What changes will we choose, in the face of Covid-19?

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This is a time of big change – but at least in our individual lives, the changes most likely to stick are those we each choose to make.  Of course life is a fascinating mix of choice and circumstance. As Sartre once wrote, “freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

What changes do we want to make coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic?  I want to really learn to lead in a more whole heartedly, full-throatedly, networked fashion.   I’m inspired by my online friend Simon Terry, who incidentally mentioned that Sartre quote to me the other day, to not only think but speak in those terms. Simon is the leader of a group called Change Agents World Wide.  It’s a network of people, subtitled “Changing work, one human at a time.”

There’s lots of discussion about how Covid-19 will change us.  I’m intrigued by some of the discussion about how it will accelerate best practices we’d been slower to adopt than we knew we should – like decarbonization and climate change efforts.  (Here’s one big link on that, from McKinsey.)

One specific example I find intriguing is the developer relations community started by boutique firm Redmonk called Flyless, described here. It’s an online community for software developers flying less, or not at all, because they still want to talk without going to conferences – and maybe flying less is going to be a good idea in the long term.  Starting that community is awesome.

I’d like to think about what we want to change, how we can help each other make those changes, how we can hold each other to high standards, “create a container” for changes, and point ourselves in the general direction we want to move in once we’re coming out of this thing.

It’s tempting to think that a centralized authority will be the determining factor, or that a “great man” will determine the direction of history, or that it’s so much bigger than us we have no control over it – but has there ever been a time when it was more clear that we’re all connected, for better and for worse?  What do we want to do about it?

Help wanted: INFLUENCER RELATIONS MANAGER

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I love my job. I get asked every other month what my Employee Satisfaction score is and at last report, it was a 10 out of 10!

I’ve worked at Sprinklr for more than 3 years now and it just keeps getting better. And by that I mean I just keep learning more every day. And we’re making it a better place to work almost every day.

The team I manage has an average score of 9 out of 10, so they’re not as happy as I am yet – but they’re pretty darned happy too.

I’d like to invite you to be a part of our team, if the following job description sounds like a good fit for you. When will I be filling this position? I’m not entirely sure, but soon.

If you’re interested, please email me at Marshall.kirkpatrick@sprinklr.com with the subject line “influencer marketing position.” I expect between 20 and 50 people to email me about it, but we’ll see! I’ll try to respond to everyone personally. I look forward to hearing from and/or meeting you!

Help wanted:

INFLUENCER RELATIONS MANAGER

We’re hiring a smart, communicative, B2B Influencer Relations Manager responsible for the development, execution and measurement of influencer marketing and collaboration campaigns used to drive both customer acquisition through demand generation and sales support, and internal learning from influencers who can contribute knowledge and insights to internal stakeholders throughout the business. This position works with cross-functional teams, especially Content Marketing, Events, and Analyst Relations. The position will be based in either Portland, Oregon or New York, (remote? Maybe…) reporting into the VP, Marketing.

About Sprinklr

Sprinklr’s mission is to enable every organization on the planet to make their customers happier. We do this with the world’s #1 social suite, which helps enterprises deliver memorable customer experiences with an integrated suite of Market Research, Customer Care, Social Media Management, and Social Advertising. Headquartered in New York City with 1,300 employees in 22 offices, Sprinklr works with more than 1,500 of the world’s most valuable brands, including: Allstate, McDonald’s, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nike, Signify, Procter & Gamble, Samsung, Santander, SAP, Shell, Verizon, and Visa. Sprinklr’s partners include Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Microsoft, and SAP. For more information, visit sprinklr.com or follow us at @sprinklr.

Primary Responsibilities of This Position

Help scale execution of influencer collaboration programs, ranging from weekly video and audio podcasts to influencer collaboration on blog posts, webinars, events, and more

Collaborate closely with VP of Marketing to build effective, smart campaigns, balancing demand generation with long-term relationship building and maintenance, learning, and integrity

Configure and use customer experience software (Sprinklr) to monitor for influencer-derived insights and opportunities

Collaborate with internal teams focused on content generation, advertising, events, and more.

Solve problems and generate business value.

Minimum Qualification

3+ years marketing experience executing marketing programs

Demonstrable intellectual curiosity

A growth mindset

Better-than-average written and verbal communication skills

Could this be you? If so, send me an email! Do you know someone who could be a great fit? Pass this along to them!

15 Notes: How Data is Revolutionizing the NFL

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I attended SXSW 2019 with my employer Sprinklr, and one of the sessions I got a lot out of was titled How Data is Revolutionizing the NFL.  I took notes on paper and now that I’m back in the office, I transcribed some of the most interesting notes from the session and thought I’d share them here.

