Thursday morning I left Minneapolis for the move to Seattle. Overall it was a great trip- lots of time to think,, some good podcasts, and a little time to relax.
On Thurs- I drove to Billings- about 12 hours. By far the most boring part of the trip. North Dakota and Eastern Montana is insanely mundane- and straight.
But on Friday, things got better. I drove from Billings to Big Sky to get some biking in. I went up on the mountain to do some downhilling. First time I’ve done that- it was pretty intense. It rained all morning so it was really slimy. That along with the steepness, the rocks and the tight turns, I spent some good time off my two wheels. With the helmet, the arm, and shin guards they make you wear it was all good. Definitely want to do it again soon.
After biking, I drove to Missoula to crash for the night.
On Sat, I went on to Seattle, checked in to my corporate housing and went and watched the USA Mens National team beat up on Grenada 4-0. One of the advantages of soccer being unpopular in the US is the ability to get awesome seats day of the game. 2nd row.
Tomorrow is my first day at Microsoft. Orientation followed by happy hour with my new boss- Marty Collins.
My new title will be Social Media Marketing Manager on the Windows team. I’ll be starting in Redmond in early July.
Yesterday I also spent a good portion of the day shitting my pants as I made the rounds to tell people. That catholic guilt runs deep. I got a lot of good questions about why I’m leaving and it comes down to the most thoughtful comments I received (from one of the most thoughtful leaders I’ve worked with).
“You hope that you can make people happy in the work they do and they stay at Best Buy. But sometimes you can’t. Then you have to ask will the move make the person happy. If it does, you support the person. And then you hope that you find a way to work together down the road.”
So the simple answer is yes, the move will make me happy. I’ll be working for one of the best companies in the world on one of its most important product launches. We’ll be close to my wife’s family. And we get to live in Seattle (love that town).
I’m happy yes- but also thankful for the last 4 years at Best Buy. They invested heavily in me, trusted me, and gave me opportunities that I didn’t think were possible at large corporations. I don’t take that lightly and owe them a lot. I’m walking out of here after 4 years a very different person then when I came in.
So a few highlights of what I’ve learned….
Lots of small ideas are better than big ones
Its ok to fail (and you should fail small and often)
Actions are more important than anything you tell me
Your method defines you- not the projects you work on
You need to stay connected to the outside- too much self think will make you slow, irrelevant, and predictable
Yesterday Jeremiah Owyang was at Best Buy and we had the chance to sit down with him for a couple hours. One of the things that we talked about was the age old problem anyone working in social tech faces:
“How do you get people/collegues/executives to understand the importance of social and more importantly, how do you help them get comfortable with participation?”
Jeremiah reinforced one of the tenets that we believe in. Start small and start internally. We’ve talked about that as the simple idea of practice. As weird as it sounds, people have to practice being social in the online space.
For lots of reasons, the corporate hierarchy that we’ve all grown up in has trained us to behave less like individual humans representing a brand and more like a homogonized entity. The only way to break free of this is find your voice, to get comfortable, and just like in real life, act like a decent human being who is looking to make friends.
Sounds easy but it freaks people out-When we try to convince people to try, you can smell the fear. People are scared of looking stupid, about having the right thing to say. All the same fears we had as kids trying to impress or make new friends.
And that’s where practice starts. Just as you had to feel your way through all those awkward years in puberty, highschool, college, then your comfortable work life, you have to push yourself to grow and to change once more. The safest place to to that is inside the organization. Set up tools that let you practice before you hit the streets and try with your customers.
Dan Haugen, a local writer, recently wrote an article on Best Buy’s journey to becoming more social. You can read the article here. I think it does a nice job of showing how practicing internally is leading to really cool things on the outside.
I’m going to be completely honest- I wish BlueShirt Nation wasn’t the focal point- its my hang up and I’ll get over it. That said, what BSN represents is important. It let us, as an organization, practice being social. It led to the development of more tools in the organization (Loop Marketplace, Watercooler, BSN Mix) that let us practice being more social. These tools helped legal practice getting comfortble with new policy. They helped executives see the power of transparency in action. And they utlimately led us to the place we are today- trying hard to figure out an open social approach to strengthening relationships with our customers by sharing our values, our knowledge, and our individual people. See more about one of the recent experiments here.
UPDATE 4/10 8P CST: Just saw Jeremiah Owyang posted his thoughts on our use of internal social tools. Read his post here.
