Nice to see the new MSN Spaces. I’ll ask Maryam what she thinks. Dare Obasanjo (who works on that team) links to the relevant details.
Most people don’t know who Dare’s dad is, by the way. His dad is the president of Nigeria. The other day Dare’s dad joked around with Bill Gates at Davos.
Microsoft’s new VP of HR, Lisa Brummel is on Channel 9 (Jennifer Ritzinger and Charles Torre interview her). She is just the coolest person. That’s what leadership looks like. Take on the tough issues head on. My coworkers have gone to her “listening tour” and have come away impressed. She asked bloggers to “be productive” when criticizing. Totally agree. Yesterday I was talking with some Search Champs about corporate blogging (they are trying to figure out how to improve their own companies). I told them that they should take risks, but always have a goal in mind that you can communicate to other people. Many of the people fired for blogging, when I’ve talked with them afterward, had no good reason to mouth off. No goal that they were trying to push the company toward.
I was talking with David Anderson (our Agile blogger) and Martin Geddes (who writes the awesome Telepocalypse blog about the telecom industry – they both used to work for Sprint together) about changes they tried to implement at Sprint and how tough that was. Martin now is a consultant and we talked about the problems Microsoft is facing and how we’d like to use our blogs to help change.
Me? I’m refocusing on small things internally (small teams that are kicking ass) and pointing outward to cool stuff elsewhere. I’ve noticed that is the behavior that most helps my goal. What’s my goal? I’m a geek and want cool new technologies that make my life better.
For example, early this morning I woke up and talked with Adomo CEO Jeff Snider and SVP Andy Feit. They have a really interesting phone system for corporations. Most people when I show them the features we have at Microsoft say “I wish my company had those.” Things like when you call our main switchboard number you can just say my name and you’ll get put right through to me without waiting for a human to pick up. Or, if you hit my voice mail box it records your voice mail and sends that to me as email (which I can then get on my phone). Really cool stuff. Anyway, Adomo does the same thing for companies. They sell a box that you put in your telecom closet that gives you all those features and more.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
Go to Scobleizer …
