4,000 Connectionssurpassed a milestone of sorts last month. When one Russell Bush reached out to me on LinkedIn requesting a connection, he became my 4,000th connection. FOUR THOUSAND! There was no balloon drop, no marching band, nothing to mark the occasion, only another cup of Starbucks coffee when me met up a couple weeks later (I did give him a signed copy of my book, Amplify Your Value, however). 4,000 connections.

OK, I can hear you now, “You must accept everyone’s requests” or “You can’t possibly know that many people”. The truth is I do not accept all requests. There have been some doozies over the years, like the guy trying to tell me my long lost relative left me with $10,000,000 in gold bullion, or, the woman from eastern Europe looking for a “friend”. Fortunately, those are few and far between. Mostly, I look for people who want to share insights, are in transition, or just looking to make a professional connection. (I’m not really looking to be sold to, so if that is why you are reaching out, chances are I won’t accept.)

As for knowing 4,000 people. I have to admit, there are some names in there that I do not remember how we connected. Sometimes, looking at the date we made the connection helps jog the memory banks, other times, that doesn’t even help. However, I do try to stay in touch will all of them. Part of my morning ritual (in addition to coffee with my wife and the Today show), is to review the notifications in LinkedIn and send birthday wishes, congratulations on work anniversaries and new jobs, and sometimes just to say “hi”. Sky Caserotti and I get a good laugh every year on his birthday when I send the message, we’ve been dancing that dance a long time!

I started on LinkedIn September of 2006, just a few short years after the platform launched. My first connection? Steve Johnson. Steve and I worked together at Thomson (RCA, now Technicolor). I recruited Steve to relocate his family from California to Indianapolis and join me at Lauth Property Group. During the real estate crash of 2008/2009, I was forced to lay Steve off as the company downsized dramatically. Believe it or not, we are still friends (I think)!

Those first couple of years, most of my connections were with colleagues from my Thomson days. I found LinkedIn a great way to stay connected as we all went our separate ways and our careers grew. Eventually, I started connecting with business partners, CIOs from other organizations and “old” friends. My oldest friend being Andy O’Donnell.

Andy and I worked together at Indiana National Bank (now Regions) a million years ago. We were in the bank’s running club, the Bison Stampeders. Just about every day, we would meet for lunch to go running. Andy was a bank officer and therefore had access to the Officer’s Lounge, complete with showers and lockers. I was Andy’s guest so often, I still get emails about Officer reunions, even though I never was one! We ran when it was hot (once being featured on the news for what NOT to do when it is 97 degrees), we ran when it was cold (weather too bad to be outside, we ran the stairs – 36 flights up, 36 down – twice).

Since Thomson was a global company, my LinkedIn connections were also global. My dear friend Laurent Ricard, jumps off this list. During one my trips to Paris when Carmen joined me, Laurent and his beautiful wife Agnès hosted us for a fabulous holiday dinner of quail and brussel sprouts. We met his two children. As time went by, his son Guillaume and I connected on LinkedIn and Facebook. He once recorded a guitar riff for one of my presentations. He is now contemplating an internship here in the US. Connections. Multi-generational connections.

In 2009, my number of connections jumped. I had left Lauth and was launching my own4,000 Connections business, Confluence Dynamics, a green business consulting firm. I added clients and colleagues in the “green” industry to the list. One of my first clients (perhaps my first) was Kevin McKinney, publisher of Nuvo, an alternative newspaper in Indianapolis. Kevin was gracious enough to take a risk on my business very early on, though he did question me extensively on what an IT guy knew about HVAC systems, plumbing, electrical and industrial cleaning. (For the record I was LEED Accredited!) Kevin would later play a major role in one of my son’s music videos. While that is a story for another day, it did spawn the phrase, “It’s not a rap video until the cops show up”, just sayin’.

To no fault of Kevin’s, my foray into this space was short lived, and in early 2010 I launched a job search. As a result, my LinkedIn connections jumped again. I was amazed at the number of people who met me for coffee. People I hadn’t seen in 20 years, said yes, I would be glad to help (Elaine Bedel). People I didn’t even know, said yes, when can we meet (Geoff Endris). It was humbling. Dozens and dozens. When I landed the CIO role at Goodwill, I was thankful for each and every one who said yes (no one EVER said no). I made a promise to myself, two promises actually. Promise one: I will never let my network go stale (hence the birthday and anniversary greetings, Sky). Promise two: whenever anyone asked me to network because they were in transition, the answer would always be “yes”.

Goodwill enabled me to connect with hundreds of people. Some colleagues at Goodwill of Central Indiana, some colleagues at other Goodwill organization, tied together by a common brand and a common mission. Some, like me, have moved on from Goodwill, but I know I speak for all of them when I say, we carry Goodwill in our hearts. Together we accomplished some amazing things. Together we built an amazing network.

I could go on and on. I am sure there are people in my connections where my memory fails me and I don’t recall the circumstances under which we met, however I’ve scrolled through the first thousand names and I remember each one. I could tell you where we met and under what circumstances. I could write a book…huh…I could write a book! I could write a book from the stories. What an epic story it would be. An amazing group of people. Some I’ve never met face to face, yet we have a shared history. We have touched each other, if only briefly. You are all part of my tribe. Thank you! Thank you for connecting, Thank you for sharing yourself. Thank you for your role in making me who I am.

