NETWORLDING

Someone Special to Watch

David Hornik, Guest Blogger

When he isn't blogging for TED, David is a General Partner at August Capital where he invests in early stage software, infrastructure and Internet-related companies. Prior to joining August Capital, David was a corporate and licensing attorney who represented and advised numerous Internet and enterprise software startups. David has worked with such companies as Yahoo, Six Apart, Evite, Tickle, PayCycle, Ofoto, When.com, WhoWhere?, DoneRight and Sonique.

David has taught Computer Music at Stanford, legal writing at

Harvard

Law

School

and teaches Intellectual Property and Business at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He's also written for the Journal of Law and Business and The Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. He was a founding editor of and frequent contributor to Actual Malice, Stanford's short-lived satire magazine.

David is also the editor of VentureBlog. His musings on life can be found on SaysMe, his personal blog. [Back to the TEDBlog]

College Grad Great Job Resources

Getting ready to graduate? Check out this site that lists the top employers and the numbers they are hiring.

Great, simple, next step? Go to my profile on LinkedIn (click here). Link with me and then do a search for these top employers which will help you connect faster.

http://www.collegegrad.com/topemployers/

The Art of Great Presentations: Networlding Interviews Jeff Hornstein

After experiencing life altering events in his late 20's, Jeff Hornstein discovered his passion. He became driven to empowering and inspiring people in a bigger way. Once he found his calling as a coach-speaker-consultant, he used his new found drive and philosophy of "Don't Settle" to enroll his engineering firm in creating a training department which he profitably managed for 3 years. Realizing it was time to take his career to the next level, Jeff then landed a consulting job with a large player in the Communications-Public Speaking field. During the next 9 plus years, Jeff mastered his ability to coach people to improve their public speaking skills while developing and honing his managerial skills and business acumen.

Determined to leverage his experience, entrepreneurial spirit and "Don't Settle" mind-set, Jeff launched Adams Communications Consulting Inc., whose mission is to help clients in create and deliver more powerful, impactful, and credible presentations. Following, is an interview I did recently with Jeff.

Jeff, tell me what is most rewarding about your work.

Without a doubt it is the satisfaction that comes with helping people overcome their challenges with public speaking and seeing their reaction when they see and feel a remarkable positive difference in a short period of time.  While all the client work is great, I’d have to say the most rewarding experiences are with clients that didn’t think they could overcome their fear of public speaking and they did.  To work with them and see how hard they worked to push themselves to break through their barrier is just the best.  It really is a privilege and honor to have the opportunity to help people in this arena.   

Over the past 10 years, I’ve had the good fortune of helping thousands of people positively impact their ability to delver their message with power and impact..  Whether working with a person that is about to hyperventilate or some high-level executive that is just looking for a little extra edge – helping all of them reach toward their goals has been extremely rewarding and fun.
 
How did you decide to get into the field of helping people improve their presentations?

Prior to getting into this field, I was an engineer for about 10 years.  Shortly into that career, I knew it was not what I was meant to be doing.  You know how many of us struggle to answer the question, “What do I want to be when I grow up?”  From the time I was a senior in high school until I was in my late 20’s, it drove me nuts. Finally after having some life-changing experiences and finding the right mentors I became clear and figured it out.  I was supposed to be coaching, consulting, speaking, teaching and inspiring people to not settle for anything less than they want for themselves. Fortunately I have found a niche in the area of public speaking where I can help provide people with this most critical skill.

Public speaking is always near the top of the list when it comes to peoples’ greatest fears…what have you found is the reason why so many people are so afraid of it?

For the most part it boils down to peoples’ concerns over being embarrassed or looking foolish. We all want to perform well in front of other people, especially when we are speaking publicly.  The challenge is that many of us have an underlying thought that we they might not be good enough to be speaking about whatever we are talking about.  And if we make just he slightest mistake, we worry that others will think we are a fraud. When we apply such self-imposed pressure to be perfect, it is easy to see how anyone can be filled with anxiety and afraid to make any mistake, even while having deep subject matter expertise.

Consequently, we are concerned that if the entire audience is looking at us, they may see our mistakes, so we have a crazy hope that the audience won’t be looking at us.  I often hear some clients tell me “I’m worried that the audience will be looking at me”. I tell them, “They will be looking at you, but not in the way you think.” In other words, we believe they will be looking at us, and if we make a mistake they will perceive us as inept. However, so long as the audience perceives us as credible we will be successful. I show my clients how to be perceived credibly regardless of anxiety, fear, worry, etc. Many have experienced those feelings to some degree, but if they can get to the place (which I help clients with) where they create a perception of credibility they will find themselves growing more and more confident.
How long is a typical engagement for a client to go from a space of feeling scared to death of public speaking, to becoming comfortable with it? 

