill set outside the academy. Academic and classroom markets are profoundly different than business and workplace markets. Why should anyone be surprised that serious knowledge/skill gaps dominate those differences?
Higher education institutions do decently with knowledge transmission. Unfortunately, they do dismally transmitting skills. Pun intended, that's — apparently — not their job. That's also why "human capital" debates and investment policies going forward should weight skills over knowledge. When I look at who is getting hired, purported knowledge almost always matters less than demonstrable skills. The distinctions aren't subtle; they're immense. How do they manifest themselves? These hires don't have resumes highlighting educational pedigrees and accomplishments; their resumes emphasize their skill sets. Instead of listing aspirations and achievements, these resumes present portfolios around performance. They link to blogs, published articles, PowerPoint presentations, podcasts and webinars the candidates produced. The traditional two-page resume has been turned into a "personal productivity portal" that empowers prospective employers to quite literally interact with their candidate's work.
Unsurprisingly, this simultaneously complements and reinforces the employer-side due diligence that's emerged during this recession: firms have both the luxury and necessity to find the best possible candidates for open positions. Yes, they're looking for appropriate levels of educational accomplishment but, really, what they most want are people who have the skills they need. More importantly, they want to actually see those skills — be they written, computed, designed and/or presented. Professional services firms I know now don't hesitate to ask a serious candidate to demonstrate their sincerity and skills by asking them to show how they might "adapt" a presentation for one of the company's own clients. Verbal fluency and presence impresses headhunters and interviewers. But the ability to virtually demonstrate one's professional skills increasingly matters more.
This is part of the vast structural shift in the human capital marketplace worldwide. Firms have the ability and incentive to be far more selective in their hires. But project managers and professionals also have the bandwidth and desire to showcase their skills. The resume is rapidly mutating away from a documentary string of alphanumeric text into a multimedia platform that projects precisely the brand image and substance a job candidate seeks to convey. Did they teach you that in college or grad school? Of course not. Will you learn that by hanging around LinkedIn or Facebook? Probably not.
Is this how human capital markets will become more efficient and effective tomorrow? Absolutely. You've got to have skill to show off your knowledge.


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Quid pro quo will define the author-publisher relationship

 
Quid pro quo will define the author-publisher relationship
Published on O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. | shared via feedly mobile
In a recent interview, author and digital book producer Peter Meyers talked about what we can expect as publishing comes into its own in the digital era. He said customized book apps will largely go by the wayside, and HTML5 as a format will be a bit of a hard-sell to consumers. And using his own experience as a basis, Meyers said publishers aren't in danger of becoming irrelevant.
Highlights from the interview (below) include:
Different kinds of books gravitate toward different kinds of formats — Meyers said the majority of books in the future won't be customized apps. The ones that will be apps will be the ones that require interactivity. [Discussed at the 0:19 mark.]
HTML5 is still a wild card — Meyers said HTML5's core question is transactional: Are people willing to pay for web-based content? Consumers have been reluctant thus far, but as HTML5 gets fully supported, we'll see more experimentation. [Discussed at 1:40.]
Amazon's Fire tablet will be a problem for B&N — Even though both tablets are similar in a lot ways, Meyers pointed toward Amazon's ecosystem and said B&N just doesn't match up to Amazon's content and service offerings. [Discussed at 4:54.]
Will publishers become irrelevant? — Meyers said no. Using his own experience as an example, he highlighted the fact that his publisher (O'Reilly) provides a platform to publicize his work and technological support to produce works in particular formats. What he doesn't get — and said few authors do — is hand-holding, individual attention, detailed line editing, cheerleading and so forth. Meyers said authors need to go in with the expectation that they'll have to do as much for their publishers and their books as the publishers do for them. [Discussed at 5:26.]
You can view the entire interview in the following video.
Meyers' new book, "Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience," will be released in the next couple weeks — you can nab a free preview copy now — and he'll host a workshop at TOC 2012.

Quid pro quo will define the author-publisher relationship

 

Quid pro quo will define the author-publisher relationship

Published on O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies. | shared via feedly mobile

In a recent interview, author and digital book producer Peter Meyers talked about what we can expect as publishing comes into its own in the digital era. He said customized book apps will largely go by the wayside, and HTML5 as a format will be a bit of a hard-sell to consumers. And using his own experience as a basis, Meyers said publishers aren't in danger of becoming irrelevant.

Highlights from the interview (below) include:

Different kinds of books gravitate toward different kinds of formats — Meyers said the majority of books in the future won't be customized apps. The ones that will be apps will be the ones that require interactivity. [Discussed at the 0:19 mark.]

HTML5 is still a wild card — Meyers said HTML5's core question is transactional: Are people willing to pay for web-based content? Consumers have been reluctant thus far, but as HTML5 gets fully supported, we'll see more experimentation. [Discussed at 1:40.]