We’re trying something new- one of the most powerful things I believe a company can do- share who we really are. And who we are is made up of our people; What they know, what they’re experiencing, what their values are, how the culture is celebrated. @odonnell gave me a glimmer of hope that we’re on the right track.
Last week we started by finding employees who wanted to help add to the Best Buy’s voice through Twitter. Its new, we’re learning, and we’re trying to get better. Let us know what you like and hate.
Here’s a much more detailed post from Ben Hedrington’s blog on why and how we’re doing it.
On March 3rd, Gary Koelling and I are presenting at Computer World’s Premier IT Leaders Conference. When they first contacted us, it didn’t feel like a good fit for the work we’ve done. After all, the event is the “only executive conference where you can hear from—and network with—Computerworld’s Premier 100 IT Leaders and Alumni.” Not the crowd we typically roll with:) But they were interested in our story and thought others might be too. Here’s a first draft of the presentation we’ll be giving. Based on the agenda I think it’ll be different.
Giftag is gift registry Add On for FireFox and Explorer. It lets you pick things from any site, add them to a list, and share that list where ever you want. Its free, it supports open standards, and its recently been re-platformed on Google App Engine.
Here’s a quick recap from our development team about why we chose GAE, what we like about it, what APIs we use, what we wish it had, and a few tips for people getting started on GAE.
Tonight I was part of a panel at the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. The presentation is embedded below.
One thing that struck me is how reactionary the conversation was- how do you “use” social technology to manage your brand- it felt very defensive.
I tried to hit the following points- not sure if I did the way I wanted. So here they are…
Before you touch social technology- you need to ask yourself what kind of relationship you want to have with the people you’ll be talking to. Then you need to live up to that agreement- with all the good and bad that comes with it. Read the rest of this entry »
Best Buy has been forced like many companies to make tough decisions with the economic downturn. Recently, a voluntary buyout was offered to all corporate employees. On Jan 5th, employees had to decide whether Best Buy was the company they wanted to work for. It was a tough week as people turned in their decisions. Barry Judge, our Chief Marketing Officer blogged about his perspective on the package (read it here). I think he wraps up most people’s feelings who decided to stay.
Gary Koelling and I decided to stay. We did for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones for me, was the major transformation I feel like Best Buy is going through. It feels like this is one of the major milestones that will define Best Buy’s future. How we choose to organize to do work. How we choose to talk to/with our customers. How we choose everything now is different. Its no longer business as usual and this isn’t a blip in the road. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s how it goes. When times get tough people get a bunker mentality. Lots of de-risking behavior. Cover up. Cut costs. Consolidate. Anything that looks like it might not work out is set aside. Any exposure to dependencies, internal or external is scrutinized and minimized. Most anything ‘new’ gets a bullet. New products, ways of doing things and new ideas in general are eschewed in favor of the familiar. Everyone is thinking this way, you and your customers. No new spending. No new initiatives. New? No. Whatever companies or brands were making or doing before the downturn looks and feels highly experimental. Anything ‘experimental’ or ‘unproven’ makes a natural target in a down market. And for a lot of companies, social media or social technology will fall into the category of new.
So this is bad news for social tech / social media. Right? Not really.
Yesterday we put a post out on BlueShirt Nation (BSN) that told the users we’re going to undertake a major evolution of the site. Essentially BSN as it exists today will go away.
A core philosophy that we try very hard to live up to is to be more attached to what we’re learning than to a specific idea.
From the early days of BSN, this was no more apparent than when we took what was a concept of a social network to the users we thought would want to participate. We learned that our idea (build a network so we could understand our customer problems better) wasn’t exactly what the users wanted. I found this video last week- it was buried in some old files. Its a video from the Hack Slams we did before we launched BSN. Twenty employees volunteered to come in and tell us what they thought about the site- why they’d use it, why they wouldn’t, what the social contract had to be in order for them to trust it. It was a key time in our learning as we shaped that core philosophy- our idea wasn’t as important as what we learned from these 20 people at the Hack Slams. Read the rest of this entry »
But on Friday, things got better. I drove from Billings to Big Sky to get some biking in. I went up on the mountain to do some downhilling. First time I’ve done that- it was pretty intense. It rained all morning so it was really slimy. That along with the steepness, the rocks and the tight turns, I spent some good time off my two wheels. With the helmet, the arm, and shin guards they make you wear it was all good. Definitely want to do it again soon.
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