A High Five column from Bob Giles:

In 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business, Soren Gordhamer writes, "In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business." 

That’s the same major message of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith in Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust, in Linden’s Working Across Boundaries: Making Collaboration Work in Government and Nonprofit Organizations, and in Peter Fingar's Dot.Cloud (my note on Dot.Cloud's relationship to Ron Karr's work is here).

Gordhamer states that businesses will need to use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers.

How to use “other means” is a historic topic of the business world, argued incessantly and seemingly-interchangeably as branding, advertising, marketing, selling, and doing  public relations. Now emerges “using social media” and Brogan and Smith offer delightfully creative and challenging lists of actions to take for people becoming, as they call them, “trust agents.” 

One action to take is to not take.  Never proclaim  "I’m honest" or "I'd be great at that."  Brogan and Smith argue that we are in a “trust deficit” and that trust agents are needed to use the power of the tools of the Internet, expanding connections, humanizing it, reducing image-building and replacing it with “self”:  innovating, being genuine about one's work, being interested in prospective customers' colleagues, employees, etc., and realizing these new tools “…enable more unique, robust communication [and] also allow more business opportunities for everyone.”

Gordhamer writes, “We are now in the age of open communication, engaged dialogue, and transparency, and business success may now have less to do with the size of ad budgets, but on the quality of interactions with customers.”

According to Brogan and Smith, those quality interactions will occur with trust agents. 

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients.

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system. He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force.  He is the father of Anne Giles Clelland, founder of Handshake 2.0.

A High Five column from Bob Giles:

“You’re having too much fun!” I’d yell at my playful young daughters. “Do your chores!”

I’m having too much fun reading Chris Brogan's Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust and can’t finish the book. There are too many suggestions on which I want to work...right now.

As I unwrapped the book from its Amazon.com box, I played with “trust,” thinking it might be the reverse of risk (the probability of failure in some circles). I had wrestled with the concept of risk before.  Then I read of The Trust Equation.

I just had to play with it. There seem to me to be six factors for personal (or perhaps corporate) trust. They are rarely of equal importance to everyone, so we weight them.  Here's how to "play" as I did: 

Give each factor your personal score of approximate relative importance (e.g., a, b, c, etc.). First, give a 10 for the highest or most important criterion or factor and give no zeroes.

Give others values relative to the most important factor. They may have equal values assigned. Then assign your estimated probability of each of the following factors for a person, company, or situation being evaluated at some time. (They, like reputations, can change quickly.) 

Here's the scale I used:

C1 = credibility type 1 - high probability (0.9 - 1.0) of correct identity - they are who they say.

C2 = credibility type 2 - probable goodness (0.9 - 1.0) - as good as they say

R1 = reliability type 1 - probability of showing up on time, appropriate dress, wellness, etc. (0.9 - 1.0)

R2 = probable over-all consistency

K = intimacy - high level of personal comfort with the person or company; probable confidence in secrecy (0.9 - 1.0)

S = probably “other” oriented, slightly “self” oriented; less “sale” oriented than customer or company oriented (0.9 – 1.0)

T* = the estimated current evaluator’s personal trust index

T* = (aC1 + bC2 + cR1 + dR2 + eK + fS) / 60

For example, here I assign importance to factors for me personally as I think about my desired personal trust for the employee pool:  a= 9; b= 8 ; c= 6 ; d = 7 ; e = 10 ; f = 9 . Then for a particular applicant or advisor, my T* value estimate computes as:

T* = ((9 x 0.9) + (8 x 0.8) + (6 x 0.7) + (7 x 0.8) + (10 x 0.7) + (9 x 0.8) ) / 6 = 64.

High in two criteria (a) and (f), the person being evaluated could not pull up a total score by low evaluations in the relatively low-importance criteria.

A top score for a person is between 90 to 100.

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From Handshake 2.0's founder, Anne Giles Clelland, daughter of Bob Giles, who both does chores and has fun:  I trust - and I don't use that word lightly anymore because I'll have to think about trust in terms of T* - I trust, or at least risk a wager, that Chris Brogran never anticipated having his book looked at quite this way.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients.