Amazon's Fire tablet will be a problem for B&N — Even though both tablets are similar in a lot ways, Meyers pointed toward Amazon's ecosystem and said B&N just doesn't match up to Amazon's content and service offerings. [Discussed at 4:54.]

Will publishers become irrelevant? — Meyers said no. Using his own experience as an example, he highlighted the fact that his publisher (O'Reilly) provides a platform to publicize his work and technological support to produce works in particular formats. What he doesn't get — and said few authors do — is hand-holding, individual attention, detailed line editing, cheerleading and so forth. Meyers said authors need to go in with the expectation that they'll have to do as much for their publishers and their books as the publishers do for them. [Discussed at 5:26.]

You can view the entire interview in the following video.

Meyers' new book, "Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience," will be released in the next couple weeks — you can nab a free preview copy now — and he'll host a workshop at TOC 2012.

TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Related:

Stories from the "Breaking the Page" project

The iPad's ripple effect

HTML5 for publishers: Drawing on the screen

What publishers can and should learn from "The Elements"

The paperless book

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He developed a plan of action that would involve laying off the top two tiers of managers—about 20 people—and asking them to reapply for their jobs.
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Get Ready for Your Next Assignment

by Katie Smith Milway, Ann Goggins Gregory, Jenny Davis-Peccoud, and Kathleen Yazbak

When Bruce Wilkinson, an executive in World Vision Inter­national’s Zambia operation, learned that he was going to be promoted to regional director for southern Africa, he immediately started reading performance reviews of key staff members and talking to his peers, other national officers in the $2.6 billion organization. In doing so he uncovered a serious weakness: A host of critical positions in the region had gone unfilled for as long as 16 months, leading to lost contracts and deterioration in the programs WVI undertakes to empower poor communities. Human resources needed to step up its game.

But Wilkinson also saw that his appointment offered an opportunity—to both fix broken functions, such as HR, and create new ones, such as quality assurance, that could improve his region’s performance. He developed a plan of action that would involve laying off the top two tiers of managers—about 20 people—and asking them to reapply for their jobs. “You want the elements of your vision to take shape before you start,” Wilkinson explains. “In my case, I was redefining the role of the regional office as a true service center, and managers got the message.”
Most executives know what their next project or promotion will be well before the day it starts, but too few take advantage of their insider status and the time beforehand to prepare well. That is an opportunity lost.
Your next assignment is your next chance to create results—for your organization and for your career. A smart investment of time and effort up front can make the difference between simply getting by and truly excelling, between a dead-end move and a stepping-stone to bigger and better things.
A key factor in your transition will be knowledge—not only substantive information about the project or field, but an understanding of how others inside and outside the organization have tackled similar assignments, what challenges and opportunities lie ahead, and what resources are available and how you can mobilize them to overcome obstacles. Combining insights from our ongoing study of how knowledge is best captured and shared, our experience with consulting and executive search clients, and interviews with successful leaders across different types of enterprises, this article identifies three practical steps for building your knowledge capital to excel in new roles throughout your career. We call them phase zero, learning tour, and affinity groups.
Wilkinson used all three to implement his plan, reinterviewing staff members and translating his network of former peers—the national directors—into a source of feedback. This enabled him to upgrade the HR leadership, add a director of quality, and rapidly fill open positions. Let’s look at each step in detail.
Phase Zero
This is a chance to use your insider advantage to become familiar with a new unit’s people and performance and to discern the opportunities and challenges of your assignment—before it begins or is even announced. In the weeks leading up to the assignment, carve out and hold sacred at least 30 minutes a day to prepare. You may find ways to increase effectiveness, reduce costs, or even reassess a business model. In phase zero you can identify problems and develop a hypothesis for how to solve them—as Wilkinson did in southern Africa. And your solutions can be tested and adjusted as you move into your new role.
Among the likeliest places to look for objective data in this step are company documents—such as performance reviews and reports on services and operations—and feedback from customers and suppliers. For qualitative input, turn to colleagues who have supervised the role, interacted with it, or previously filled a similar role. Push to understand the story behind the story—for example, ask “What challenges might I encounter that aren’t apparent from the description of the assignment?” Finding these people and getting the information you need, without fanfare, will help you understand expectations and possibilities, think through a plan of action, and prepare personally for the transition.
Consider the experience of Todd Hoddick, who in early 2011 became vice president of the North American entertainment division of Barco, a global visual solutions company based in Belgium, in January 2011. Having joined the firm in 2008 as vice president of digital cinema in North America, Hoddick had developed a strong reputation for building a profitable single-business unit. In 2010 he was approached for the new position, which would add rental and staging, digital signage, home cinema, image processing, and corporate audiovisuals to his plate.