Ten tips on becoming a successful business leader

CEOs and their golden parachutes have become a staple news in the last few years. There is that Yahoo musical chairs and the HP fiasco just to mention a few newsworthy items. And who can resist the urge to be inspired from all those government officials spending enormous amounts of tax payer's money? After being bombarded with news about these "successful" leaders and having learned from the best in my own professional career, I thought it was time for me to write one of those "Ten things you absolutely must do to woo the love of your life" style articles. So here it goes...

Demonstrate incompetency in doing real work - If you learn anything from this article, this is the one that you must really grasp. People who do real work may climb the ladder to fix a light bulb, but they never climb the one that makes you truly successful. You must actively demonstrate your inability to perform even the routine work items. That way everything gets delegated to the real workers and you have plenty of time to manage others and focus on your own career advancement.

Lying is just stretching the truth - If you think that tiger in the cereal commercial really exists, you might as well give up and try to become a mathematician or something. It's all about advertising and here in the US we are really good at it. You must learn to successfully stretch the truth about your resume (so what if you didn't really have that degree in metallurgical engineering?), the size of the company, the revenue, etc. That's the only way of getting to the next and even bigger level of stretching the truth.

Control the information flow - All communication between the lower and higher levels in your organization must go through you. That way you can convince the people that work for you how every bad decision was made by the superiors and tell your superiors how every failure was the fault of XYZ working for you and that s/he needs to be fired.

Align yourself with success - Many people believe in this myth that the success has to be "earned". They clearly haven't seen the Staples "Easy Button" ad. You have to be smart enough to judge what's getting successful and what's failing. When you see something failing, get hold of the smartest person who works for you and tell him (in private) how s/he is the only one who can save the situation. If something is on track to becoming successful, jump on it with both your feet and widely publicize how you are the key driving force behind it.

Keep up the appearances - Always remember that it is all about the "image" and perception is reality. No one really cares if you understand the business. That's such an ancient idea. Everyone is hoping that you will follow my tips listed earlier in this blog and con a bigger fish so that they can get a few more pennies in their pocket.

PS: I did originally set out to write 10 tips on becoming a successful business leader. Unfortunately I do have to get back and do some real work. But some times less is better. Good luck with your careers and do mention this blog post in your television interview after you get indicted by SEC.

Nabh's Hierarchy of Gamification Techniques

Gamification has been in the news lately and most of it revolves around making user perform certain activities in exchange for some type of reward. While this is useful, gamification can be applied to produce a lot more business value than motivating users to perform simplistic activities. This blog post looks beyond activity-based rewards and identifies other forms of gamification that provide far better value; especially when used as part of enterprise social strategy.

Gamification is the application of game design principles to non-game applications to motivate users in accomplishing real life tasks. At its core, gamification is about creating a fun, engaging experience that encourages users to perform tasks that they might otherwise find tedious or common place.We have identified four different approaches to gamification as depicted in the following figure.

Activity-Based Rewards

This is the simplest form of gamifying user experience. This approach works very well when the objective is to simply maximize the amount of user activity. Examples include boosting the number of “Likes” on your facebook property, sharing a link to your site with friends, etc.

Rewards on Validation

Sometimes it is not enough to know that a user has completed an activity, but that the use has completed it successfully. For example activity-based points can be awarded when a user completes a training course, but you probably want validation from the system that the user has passed the training course successfully. In fact one could also award points in proportion to user’s score in the training course. This is obviously harder to implement since it integration with external systems but it also introduces more accountability by requiring validation that the user has completed a task satisfactorily.

Emergent Gamification Metrics

Awarding points and badges after validation is better than pure activity based rewards but it still a simplistic approach to gamification. As the novelty of completing tasks and getting badges wears off, these techniques cannot be used to incentivize users in the long run. A more sophisticated form of creating user leaderboard ranking is to analyze the individual’s contributions to a community and examine how the community as a whole is reacting to the individual contributions. Reputation or connector rankings produced based on social network analysis is one example of this type of gamification. Typically the rankings and points earned in the manner are based on a recursive analysis of the community interactions and are bound by a time window. This makes it much harder to game, incentivizes users to continue provide meaningful input, and is a much better form of motivation since it is a form of peer recognition.

Turning Play into Work

Serious games help organizations solve complex problems through collaborative play. This is clearly a technique that requires different designs to address different business objectives and cannot be generically applied to an enterprise social community. This is however the best form of gamification since the players create business value by playing the game itself. Idea markets like the once I developed and deployed in Cisco's I-Prize competition is a great example of this. Players collectively provide a much better ranking of ideas by investing virtual money in the ones they believe would succeed. A product design game created by Social Lair is another example. This game requires players to design products by balancing benefits, price, costs, and risks. The resulting mix of features are much better indication of what should go into the product as compared to the tradition method that pits competing factions that only look at the upside.