A summary of what folks are mad about:

"I think the message is obvious," said Jesse Lagreca, 38. "The wealthiest one percent is taking advantage of working class people. They've been selling us faulty financial products, they've been taking huge bonuses while depending on society to bail them out."

CBSMoneywatch's Jill Schlesinger points out that, according to economists at Northeastern University, corporate profits represented 88 percent of the growth in real national income between the 2Q of 2009 and 4Q of 2010, during the same period aggregate wages and salaries accounted for just over 1 percent. "The money that companies have earned during the recovery has mostly stayed within corporate America," writes Schlesinger, "and has not trickled down into higher wages, nor has it created enough jobs to put some of the 14 million unemployed Americans back to work."

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/10/earlyshow/main20118005.shtml

I hear and feel the concerns out there right now. So, here's my message to unhappy friends, family and protestors: Be thoughtful and get focused. You vote for policy at the polls, but you vote for jobs and economic principles with your dollars. If you're fed up with institutions that squeeze surplus value into too few hands while keeping wages and job headcount stagnant, then stop spending money on their products and services. Money is where we talk.

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Blueprint, by Fuzazi: "Never mind what's been selling, it's what you're buying..."

http://millennialmarketing.com/2010/09/crowdsourcing-vs-community-sourcing/

Community members share a common bond and possess a unique and accurate understanding of their own community, its interests, desires, and requirements. Community members also derive intrinsic value from sharing information and performing worker-bee services for the good of their community.  In that sense, a community network (xyz co's employees, xyz co's corporate alumni, an artificial intelligence expert community, etc.) can be leveraged greatly as a logically singular channel for sourcing specific items (talent referrals, business development referrals, etc.)

To the contrary, an undefined, amorphous "crowd" is more difficult to engage and harness in any meaningful way, from the perspective of the entity looking to sap value. The crowd, by definition, doesn't share a substantial set of common experiences, interests, or motivators. The crowd's usefulness as an information magnet, filter, or for the manufacture of work can be dramatically limited in comparison to the Community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

http://www.washington.edu/pine/

http://www.winamp.com

http://www.icq.com

http://www.mirc.com/

http://www.tripod.com

As usual, Glen Cathey has smart things to say about sourcing. This time, he takes issue with the "sourcing snobs" that claim candidates found on LinkedIn or via a social network are somehow "intrinsically" better than candidates found in a job board's resume database. A good candidate is a good candidate. Strong database search competencies will drive good search results across all manner of large resume databases, he argues. I strongly agree.

I've worked for an IT staffing firm, similar to the one Glen works for now, and I wouldn't disagree: The source of a candidate ultimately becomes incidental. The search skills of recruiters are not incidental, however, and some recruiters are simply better than others at mining databases.

If Glen's cause (or perhaps one of them) is to awaken the recruitment profession to the control they have - the control over their own skill level and hence sourcing effectiveness - then perhaps mine is to awaken recruitment leaders to the limitations of viewing sourcing as an individual sport; a sport where every single sourcer (each with a varying level of competency) becomes a potential bottleneck and single point of failure in the process of surfacing good candidates. As I'll explain shortly, it is a mistake to limit sourcing responsibilities to just a handful of professional sourcers. It also turns out to be unnecessary for sourcers to limit their search space to include only the structured information contained within profiles and resumes.

What's missing from the sourcer's search space is tacit knowledge of a prospective candidate's personality, behavior, work ethic, attitudes toward others, etc. I.e., critical human dimensions that determine which of two candidates - both whom look good on paper - will get the job, perform well, and stay a while. This tacit knowledge can only come from two places: The candidate herself, or from someone that knows her.

Enter the Referral Graph

The social graph - the global mapping of everyone and who they know - has become useful to consumers who want to see which products their trusted friends have recommended (or "liked") before trying said products themselves. We've all run into articles that our friends have already read and liked, or an advertisment for an album that our friends have downloaded. What if recruiters could apply the Referral Graph - a global mapping of trusted people linked to others they'd actually refer - as a kind of search filter? When I say actually refer, I mean: actually refer - not just recommend on a LinkedIn profile. (For every 10 people I've recommended on LinkedIn, I'd only refer 3 to actually work at my company. Just being honest.)

With access to a real Referral Graph, we could know that one of our top-performing employees or consultants has pledged to refer a prospective candidate from within our search results, and we could use this information to flag and prioritize outreach to that prospective candidate. Referral-referee relationships mapped by the Referral Graph will serve as proxies for some positive tacit knowledge held by the referrer. This is powerful stuff. The Referral Graph enables something else just as powerful:

Make Everyone (i.e., all the people we trust) a Sourcer

The fact that all of our top employees, consultants, and corporate alumni have built online networks means that, with the right technology, these folks are only a few clicks away from referring some of their highly talented friends to us as recruiters. This means that, at a very basic level, each one of our employees can become a "Talent Scout." Employees have something that recruiters/sourcers don't have: Pre-built, trusted relationships with the prospective candidates we want to talk to. This trust isn't trivial. Trust means that when our employee sends a note to a friend, she's many times more likely to get a response than a recruiter is. Trust also means that our own employees or consultants, by virtue of working for a firm, can help effectively sell the attractiveness of the firm. We have to admit that recruiters just don't have the same level of credibility.

