Everyone by now must know the shake up that’s happened at RIM (mother and father to BlackBerry)? If you don’t, go here for a catch up.

This morning I opened my RSS Reader to be presented with these articles as the first three that had been assembled as the main stories of the day:

• 4 Things RIM’s New CEO Can Do to Fix the Company (Mashable)
• 5 Things RIM’s New CEO Absolutely Must Not Do (TechCrunch)
• Six Strategy Insights RIM’s New CEO Can Use (Harvard Business Review)

I couldn’t help but smile and then laugh a little. I was instantly reminded of a comedy sketch from a long time ago, where a guy was saying he was going to create a Get-Fit DVD, and call it ‘GET FIT IN 9 MINUTES’. His rationale was simple, if you were looking for Get-Fit DVD’s and you saw the 10 minute workout and the 9 minute workout, you’d clearly take the 9 minute workout.

Based on that logic (which I like very much), RIM’s new CEO, Thorsten Heins, is going to be reading Mashable today, should he be looking for advice from the internet : )

In case you don’t feel like it, or don’t have the time, here’s a brief summary of the 4-6 things he should and shouldn’t do…

Mashable’s 4 Things He Can Do

1. Narrow Your Focus
2. Build A Better PlayBook
3. Invest In Apps
4. Resist Temptation To Fast-Track

TechCrunch’s 5 Things He Absolutely MUST NOT DO

1.  Be Complacent
2. Lose Track Of Time
3. Neglect Developers
4. Ignore Employees
5. Follow

HBR’s 6 Strategy Insights He Can Use

1. Don’t Have Fuzzy Objectives
2. Don’t Involve Too Many People
3. Don’t Be Rushed
4. Define Challenges
5. Identify A Clear Destination
6. Conceive Smart Options

P.S. Don’t you love HBR’s gentle business speak : )

I came across a simple and interesting service this past weekend. It’s called Twocation, and if you give it permission to access your Twitter account, it’ll return an World Map image of where your followers on Twitter are based.

There are, by the way, a fairly impressive collection of services for Twitter. They’re not run by Twitter, but you can find almost anything you need to about the make-up of your Twitter followers if you dig around a little. The services I’ve come across for Twitter include:

• Find new followers
• Manage current followers (find out who’s not following you that you’re following, and the other way around
• Where they live (this post)?
• The growth of your followers?
• Are your tweets being read and therefore how great your influence is?
• How often you tweet, your average number of tweets, when you mostly tweet?
• Who are other people following that you are as well?

The list is a fairly long one. My general rule of thumb is that if you can imagine the data you need, someone else has already, and they’ve built a service : )

This image is of my followers. I’m not very popular from South America to Russia. A nice diagonal band of opportunity to find Twitter friends : )

One of the focus areas of my work as a Conference / Keynote Speaker is Talent. And one of the theories that informs some of my Talent thinking is Generational Theory.

Yesterday I received a some cartoons via email highlighting the changes of the last 10 or 20 years. I picked a few of them for this post. They speak loud and clear about how things have changed for different generations in how they experience their world.

You’ve heard the saying, ‘comparing apples with apples’? In the case of the infographic below, it’s both impractical and silly, and will leave you wondering why you’re even trying (well it did that to me). The infographic was posted on Mashable from MBAOnline.com

It’s really a little silly, but I liked it because I can just imagine the person coming up with the initial thought. In my world, whoever it was, must have been engaged in something really boring, drifted off into another world, and then wondered what might happen in you compared Apples (those you eat) with Apples (those that edutain you)?

I’m not sure you’ll ever have an intelligent context to use it, but next time someone says that the situation requires you to compare apples with apples, a small smile will emerge on your face : )

Before Mac there was very little by way of GUI (Graphical User Interface). I can still remember the green and black screens with command lines to get into and out of programmes. And then things changed. Suddenly we could click on things to navigate our way around using icons as signposts. Enter Susan Kare, the mother of the Mac Icon…

Kare joined Apple Computer, Inc. after receiving a call from her high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld, in the early 1980s. Susan Kare worked at Apple Computer starting in 1982. She was originally hired into the Macintosh software group to design user interface graphics and fonts; her business cards read “Macintosh Artist”. – Wikipedia

It was a wild thought reading about Susan Kare. I’d never thought about the person that made our computer experience pretty. I’d never imagined that there was a giant conversation going on with the developers as to how things needed to look. And as you read about Kare, you discover that much care was taken to ensure that the icons were not only beautiful, but meaningful as well.

In a FastCompany Article on Kare some of her history is described:

After graduating from New York University with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare took a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where she quickly felt like she was on the wrong side of the creative equation. “I’d go talk to artists in their studios for exhibitions,” she recalls, “but I really wanted to be sitting in my studio.” Soon Kare earned a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel. That was the project she was tackling in her garage in Palo Alto when she got a call from a high-school friend named Andy Hertzfeld, who was a lead software architect for the nascent Macintosh operating system.

Kare mined ideas from everywhere: the history of Asian art, the geeky gadgets and toys that festooned her fellow designers’ cubicles, and the glyphs that Depression-era hobos chalked on walls to point the way to a sympathetic household. The symbol on every Apple command key–a stylized castle seen from above–was commonly used at Swedish campgrounds to denote an interesting sightseeing destination. 

If Susan Kare had started badly, one wonders if Steve Jobs would eventually be able to say, “We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

For those of you who feel more than grateful for her work –> signed, numbers and limited edition prints of her icons can be purchased here.

Welcome to 2012. Another year, and the challenges facing us didn’t seem to go away over the December break (for those fortunate enough to have had one).

Last year I wrote a post about the founder of Patagonia, and at least about his relationship with Walmart. I came across another interview with Yvon Chouinard in FastCompany, with more thoughts on environmental sustainability.