I’m not a football fan, but I love data analysis, and this session was a lot of fun.  I think there’s a lot here that can be a source of inspiration for work in just about any sector, especially work that involves data.

* Each player has an individual game plan for each game (I didn’t realize that but of course it makes sense.  When I put my work to-do list on my calendar, that makes me feel a little like I’ve got an individual game plan in support of my team’s plan.)
* LA Rams analytics team has 3 people: a forecaster, a data architect, and a front end developer for internal systems.
* Whether it’s today or the 90’s before there were analytics teams, there have always been people looking at data, looking at probabilities, and trying to help teams make good decisions
* When you see players who are successful, you look to see if you can discover any new traits they have. Then you can look to find other people who have those traits as well but who may have missed other benchmarks and thus not been discovered.
* One person can’t do analysis of all the data available, but if the work is documented and reproducible, then you can come back later and repeat it, or pick it up again to iterate with new data and knowledge. As long as you’re iterating in your analysis, that’s good.
* These analysts are working with R, Python, SQL databases, and spreadsheets are often the final product that’s sent to someone
* You’re not going to be 100% correct in your forecasts, in fact your failure rate is going to be very high – and you just have to get used to that
* Much of the analytics are used for tracking player workload for optimization (makes me think about capacity management in an information worker’s worklife)
* The NFL is using data to try to make fans smarter, so they can hang out with their friends and say “you should look out for this when the game is being played.”  When you put the names of receivers and who’s covering them up on the screen, people love that. (cool validation of this as a commercially viable value add)
* For QBs air yards is a key stat. Everything these days is a quick, controlled game. We’re asking QBs to throw shorter passes and they should have about 60% pass completion rate
* Data science is a great place for people from diverse backgrounds to showcase your abilities by analyzing public data and find new perspectives. You can showcase your abilities, get attention for it, demonstrate, show your work, share your code
* Communication is super important. As an analytics person, you should be able to translate your work to anyone who could use it. That’s just as important as the ability to do the work itself.  (I’m pretty sure it was Namita Nandakumar who said that.)
* People think stats are going to tell you something dramatically different than what you think – but they often don’t. They often tell you something smaller, like who on your team has the potential to play a larger role.
* You can support people moving toward more statistical thinking in an incremental fashion: show one success first, then move toward more grey areas
* Having discipline in this job is key because there are so many interesting things you could be analyzing, you must constantly assess and reassess projects

Those were my notes, I hope you find them useful as well!

The growth benefits of blog subscription

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I’m not going to write yet another post about how to grow your blog subscribers (in my experience working for blogs like TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb, our key tactics were to write regularly and to break news on topics of widespread interest) but instead I want to share some thoughts on the personal and professional growth opportunities presented by ongoing reading of subscriptions to one or more specific blogs.

You may follow bloggers on Twitter or email, but I find it useful to subscribe by RSS for an interface dedicated to long articles. I do that through Feedly and lately through Pocket, via IFTTT, in order to get the articles read to me aloud on my phone when I’m in transit. (My new favorite is The Living Library, about data and society.)

There’s a four part “growth mentality” model I’m going to use here to talk about the benefits of subscription, but you might appreciate using the model itself for other things as well.

What are the benefits you could capture by growing in this way? I’m motivated to subscribe to blogs for one reason in particular: they are a powerful way to be exposed to thoughtful perspectives on matters that may be useful to me later. I regularly get to cite something at work that’s really useful and that I read on a blog. I high five myself in my mind when I do. Regular reading of high quality longer form sources is a fast track to building out the mental toolbox.

If I could really nail regular reading of my subscriptions, I think I could add a lot of powerful timely knowledge to what I have to offer at work.

What’s something else I’ve succeeded at that’s inspiringly similar in challenges and opportunities? I have totally succeeded at adding both daily work logging and daily personal journaling, after deciding I wanted to years ago and struggled for a bit. So I’m confident I could add regular reading of my subscriptions too. I have, but this is the second question in the model – and I could get all the better at reading my subscriptions, too.

Who is someone else I’ve seen successfully grow in a similar way? My wife has added some practices to her intellectual life that I find pretty inspiring.

What would I say in a letter to a friend advising them how to grow in this way? I’d advise anyone to find an interface that works well for you, to refactor and clean up your subscriptions regularly, to not worry about unread items, and to consider a relationship with your items that is optimized for quality over quantity. One article considered deeply and connected to other matters in an actionable way may be worth 10 articles or more quickly scanned and all-but-forgotten. Finally, I’d recommend using the BJ Fogg method of building new habits: keep it small, tie it to an established anchor habit, and celebrate each time you do it to train your brain with positive reinforcement.

