If you missed it, Community Manager Appreciation Day was this past Monday, the fourth Monday in January. As the Wikipedia link notes: Community Manager Appreciation Day is "... a way to recognize and celebrate the efforts of community managers around the world using social media and other tools to improve customer experiences." While community management is a growing and discrete role in many organizations, I don't want to highlight that here. Instead, I want to take this opportunity (albeit a few days late) to thank YOU ,... [More]

Tags:  community rational rational-client-support think-friday community-management social-business thank-you

      From the list below, it would appear that this past year you all were big on some of our thought leadership items. Following are the top ten (well technically eleven, but 6 fall under a single topic, so I figured I owed you at least one more) posts which garnered the largest number of views over the course of 2012:                Think Friday: YOU are a community manager From our Working outside the Inbox series: Working Outside the Inbox, Step 1: Stop Replying to Email   Working Outside the Inbox, Step 2: Group Conversations and Identify... [More]

Tags:  ibm-puresystems woti rational-client-support rational think-friday top-content

   Over on my personal blog, I posted last week about Building a better business: Hiring ducks and eagles for the right jobs. In that post, I explored the personal experience and positive results of team hiring practices that focused on finding the right person for the right job. The net conclusion of that post being: "Hire to your needs, but also to the candidate’s strengths and abilities. It isn’t easy, but the rewards and your future success depend upon it." But, I'd like to take that conclusion a step further now, since... [More]

Tags:  rational op-ed rational-client-support thought-leadership think-friday social-business

Yup, we're still "working outside the inbox" here. Along with Luis Suarez Kelly Smith and I continue driving and evangelizing the idea in hopes it will take hold and help create a new business culture of open, transparent, and collaborative work. To that end, I recently built a presentation now hosted on Slideshare to help illustrate our efforts as we documented them here in our Notes from Rational Support " WOTI " blog series. We've tried to distill the core concepts, ideals, and recommendations down to their essence and... [More]

Tags:  woti rational think-friday rational-client-support lawwe hippie2dot0 thought-leadership

   For some reason I am not as yet able to identify, there has been a great amount of increased chatter across the internet surrounding Google's 20% time concept . Perhaps it is the ever growing need for us to filter through all the information flooding us every day and take time to focus on the things that make us happiest. While Google has formalized the idea into more structured policy, here in IBM Rational we've been doing the same kind of thing for quite a while now, albeit in a more unstructured way; a bit looser to help the creativity... [More]

Tags:  rational thought-leadership innovation rational-client-support op-ed think-friday hackday creativity

   Working out loud .... and thinking out loud. I've seen this phrase several times on the internets, and I think it's my new favorite tagline for the way I like to work, and the way a collaborative enterprise works best.   It's also a great mindfulness practice, if you are inclined that way, and goes a long way toward transforming your workflow to a more collaborative open and transparent model. But what does it mean? Simply, it means making your work visible , even when it's in that ugly semi-formed concept phase (then we call it... [More]

Tags:  transparent open emergent-collaboration think-friday collaboration

First and foremost, all credit for this forehead-smacking moment goes to my fearless cohort, Kelly Smith . She had posted internally on this topic and pointed out that this may make a great "Think Friday"   post here on Notes from Rational Support. If you've been reading our posts for a bit, you'll likely have noticed our typical image crediting at the bottom when we use images not owned by IBM. Both Kelly and I use the Creative Commons attribution pool / search feature on Flickr.com to find fun and interesting images to accompany our... [More]

Tags:  rational-client-support op-ed think-friday rational thought-leadership acdntlpoet community

    i nfluence:   (ˈɪnflʊəns) — n. An effect of one person or thing on another resulting from ability, wealth, position, etc.  　                  Here in Rational Support, we understand the deep value of influence and thought leadership. We work hard to make sure our experiences across the organization are captured and shared out to help all of our clients and other IBMers alike reuse and benefit from our collective knowledge. One of these ways is through our periodic " Top Content " posts which highlight the most reused support... [More]

Tags:  rational acdntlpoet rational-client-support op-ed influence think-friday