thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

The latest TED conference starts this week and runs from 27th of Feb to Sat March1. This time presenters range from Craig Venter, through Bob Geldof , Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Isaac Mizrahi to economist Paul Collier and many, many others.

On the Friday night for example there is a debate chaired by Matt Frei of BBC on “How True is Your World View?“, which is both dissecting the media and being broadcast later by the BBC as part of an extended debate.

I’d love to be there myself even though the tickets are almost impossible to get, they cost around $US 6k and then you have to get from wherever you are to Monterey (& Aspen) so there are travel and accommodation expenses also. Luckily I do know a couple of the people who are going and we hope to hear back from them in due course.

I happen to think that most of the discussions and presentations are almost priceless and I know this because like many thousand others I have been busy downloading the videos from the TED site for the past year or more.

I have now watched something like 60 x 18minute videos. Some are much longer like that early Bono one (Who was going to tell him to stop!) They are almost always fascinating and would be keynotes at a wide range of conferences in a host of disciplines.

A recent video release by Chris Anderson the TED curator on the vision for the conference filmed in 2002 makes for great viewing now as he explains some of the back story and the vision for the future.

In the latest TED some of the key questions are:

Who are we?
What is our place in the universe?
What is life?
Is beauty truth?
Will evil prevail?
How can we change the world?
How do we create?
What’s out there?
What will tomorrow bring?
What stirs us?
How dare we be optimistic?
And the point?

As a creative generalist myself …I find the TED sessions wonderful to watch on video. I keep around 40 TED videos in various formats.

For a while I loaded them as QuickTime movies on CD’s for friends, as you are allowed to do under the Creative Commons license but from experience it much better to convert and save them onto DVD’s as not everyone is that savvy with managing video files (unless they are Mac owners.) And watching them on a TV is also much better!

Here are the details of TED for use in the classroom and beyond.

For example :

“5. If you’re a teacher, consider incorporating TEDTalks into your classes. They are distributed under a Creative Commons license, and are freely available for such use, so long as you credit the source and do not distort the speakers’ intended meaning.”

For this conference there is also an invitation to a live session from TED organisers see below.

“First and foremost, we are opening up one complete session of TED free to the world, streamed live over the web. It’s the dramatic session tomorrow evening when three remarkable individuals each unveil their TED Prize wish. (“One wish to change the world. No restrictions. Think big. Be creative.”)

I invite you to join a global audience as Dave Eggers, Neil Turok and Karen Armstrong share their inspiring visions, followed by the uplifting music of Vusi Mahlasela.

You can see the live TED conference video feed here on Thursday, starting at 5.15pm US Pacific Time and lasting a couple of hours. You’ll probably need a broadband connection to see the video properly. There’s a button below the video to select a full-screen view.”

After checking my World Time clock I can see that @ 5:pm (15mins before) is 2pm Friday 29th for NZ and other locations are as shown below.

Enjoy. If you are going to TED and want to report back on what you liked – please let us know your impressions as we’d love to post any insights here.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Recruiting staff, especially for small companies has its risks as everyone want to look good.

As the Semler story below emphasizes everyone is highlighting the positive but just maybe there is a way to ask the “right” questions in an interview or assessment to get a more realistic idea of the suitability of candidates.

For example I’d want to know what people are like when the chips are down. How did they recover a tough situation at a previous workplace. The reality of small businesses is that the outlook can change fast.

The best staff can think on their feet and recover when there are mistakes and that is when character and integrity are tested the most.

And for a start-up company I’d definitely want to know if they had EVER risked their own money. I’d want staff to act in the best interests of investors and if they already have experience of risking their own capital then that might be a useful indicator.

Ricardo Semler was interviewed for a feature Strategy+Business and he explained Semco HR practice as follows…

Then Mr. Semler segues into his perennial theme: the habits of thought that can change rigid, dehumanizing workplaces into engaging, productive ones.

As he writes in The Seven-Day Weekend, “Our ‘architecture’ is really the sum of all the conventional business practices we avoid.” Consider, for example, typical employee recruitment.

“It is like Internet dating,” says Mr. Semler. “I’m always six foot, four inches, and I look like Brad Pitt; you are always Cindy Crawford or Angelina Jolie.

In the recruitment process, we put out fraudulent stuff about the company, like we’re going to double our earnings, leaving out that we’re also transferring all production to Vietnam in a year.

You forget to tell us that you have fits of rage, that you worked six months here, six months there, and it’s not on your resume. Then we meet at a bar and decide to marry. What are the chances that is going to work?” he asks.

At Semco, by contrast, “We put out ads that are realistic,” says Mr. Semler. “We don’t have an HR department, so the person who has the opening will take the stack [of applications] and distribute it for review.

We wind up with a group of 35 people in a room, 15 of whom are candidates. When that conversation ends, our people will pick three for further interviews. They’ll come back several times. By the time we decide to marry, we know a lot about these people. That leaves us with 2 percent turnover in an industry with 18.”

I have been testing out VortexDNA as a way to better understand the underlying intentions and most likely behaviours and outcomes. The system is a platform to help make the web a more relevant place and has the ability to decode some of the key motivations of its members. To quote from that site..

“Your Vortex DNA profile is a map of who you are – the beliefs about yourself that create your world. Each strand of your DNA is highlighted according to it’s relevancy to you.”

“VortexDNA has mapped the genome of human intention – the mind-DNA that predicts human characteristics. Advancing our understanding of how belief creates our world, the human intention genome opens up a new era of science and human empowerment.”

As a business technology VortexDNA is useful because

“VortexDNA technology tells you, accurately, what your users are likely to care about.

In an independently verified trial against Google SearchTM, VortexDNA technology proved its ability to increase the relevance of search results by up to 14%, which translated into a 3% improvement in click rates.

VortexDNA is easy to install and complements your existing search/recommendation technologies.”

All of which brings me back to my original thought. If we can get an idea of what staff might do / have done under pressure in the past – we can better understand their intentions and motivations. It is also much more obvious what people care about when the chips are down – so to speak.

In asking the right questions knowing what is in the DNA of our prospective recruits could be very helpful. This includes attitudes, intentions and beliefs which are all influences of future behavior in my view.

What do you think? What are other great HR questions?

Note: Vortex DNA has many business applications – have only scratched the surface here.