Chouinard is serious about the environment. Serious enough to close down his business if he can’t get it right.

I’m kind of like a samurai,” says Yvon Chouinard, founder of outdoor-apparel maker Patagonia. “They say if you want to be a samurai, you can’t be afraid of dying, and as soon as you flinch, you get your head cut off. I’m not afraid of losing this business.

An initiative he speaks of in the interview is 1% for the Planet. A description from the FastCompany article:

Since 1985, Patagonia has given at least 1% of its sales to environmental charities, and in 2001, Chouinard cofounded One Percent for the Planet, an alliance of mostly small companies that pledge to do the same. One Percent recently notched its 1,000th member; in total, its members have given $42 million to more than 1,700 groups.

I had a look at the 1% for the Planet website and there are only two business members in Africa. One of them in Kenya and the other in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Sinamatella Productions based in Vlaeberg, and describe themselves as:

Sinamatella Productions aims, through the media of film and photography, to celebrate the outdoors, inspire people to get outside (whether it be in their own backyard or on a different continent) and engage Joe Public to make these adventures happen.

It’s the holidays. Today marks my last official day of work for 2011, and I leave tonight with my family for our annual pilgrimage of rest and fun. For those still at work, and those with time to drop in on websites like this one, here’s my final post of 2011. It’s made up of some music and hopefully a little festive season chuckling (assuming you’re not the President of South Africa who’s watching : )

I watched the two videos, embedded below, during the past month. Both of them represented further evidence of how FaceBook is no longer on the fringe or a fad in South African society. It’s mainstream. It’s part of our language. A large number of us know what it is, and use it. It’s become part of our humour, and we even sing songs about it. Take a look and judge for yourself.

VID 1 - Sizohlangana ku Facebook
I was sitting in another meeting, in another office, in a ‘the details aren’t important’ part of South Africa, when one of the meeting participants mentioned DJ Cleo and his song “FaceBook” (embedded below). I confess I’d not heard of DJ Cleo, and while I’ve done a little research on who he is, I still haven’t come across anything of his I know. Yet.

VID 2 – Trevor Noah on President Zuma and FaceBook
The second vid I saw a link to off of Twitter. It’s a piece of one of Trevor Noah’s comedy routines. Specifically his thoughts on whether Jacob Zuma ‘does’ FaceBook.

Enjoy your break if you’re having one, and look forward to yours if you’re not : )

I’ve argued for some time now that loyalty is moving from vertical to horizontal. In short, for many young people their next job is going to come from their social networks and not their manager. It’s one of the reasons online profiles are so pristine, well kept and regularly updated.

Just yesterday I assisted a client with choosing a graduate for their Grad Programme for 2012. I was sent 10 CV’s to wade through. I didn’t read one of them. I simply searched all 10 on FaceBook and LinkedIn and had a look at their online profiles. I wasn’t the only filtering process, but here’s the interesting thing…. I sent back 3 candidates I liked, and 2 of them where liked by the rest of the panel, who took a traditional route in their selections. I’m certainly not advocating for a new recruitment science here, just that it was interesting.

According to the infographic (from Mashable and MBAOnline.com) below, 18 400 000 Americans got their current job through FaceBook (8 000 000 from Twitter and 10 200 000 from LinkedIn). Those are impressive numbers. I don’t know what SA stats are, but using FaceBook numbers of both countries, and assuming South Africans ‘do’ FaceBook for recruitment like Americans do, there’d be roughly 550 000 South Africans who’s current jobs were found through FaceBook. Very impressive numbers, assuming you could do that?

Please click on the image for full size

Joey deVilla posted the image below on his blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. It’s a satirical look at the organisational structures of six of the big tech companies, Apple, Amazon, FaceBook, Microsoft, Oracle and Google. Certainly it made me smile as I looked through each of them, in the context of information I read every day about the leadership and management styles of each of these companies.

Of course each company has an image like this. There’s the official image, the one that’s used in induction programmes and shown to the public, and then there’s ‘the way things really work around here’ image. That’s what the images below are. They represent the real the way it works around here. And it’s the more important image if you want to succeed in that particular company.

This is the image that determines management and leadership styles? It’s the image that gives you the most comprehensive understanding of what can and can’t be done? It’s the image that will give you the most accurate view of whether you’re going to survive or not in the long term?

One of my favourite books that deals with this is by Charles Handy. His book, The Gods of Management, is described my Amazon as:

Handy shows that each “god,” or company culture, stems from different assumptions about the basis of power and influence, what motivates people, how people think and learn, and how change should occur. And he reveals that firms with the wrong culture often wallow in inefficiency and unhappiness, either blind to their plight or unwilling to struggle to find the right culture for the firm. 
If managers are aware of their own “gods” and of the cultural choices available for them and their organization, they can create a more productive and satisfying workplace.

It’s one of those books I’ve often turned to for wisdom and understanding around organisational structures and the management and leadership styles that best suite them? As Handy points out in the book, there’s no right or wrong, but understanding what each style allows and doesn’t allow is critical. Without this understanding you risk swimming against the stream and wasting much energy.

Walmart is a large talking point in South Africa at the moment. Consumers talk positively about Walmart because of the competitive prices they’ll bring to Massmart businesses, and almost everyone else speaks of the giant evil monster who will un-create jobs, close down businesses and pollute the environment. It’s a tough conversation at dinner parties.

This week I wrote about Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard in, ‘Let my People go Surfing, and they’re still Surfing‘. Here’s an interview from FastCompany with Yvon Chouinard talking about his relationship with Walmart, his hope for them, and their intentions around sustainability.

Many would argue that it’s an unlikely friendship – Walmart and Yvon Chouinard.

Take a look at the video embedded below

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