Opportunity for the Sourcing Profession

The rise of the Referral Graph and the rush toward smarter management of referral channels is already underway. @SelectMinds is one of just a few companies superimposing the Referral Graph on to recruitment challenges. We'll of course still need killer professional sourcers to lead the charge in finding talent and to fill gaps between what we need and what the crowd can source for us. To effectively harness and manage the crowd's help, however, seems to be a key professional opportunity for sourcers looking to add value, distinguish themselves, and benefit from (rather than be left behind by) the technological disruption occurring in the larger recruitment space.

How will you leverage the Referral Graph? Let's discuss. Contact me: james.milton@selectminds.com or follow me/DM me on Twitter @jkmilton

You can quote me on it -

It is natural to bet on one of many technical paths toward meeting a need - even when it could be wiser to develop an enabler of many paths.

— Jim Milton (@jkmilton) January 17, 2011

"It is natural to bet on one of many technical paths toward meeting a need - even when it could be wiser to develop an enabler of many paths."

Eleven Principles for Creating Great Community Places

1.) The community is the expert

2.) Create a place, not a design

3.) Look for partners (you can't do it alone)

4.) You can see a lot just by observing (take note of other failed and thriving places)

5.) Have a vision

6.) Start with the petunias (lighter, quicker, cheaper)

7.) Triangulate (bridge connections between people who want to interact)

8.) They always say "it can't be done"

9.) Form supports function (many functional needs shape form outcomes)

10.) Money is not the issue

11.) You are never finished

Someone actually wrote this, and this type of stuff actually passes for analysis in the Social Recruiting field:

"First, let’s acknowledge that we only know about 10% of the details necessary to judge whether the campaign was successful or not.

Now, let’s judge."

http://socialmediarecruitment.com/blog/2010/09/20/roi-in-social-recruiting-its-complicated/

I had a conversation a few weeks ago with a friend about the limits of knowledge. The conversation led us to ask several questions. For one, could it be possible that ingenious people simply have a greater linguistic capability, and therefore a greater ability to see what no one else can?

In thinking through this, we acknowledged that human beings are genetically hard-wired, pre-programmed to acquire language, or to grow a mental language organ.

@ 2:54 :

"Anything that can't be accommodated to this structure [however], anything so to speak that can't be caught in the mesh of this particular network, is linguistically inexpressible and unintelligible to us.
So the general principles common to all languages set vital limits to our capacity to understand the world and communicate with each other."

Can we expand our ability to learn and communicate beyond the limitations or constraints imposed by our language organ? Are there things even worth knowing that lie outside of our current perception zone? If so, who is working at the bleeding edge of science, technology and philosophy to ask and answer these questions?

Anyone with insights into academic endeavors around this topic, please contact me. I'd be excited to learn more.

Genrich S. Altshuller observed that human beings face problems across a spectrum: Problems with more generally known solutions, and those with lesser known solutions. According to the table below, 95% of problems can be solved by acquiring knowledge from within one's own industry. Altshuller described a psychological inertia , however, that increased as a problem-solver strayed farther from his own domain. It seems trivial, therefore, to note that domain expertise is a helpful input into the problem solving process. Less trivially, however, it takes exceptional (inventive) thinkers to imagine and create outside of their own history and experiences.

Altshuller deemed inventors to be as effective as their ability to master certain psychological tools such as intuition, creativity, and ideation; but not in open-ended exercise. Specifically, the inventor's goal is always to increase the ideality of a system. Stepping back, I think there are some important principles and implications to consider here.

First of all, "ideality" is defined as the quotient of the sum of the system's useful effects, U_i, divided by the sum of its harmful effects, H_j.

In simple terms, this means that systems/products tend to have an increasingly positive ratio of useful effects to harmful effects over time. This definition of ideality acknowledges that in the course of designing and improving systems, designers are prone to settling for trade-offs along the way, i.e., for each positive element added to a system, there is some unavoidable negative quality introduced. E.g., a more powerful combustion engine weighs more and/or consumes more gas. Altschuller referred to these emergent tradeoffs as "technical contradictions."

According to Altshuller, when you cannot break through technical contradictions, you are not only settling for negative effects- you are also not really innovating. Think about it: How innovative, truly, is your team? How attuned are they to inventive principles? How capable are they of flexing inventive muscles? More tangibly: How many technical contradictions ("TC's") are embedded in your products today? How do these TC's limit your ability to satisfy customers' needs?

In a start-up environment when things are moving incredibly fast, imagine how easy it is to blaze through iterations just to tread water in the market, while accruing a boat load of technical contradictions that no one is accounting for.

**********

When I first started working with small teams inside of start-ups, I subscribed to a humble ideology; one that more or less described ideas as commodities and contributors as being essentially equally equipped to opine throughout the problem-solving process. I've recently had a change of heart.

In the heat of a battle, with limited resources and time, it seems clearer than ever that a team has got to learn quickly, imagine effectively, and iterate through technical contradictions by working toward ideality in a structured, deliberate manner. There is simply no time to sort or flail through equally uninformed, variant options and solutions. An effective, inventive meritocracy requires real inventors and real inventive principles. It also helps, from a sheerly practical standpoint, to involve subject matter and domain experts in the product and revenue creation strategy. Believe it or not, I've acquainted myself with some start-up teams filled with all the "smartest people in the room," none with any experience in the industries into which they were going-to-market. This simply makes for poor winning-odds.

In conclusion, I now believe that all ideas, systems, and thinkers are not created equally. I am fortunate in my professional role today to be surrounded by a few highly effective, inventive problem solvers and this may literally mean the difference between success and failure. I recommend that all start-up CEOs and boards quickly identify and assign important responsibilities to their inventors and experts, separate them from the rest of the smart-guy peanut gallery, and put chips on their unique, competitive abilities.