There you go! Now I’m going to take action on this. Next thing will be to try to figure out how to write blog posts regularly again, using the same growth model as well. 🙂

How to have important blog posts read to you aloud on your phone

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Information overload is a defining challenge of our time. It’s tempting to just shut down, ignore all the incredible things on the internet, or rely on serendipity and social feeds to bring you what you need. You don’t have to do that, though.

There are strategies and tools that you can use to tap thoughtfully into the abundance of knowledge being published online without being overwhelmed. One tactic I have added to my practice lately has been the following method of having every new post on a few important blogs read to me aloud. This is something I’ve mentioned to several people, casually, and they’ve told me I should write a blog post about how to do it.

I do this for the blog of the company I work for (Sprinklr). And for other companies and organizations I find so inspiring I want to try to read everything they post too. I just subscribed to Stefaan Verhulst’s excellent new Living Library this way. There are a variety of sources I want to keep good track of.

The newest way I’ve been doing it is by using the mobile app Pocket and its wonderful text-to-speech continuous play audio feature. Bookmark an article to Pocket and it will read the article aloud while you clean your kitchen or walk your dog. The voice is a touch robotic but I’ve gotten used to it.

I put things into Pocket in many different ways, but using the tool If This, Then That, you can put any new blog post into Pocket from a specific source.

Here’s the process in a one minute video, written out below.

1. Create an account on IFTTT.
2. Create an account on Pocket.
3. Create a new “applet” and select “RSS” (really simple syndication, the primary form of automated feed that blogs publish their articles to)
4. Grab the feed for the blog or website you want to subscribe to. You may need to view the source in your browser and look for the feed in the code. This is not hard to do. It’s ok, you can do it.
5. Plug that feed URL into IFTT
6. Then, select Pocket as the next service to activate. When there’s a new article in the RSS feed for the blog, then send that link to Pocket.
7. You’ll be prompted to connect your Pocket account and your IFTTT account. Once that’s done, you can create your RSS-to-Pocket applet and then it will be run automatically every day.

Now you can load up Pocket on your phone (see screenshot below), click on the headphones icon, and it will read aloud all the articles you’ve bookmarked and all the blog posts that have come in through IFTTT.

It’s a pretty great way to regularly keep up with a blog or organization that’s important to you.

It’s easier than ever to picture corporate social responsibility verified by blockchain

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Walmart announced today that it will require suppliers of leafy greens to upload data to a private blockchain provided by IBM next year. The goal is to make it much faster to verify origins of greens responsible for food borne illness. That will be good for people who buy spinach at Walmart and for Walmart’s reduced costs in responding to crisis.

There’s sure to be an innovation dividend, too. It’s not hard to imagine this expanding across the biggest supply chain in the world, and then to jump into more firms even beyond the other places it’s currently being tested.

Bloomberg: “IBM is working on food traceability with 10 other companies, including Dole Food Co., Unilever NV and Driscoll’s Inc., a berry supplier. The computer giant holds a leading 32 percent share of the $700 million-plus market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. said in January, and has 1,500 working in the field.”

Let’s see CSR on the blockchain

This sounds like a great start but I sure would like to see the immutable ledger paradigm put into networks like these supply chains and used to track:

  • Climate impact
  • Worker respect

Just that! Verified by 3rd parties, I’m sure, but with that verification certified by said blockchain.

Help slow down climate apocalypse and use blockchain to prove that your whole team is doing it. I’ll buy more if you do, and I know I’m not alone.

E-books from the public library make it easier to expand your horizons

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I just finished Atul Gawande’s book Better, on the science of performance improvement, especially in medicine, and it was worth the time it took to read. I might have paid for it; the last book (A Very Brief Introduction to the Future) and the next book (Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality) on my reading list were things I paid for in print.

I’ve previewed and reserved On Grand Strategy though and that’s one I wouldn’t have paid for – it’s too far outside my core interests. I learned something really big from it: the importance of thinking in terms of strategic sequences. That’s something that’s easier said than done but hugely important and much easier to do when you think about it consciously.

Because we all paid taxes to fund the public library, and because ebooks are so easy to quickly check out from home, the diversity of ideas that I’m being exposed to is substantially increased relative to the books I’d be willing and able to buy in hard copy. If that’s true even for me, I can only imagine how true it might be for other people less apt to invest in exposure to diverse perspectives.

I’m thinking about this just after leaving a community swimming pool, where for a few dollars people of all kinds of backgrounds have come to be in the water. It’s far more diverse that my workplace, than the natural foods grocery store I shop at, or the last restaurant I ate at.

Collective creation of free and low-cost resources is a powerful way to expand and enrich people’s experiences and perspectives. If we as a society choose corporate alternatives to these collective institutions, optimized for profit and efficiency instead of for public accessibility, it will be a great loss. Let’s make sure to support and appreciate those public institutions.