Engagements for us have been as short as 4 hours (half day) all the way up to 30 hours (split up over the course of several months).  It all depends where the baseline is for the client, how proficient they want to become, and how committed and coachable they are.  Certainly the less fear a person has going into the process, the quicker we can move into more specific suggestions to impact perception.  The greater the fear, more time is needed to help them realize they are not as bad as they think they are.  The greatest tool we use to facilitate this is the video camera.  While most people hate it, but there is no better way to capture exactly what the speaker is or is not doing. Pointing out the areas that need adjusting is critical, but equally as important is pointing out areas of strength.   When they see and start believing in their strengths, the fear starts to melt away.  The key is to identify and convince them of their strengths.       

What do you in your spare time?

When I’m not working, I’m spending most of my time with my wife and 4 kids.  For more information on Jeff, contact us at info@networlding.com.   

Enterprise Networking Strategies - Building Effective Wisdom Networks

An Enterprise Networking Strategy that Increases Effectiveness and Performance

                                   By Steve Benton

The following is a brief summary of a strategy that is gaining more visibility in many large organizations, government bodies, and non-profit agencies. For purposes of this blog, this summary applies to all of them.

Enterprise Networks (ENs) are used by organizations to alter the behavior patterns of their work force without changing the existing organization structure and reporting lines – which is obviously a costly endeavor in any firm. Used appropriately, the power of networks to improve the bottom line stems from their ability to challenge entrenched work patterns. Specifically, they allow firms to:

o    create new, more collaborative approaches to identifying and fixing problems,
o    share lessons learned and stories of successes, and build upon them
o    provide greater transparency into the daily trials and tribulations faced by line staff.

The key premise of such a networking strategy has to do with the enablement of staff to get more accomplished, to do it better and smarter, and for less spend. ENs are a proven resource that allow employees at all levels to give more into the firm while concurrently learning how to deliver quicker, how to leverage existing resources in ways that enrich core capabilities, and to provide solutions without increasing costs, often finding ways to reduce costs in the process.

A few examples of different approaches

o    A leading petrochemical firm formed more than 20 enterprise networks, ranging in size from 50 to several hundred employees, focused on work areas where people could benefit from sharing best practices. A network assessment was used to analyze the effects these networks were having on productivity. One sixty-person network alone contributed $50 million in savings annually to the organization.
o    Wachovia, the fourth largest bank in the U.S., plans to rollout a social networking service to 110, 000 staff by early 2008. The target goal is to deliver a highly sophisticated collaboration platform integrated with multiple applications and enabling workers to locate information and connect online with resources simply, intuitively, and timely.

Adopting ENs is also a means to help develop talent while simultaneously finding new ways to deliver solutions cost-efficiently and effectively. Many large and complex organizations have documented successes in utilizing a networked approach to driving competitive advantage in the development of their talent – successes ranging from adopting a highly focused approach to networking in order to bring mentors and coaches to younger or less experienced staff, to a broader (more open) adoption of online staff connectivity that increases the pool of knowledge resources for everyone.

How it works

The keys to success in executing an EN strategy rests with an organization’s ability to influence and alter the behavior of its staff, to get people to not only work differently but to think differently about how to get the best and most results out of their every effort. Doing so will result in increasing the firm’s ability to identify and remove bottlenecks and redundancies that reduce its ongoing ability to deliver goods and services. ENs help with creativity, too, and bring new pools of ideas that could feed into strategy development and to innovate competitively.

ENs should be established to specifically address key strategic projects’ issues, areas of inefficiencies or decreased effectiveness, to find and eliminate bottlenecks, pain points, and items of large, unnecessary concern (revenue or cost-side). They could be assigned to perform research into areas particularly germane to the organization’s goods and services – be it in product development, industry competitors, client segmentation, or other areas of relevance.

Therefore, to succeed, ENs should be assigned a specific topic area, issue, or workflow for its members to address. A network lead and a senior sponsor should have the backing and support of a firm’s top leaders, appointed by senior management. The members will then engage with each other to share knowledge, stories, lessons learned, review best practices and to brainstorm collectively to create actionable recommendations on how to make things better.

These actionable recommendations should be delivered back to senior management by the sponsors for approval or rejection. In this way, the sponsors also act as champions of the network’s focus. Upon approval of the recommendations – and depending upon the recommendations themselves – in the case of “quick win” solutions, the network members will collectively work to accomplish the changes outlined in the recommendation; in the case of longer term change recommendations, the network members will work to develop change program proposals for resubmission to senior management. Progress on each recommendation should be tracked and reported back to the management team in order to help them prioritize enterprise resources assigned to carry out the change recommendations and to monitor overall effectiveness of each EN.

Social computing and networking technologies and services could be used to further enable the appropriate behavior change of the network members. These include use of Web 2.0 – applications that provide on-line team workspaces, instant messaging, tags/bookmarks, wikis, and blogs. Such tools provide structure to the networks, a repository for storing and sharing relevant information and discussion threads, and enable the networks to exist “virtually” on-line (e.g., without needing a lot of travel and ‘face-time’ in order to collaborate). Each one encourages cooperation amongst the network members that is essential in order for them to succeed. The power of an effective online network is to minimize ineffectiveness that arises from teams not being in the same physical space/time zone by creating a co-location platform based on mutual intent, incentives and process.

For more information, email info@networlding.com.