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system. He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force.

From Bob Giles:

Recently, a friend told me of his two little children playing cellos together. “It brought tears to my eyes,” he said.

I bought a BlackBerry device last weekend. I’m not sure why but I had seen them in use and respected people were seemingly dependent upon them.  Ms. Handshake 2.0 encouraged me. I could have asked others about them but suspected their special interests were both personal and unlike mine.

I have lots to learn about my little pocket machine.  Two weeks was suggested as an appropriate time for learning and practice, practice.

I touched, then pressed the Internet browser symbol on my BlackBerry, found my website, www.RuralSystem.com, and clicked on one of its files. 

From almost anywhere, I now had access to my 250+ files at that web site and the thousands within the 70+ folders on ecology and wildlife management and forestry resulting from years of continued work since retirement from Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources in ‘98.  And there was Google access! From my jeans pocket, I could now bring knowledge to very specific places in the outdoors for improving natural resource management.

It brought tears to my eyes.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients.

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system. He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force.

From Bob Giles:

In Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, Nandan Nilekani presented for me a new idea. I have made many speeches about population control and referred multiple times to the plight of thousands in India. According to Nilekani, since the 1970s there has been a shift in labor productivity and the knowledge economy and thus a shift in both political and economic power.

“Today…India’s growth is credited to its strength in human capital, and the rise of IT [information technology] in India, for instance, is seen in terms of ‘Indian talent’ as entrepreneurs and workers overcame the barriers that existed in the 1990s to drive growth...The change in this idea of population as a ‘burden’ to population as an ‘asset’ is central to what is driving India today.”

There is still a problem, however, and I think it is similar to that of Western Virginia as I continue to try to see similarities and find solutions for the US region. In India, the people as “human capital” need roads to get them to work, electric lights for night work, and English skills. Analogously, in Western Virginia, people need roads, health care, diverse jobs, and education for wellness and those ever-changing jobs. In India, the young population “labor pool” is of restless, ambitious, young workers “…not hamstrung by tradition and old habit….a shot in the arm in terms of new ideas and opportunities.” In India, rising democracy is part of what is new.

In Virginia we could have heard the identical speech made by chief minister Nitish Kumar (2007):

"'Our young people leave the state and go for jobs elsewhere…we need to make such opportunities happen here. Only then will the young stay.’ His words were met with roars of approval."

"It was a sound that gives me hope," writes Nilekani.

Me, too.

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Photo credit:  Elephant by Nidhin G Poothully

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients. 

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force. 

From Bob Giles:

In Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation, Nandan Nilekani has wisely said that “looking at our problems through the prism of ideas” can help us see things that limit us.

Nilekani spoke of the agricultural crisis  in India, but such a prism is a figure of speech useful in exploring the Roanoke, New River, and western Virginia region and its future. Nilekani placed his cards for India on the table and our game is the same: The way forward for growth is in expanding access to resources and opportunity. People need open access to health facilities, clean water, basic infrastructure, jobs, and capital, a reliable social security system, and good schools.

Like some mindless choir behind a skilled speaker, to Nilekani's multi-faceted music, I must sound the Virginia region’s chorus of “us, too”:

• Our advances will be not in our discoveries but in how we apply them to reduce inequality and improve access. (p.20)
• We have unique advantages now, and we have far more to gain than lose by embracing globalization. (p.21)
• We have to overcome the public service culture that prizes process and precedence over progress and results. (p.22)
• IT (information technology) can bring equity, efficiency, and effectiveness into the public sector – bypassing inefficient government systems, bringing improved quantification and measurement to objectives and outcomes, and gaining transparency to expenditures. (p.23)

Not belaboring the large population of India, Nilekani proposed the idea of human population as an asset rather than a burden arising with knowledge-base industries, IT, telecommunication, and biotechnology, and coupled it with the delightful idea that the information economy is the culmination of the Industrial Revolution, putting human capital as the main driver of productivity and growth.

