BNET blog has uploaded this video which is a must-watch for all the management guys.

What with the crisis in the economy, employees are especially concerned about their performance reviews. As a manager, you probably hate them, too. They’re a bureaucratic pain in the you-know-what, one that you would rather avoid. As a result, you wait until the last minute to prepare. Don’t do it, says management consultant Leila Bulling Towne in this new BNET video. Instead, plan your reviews carefully to put your employees, and yourself, at ease.

Here is the video:

Vopium is a Danish-Pakistani portal that focus on providing a platform for almost free calls and SMS to any part of the world. As we covered in one of earlier posts, they have got a  funding of EUR4.2 million.

The company’s operations are mostly based out of Lahore since 2003 and currently 50 employees are developing new applications in this facility. Tanveer Sharif, Vopium’s co-founder, recently told me that they are planning to double the workforce before the end of 2009. They are also planning to expand their operations.

Speaking of VC funding, he said that it has both its pros and cons but they’ll help other Pakistani companies to get funding.

As for the VC funding, let me assure you that it is not always a blessing. We have raised USD 6.8M last year, and we would love to help other Pakistani companies to achieve financial injections.

He also said that they are helping other Danish-Pakistani companies to set up their operations in Pakistan. Some of these are Gatefone, Youpark and Getmore.

Downloading, chatting, Youtube, even Facebook is a major NO in most of the office environment- and that for a valid reason. Most employers like their employees to be totally focused on work and nothing else, since this is the exact reason employees are hired for so that the employer’s right to monitor and limit your unofficial online activities.

However, there are two sorts of monitoring, ethical monitoring and un-ethical monitoring. These days, online monitoring is one of the recent ways to judge an employee’s performance. Companies have well defined policies regarding usage of internet. This online monitoring may have many positive aspects but this also raises the chance of unethical monitoring. I tell you what unethical monitoring is, that is reading your emails, chats or personal data without your consent or knowledge under the pretext of monitoring.

Most of us, when come to office in the morning, first thing we do along with checking our official email is to check our personal account as well. How many of us stop and think of what if your boss or any other techie person in your office is also reading your personal emails or chats? Or what if there is a spyware on your computer without your knowledge? This is actually happening! Now if getting the work done is the employer’s right then privacy of checking personal email is the employee’s right too. If the employer fears of valuable information being exploited or leaked then these websites should be banned from the workplace instead of being monitored discreetly as this is I believe, totally unethical.

Corporations see in software’s seductive invisibility and seemingly open-ended flexibility a never-ending frontier of promise, where hope triumphs over reality …. And hope, unfortunately, has never been a very effective strategy.

The above quote is taken from a paper “The Trouble With Enterprise Software” by Cynthia Rettig, published by Sloan Management Review. I recommend it to everyone who is involved with software and business. It is especially useful for non-technical executives. If you are in the IT/software field, it is very common to experience the tension between business and IT. This paper debunks many of the common myths and makes an honest assessment of the often messy situation with enterprise software.

A few excerpts from the paper.

As work became more complex and specialized over the 20th century, the use of data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more and more analysis and fact-based decision making intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for this kind of world.” Of course, digital technology not only supported that complexity but also played a large part in actually creating it, weaving a continuous web of unending data.

What do business executives miss?

Business executives, however, simply want to continue to believe that technology will lower costs, improve processes and reduce the size of the workforce. They don’t want to understand IT issues. In part, this is because technology requires special skills and intellectual talents that are quite distinct from those needed to understand and manage business organizations, markets and strategy. But it is also because executives do not like to hear about the downside of technology.

On the difficulty of aligning technical and business sides:

… long-term plan calls for closer and closer communication and collaboration between the IT and business sides of the organization. While much to be desired, this has proved difficult in the past, and with increasing complexity in software systems, it is unlikely to improve by itself in the future. Differing backgrounds and perspectives, goals, even vocabularies — all hamper efforts to improve communication across this internal digital divide. Biases intrude: A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. of Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that only 28% of CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative in terms of business process improvement

The pdf of the paper is available through Google search.

The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Has enterprise software become too complex to be effective?
Cynthia Retting
Fall 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 21

I stumbled upon this blog post and found it to be a useful checklist for preparing for sales, demos and other selling activities. I have included one set of list but there’s more at the post about the meeting, followups and sales strategy.

Build The Client Relationship

The positive Client relationship that may take an eternity to develop… can be destroyed in an instant

1. Listen: Talk 10%, listen 90%.
Clients will love you and heck, you might just learn something.

2. Know the client’s business:
Do the research and understand their products, distribution, competition and position within the market.

3. Know the client’s customer:
Understand every step and emotion their consumers go through on the path to a purchase.

4. Be their brand steward:
Be protective of what’s responsible and relevant to their brand.

5. Exceed their expectations:
Surprise them with more than they expect and they’ll see more value.

6. Persuade, don’t sell:
Clients can smell a selling style and they think it stinks.

7. Don’t be self-serving:
Judge and support the work from a business perspective. If a client thinks you are looking at creative for creative sake the trust evaporates.

8. Demonstrate enthusiasm:
Show them that you love their business and helping them solve problems.

9. Know the client:
When a client knows the creative people on a personal level it goes a long way.

10. Apply some of these steps to the people you work with:
When the internal team trusts and respects each other, the work only gets better.

Source: Ramp Projects Blog

The rise in popularity of semi-professional social networks has led to a large number of digital version of paper tigers. Just to be clear, by a paper tiger I refer to someone who artificially inflates his or her online profile to make it appear more impressive than it is in reality.

This is no different than people who exaggerate on their resumes and interviews. However now the digital profiles are the norm and they are ah, so easy to manipulate and inflate. On a similar note, some folks are obsessed with getting connected with every living soul they can find. The whole networking thing is becoming a confused spaghetti of friends, colleagues, people you actually know and folks who are”friends” of acquaintances of someone who has exchanged a few emails with you. A senior executive I know refuses to use linkedin.com because he is afraid that he will offend someone by ignoring their connection request!

Anyway back to the trend of inflated online profiles – I have stopped taking these things seriously because after you meet a few of these people you realize that it can be a lot of hype and marketing. Instead of taking these profiles at face value, just keep in mind that there is some variance and self-promoters will use all tools to their advantage. This is just something which happens as the current networks have very little trust built in the system. You are what you claim to be and that is it.