Unlike India, the New River Valley region, in my opinion, is not "...united...by a respect for achievement and yearning for a better life, but also by an unprecedented belief that such a life is possible, regardless of one’s social and economic status."

It is must not become, to paraphrase Jacques Chirac, "a place of old people, living in old houses, ruminating about old ideas."

Let us see new ways through a prism of new ideas.

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Photo credit:  Southern Hill Myna Bird by Nidhin GP

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients. 

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force. 

From Bob Giles:

Thomas Friedman, inspired by Nandan Nilekani, wrote the profoundly influential book, The World Is Flat.  Friedman has written a foreword to Nilekani’s Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation.  This book will have similar effects.

I have been to India twice on projects. Captured by the book's title,  I read it searching for knowledge of a country I had come to love but also to see if I could find parallels with my hypothetical Imagining of the New River Valley of Virginia: The Idea of a Transformed Region.

Extremely well-written, Nilekani’s book should win awards for writing about complex, inter-related historical, religious, economic, educational, health, and environmental topics. He presents modern India, its roots, and timely analysis for that country, parts of which are still emerging from British rule. The vast country with its major differences and contradictions in religions, languages, castes, population densities, and natural resources has almost unbelievable problems, but they are given a personal depth, with abundant signs of change and improvement, and adequate caution and insightful analyses for what may come next.

As India may be emerging as the world’s next growth engine, I wonder how the New River Valley may be emerging, or think its wants to become. As is in the Valley, Nilekani found in India little common ground for priorities and incentives, but a sense, as I have here, that problems are increasing, merging, and coming to a head. The challenge is the same:  "...uniting our people and policy makers toward urgent and necessary solutions.”

Like Nilekani's nation, the New River Valley (or all of western Virginia) "...is as much an idea as it is a nation [region].” Understanding that idea and its influence on the people of the region and their progress now seems critical to me.

India's needs and those of our region seem quite similar:  “But India’s rapid economic growth is demanding much more innovative ideas from us as existing solutions for issues like health, energy and the environment have proved ineffective around the world. India cannot, for instance, have an energy policy that is based entirely on the heavy use of hydrocarbons. We should worry about the environment right now, rather that try like the developed countries to salvage it after industrialization has ripped through our natural resources.”

To imagine India and the New River Valley, I see these needs as mutual:  "...a sustainable, realistic social security system...and to "...ensure that our public health challenges do not swing, as they have in the developed world...from starvation to excess."

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Photo credit:  Kingfisher by Nidhin GP

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0.  The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients. 

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force. 

From Bob Giles:

Following completion of his PhD on the philosophy of perception from Oxford, Dr. Richard Price, with a team from Stanford and Cambridge, launched a website, Academia.edu, which:

• Shows academics around the world structured in a "tree" format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations.

• Enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks.

Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world - Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students, and even Independent Researchers - potentially providing access to intellectual resources for many uses. More than 15,000 are now listed.  An amazing site, requiring structuring knowledge, and creating a vast, new social network, perhaps a new community.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0, a business news and Web 2.0 public relations services enterprise of Handshake Media, Incorporated, a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks. 

The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients. 

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force. 

From Bob Giles:

Shake hands often with everybody. It doesn't hurt and may help.

Appear eager to shake hands; make it first on the agenda.

A firm handshake is good and expected. How firm is firm?  You ought to be able to get juice to start to flow from a half grapefruit with the right firmness.

Most old guys have arthritis in their hands. Too firm hurts!  You only "make points" with a crushing handshake if you are applying for a position as a bouncer.

People once "read" other people from their handshakes (shape, roughness, pressure, etc.). False messages were sent and many were poorly translated. An eager, firm, lasting handshake, accompanied by smiling and constant eye contact are the keys to good handshakes.

Never just lay your hand into the hand of another (the dead fish). A handshake is a grasp, an expression of "self" as well as an expression of mutual greeting and willingness to be together, at least for awhile.

If a person’s hand  is injured, grasp the hand extended.

Pump no more than twice.

Grasp the hand of an elderly, honored, long-awaited, or loved person with both hands.

Be sure to stand up to shake hands if possible.

Become thoughtful when a person is unwilling to shake hands.  Size up the reason.

Get the rules for handshakes in foreign countries before you visit. Greetings vary by culture. 

Wipe off a sweaty hand on your pants or pocket. Still, real people are more interested in you than in the cleanliness or hygiene of your hand. (This rule may change with disease threats.)

But if a friend shows up in your backyard to introduce someone to you and you've been gardening and spreading compost?  Don't offer to shake hands. Apologize quickly and get on with the conversation.

And, men, don't expect women to offer their hands. Wait. They go first or not at all. It's the old rule but it works.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0, a business news and Web 2.0 public relations services enterprise of Handshake Media, Incorporated, a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks. 

The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients. 

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force. 

From Bob Giles:

Cavemen probably used gestures to communicate.  Then appeared song and spoken word.  Then came the written word and words off the presses.  The computer words flashed next.  Then it was noted that fewer and fewer words are spoken by aging TV-watchers.

In her captivating The Age of American Unreason, Susan Jacoby reported Kiku Adatto’s study that found between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite for a presidential candidate dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds.

By 2000, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds. Jacoby examined the many reasons for this and tried to suppress her fear that "...the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy."

Her book shares her pain in thinking “…about what the cultural landscape will look like a generation from now.”

David Catalano of Modea and others discussed the essentials of an elevator pitch and seemed to settle on 21 seconds for a business summary while going up a few flights.

Tweets on Twitter are limited to 140 characters (averaging about 10 words).

My daughter, Anne Clelland, founder of Handshake 2.0, said to me that people now rarely read blog posts over 300 words. I usually fail in my posting limit for High Five.

Jacoby is highly critical of blogs  as "...crude observations of people who are often unable to express themselves coherently in writing and are as inept at the virtual conversational skills required for online exchanges as they must be at face-to-face communication."  She adds, "The point of blogging is self-expression, not dialogue."

Not dialogue?  Back to gestures?  Perhaps to waving a sign bearing forgotten symbols? 

Total:  284 words.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0, a business news and Web 2.0 public relations services enterprise of Handshake Media, Incorporated, a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks. 

The opinions Robert Giles expresses are solely his own and are not necessarily shared by Handshake 2.0 or its clients. 

Feel free to follow Robert H. Giles, Jr. on Twitter @Bob_Giles

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.  He writes two blogs, The Survivalists and Faunal Force. 

From Bob Giles:

I’ve taught systems ecology for 25 years and worked with graduate students on systems projects for 35 years.

In his preface to Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World, John D. Stermans writes, ”Effective decision making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems thinkers to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior.”

The argument seems to be that given the growing complexity of modern life, "A Systems Approach to Everything" might have value.

A systems approach has the following dozen ways to offer help in solving complex problems.

1. It provides a few standard words for a common language for problem-solvers.
2. The few words provide complete coverage of categories and thus organization; there is room for everything.
3. Its mental and linguistic use leads to computer use and powerful computer-aided solutions.
4. It often uses computer models, systems themselves, usually to simulate conditions or to select optimum conditions.
5. It has been tested by many over time and found strong and useful (though there are detractors).
6. It is useful for design when objectives are specified.
7. It can be used for small or large problems because systems are seen as subsystems, often as modules.
8. Its power is in feedback (if there are clear objectives) resulting in improvements or safe stops.
9. It uses crafted amounts of input, “fixing” them in amount and quality with feedback.
10. It includes feedforward, using best estimates about the future to optimize current decisions.
11. It uses the efficient set of “structures, dynamics, and relations” in analyses and designs of systems having only context, objectives, inputs, processes, feedback, and feedforward.
12. Its users see most things as potential systems, isomorphic, thus offering efficiencies and reduced duplication or re-invention.

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Robert H. Giles, Jr. writes High Five for Handshake 2.0, an enterprise of Handshake Media, Incorporated, a member company of business acceleration center VT KnowledgeWorks. 

Robert H. Giles, Jr. is a Virginia Tech Professor Emeritus with a vision for a rural land management system.