It had been over 20 years since I had been on a hay ride. I daresay, that probably holds true for the majority of the participants at the recent #GWTS2014Summit…but let me start at the beginning. Leadership, Business, Management

A year ago, we put a twist in our annual budget and planning cycle. Many companies and departments conduct offsite planning “summits” and we had always done much the same. In 2012 we added something I had talked about doing for years. We invited some of our vendors to participate. To be invited, the vendor had to be a “strategic partner” (see “Three Keys to a Lasting Relationship“). So, after my management team had spent a day and a half reviewing business plans, trends in the industry, and trends in technology, our vendors arrived. We spent the remainder of the second day reviewing those plans with them, asking for feedback, and asking for general questions.  For the inaugural event, the feedback we received afterward was very positive, enough so to repeat in 2013.

Always looking to improve and listening to the feedback from the that first event, we made some changes to the format.

First of the changes…Twitter and the hashtags. As I talked about in a previous post, Twitter is my new way of taking notes at conferences (see I will never take notes again). I thought…”why not”. So, I created the hashtag and began tweeting first thing in the morning of day one. I encouraged my team to join in (though I must say NO ONE DID, ahem, are you listening?). I also sent a note to the entire department and our vendor partners suggesting they follow along with the activities through Twitter. Our day began in the Roosevelt Room at Fort Harrison State Park (ok, that is significant, but to find out why, you have to read a future post about my journey with Theodore Roosevelt).

Day one was focused on internal discussions with our management team. We reviewed business and infrastructure plans, however, we dedicated the meat of the day to open discussion, about the department, our company, and where we are versus where we want to be. Believe it or not we ran out of time!

As day one of discussions came to a close, it was time for another departure from the prior year. As I mentioned, last year the partners came at the end of day two. While the conversation was good, I believed it could have been better. So, this year, we had the partners join us for dinner at the end of day one (now before anyone reading this panics and thinks we bought dinner for 35 vendors, we did not, we asked that each vendor attending pay for their own meal. There, feel better?). The dinner was catered by the park at one of their shelter houses.

My team and I headed down to the shelter house while our guests began to arrive. Many had met the year before, or had been involved in joint meetings with us. However, there were some new faces to introduce to each other. This was one of the reasons for the shift to the end of day one…to get the introductions out of the way. Keep in mind, some of these vendors represented companies that were competitors of each other (not on our account mind you, but competitors in the market just the same). We had warned them all to put on their big boy and big girl pants for the event; it was after all about transparency and dialogue.

Gradually, the conversation began to shift from introductions into curiosity. Why HAD they been instructed to dress casually and wear outdoor shoes? Where we going to hike? Where we going to have a scavenger hunt? Maybe, a “vendor challenge”? (btw nice tennies, Steve!) Soon the sound of a large tractor could be heard in the distance. Since only two of knew what was happening, no one noticed. Moments later a large John Deere (Dave, picture our John Deere salute here!) tractor pulled into the parking lot next to the shelter house. It was pulling two large wagons filled with hay. Still, not many noticed.

I stood up on one the picnic tables to get everyone’s attention and announced, “Before dinner, we have a surprise for all of you! You may notice the two wagons behind me, everybody…follow me and pile in, we are going on a hayride”. At first the crowd didn’t move, as if they thought I was kidding. Me? Kid? I don’t think so…let’s go folks EVERYBODY IN!  Finally, 40+ of Indianapolis’ finest business people were piled in the two wagons and we headed out for a 45 minute tour of Fort Harrison State Park.

Business, Management, LeadershipAt first there was some awkward chit-chat and bemusement, I don’t think many of them could believe we were actually on a hay ride. The further along the pathways we traveled, the polite chit-chat gave way to laughter, spirited conversation and picture taking.  You could sit and watch the inner child come out. By the time, we were halfway done, there was debate about which wagon was the “cool, more fun wagon”. (Personally, I think the one I was in was the cool wagon!).

After the adventure, the dinner was served. I think the hay ride dominated the conversation at most of the tables.

The next morning as we gathered in the Roosevelt Room, the evenings activities had the exact effect we were looking to achieve. The greetings were boisterous, the conversation lively, and…the ice had been broken. We kicked off the meeting with a special guest and a dear friend of mine, Dr. Dan Miller of Historical Solutions (www.historicalsolutions.com). Dan provides leadership training, team building, and executive coaching, all in the context of exploring history. Those of you who know my passion for Lewis and Clark would think we were twins separated at birth. Dan provided us with an historical perspective of our surroundings, in the Roosevelt room of For Harrison, the relationship between Teddy Roosevelt and Benjamin Harrison and an approach to planning, preparation and execution. There could not have been a more appropriate start to our day.

Next up, we reviewed the business and technology plans and highlighted our discussions of the day before with our partners. We then asked each partner to present their views on the trends they are seeing in their slice of the industry. I am sure it was tough, ask a bunch of business development people to get up in front of a room of 45 people and NOT SELL and only give them FIVE MINUTES, it had to be tough! (Ok, to be honest, next year, I am going to edit their slides beforehand and remove any of those “here is who we are, how much we sell, and who our customers are” slides!) Check out the Twitter hashtag (#GWTS2014Summit) to see some of the highlights from the round-robin presentations.

We spent the remainder of the morning in a group discussion of our projects, the trends, business issues, and our direction. In addition to some great thoughts, I believe there were several business connections made within the group and some ideas for additional areas of partnership with us were formulated.

Our partners left at the end of the morning discussion, we were then joined by our newly formed architecture team. We spent the next couple of hours diving into discussion topics specific to our technology architecture. By mid-afternoon, we were joined by the remainder of the team and we jumped into topics about process, team dynamics, and communication.

Overall, it was a very successful summit. We learned a a lot from each segment, solidified our roadmap, and potentially made some connections for business. We are already planning next year’s event and how to make it even better…hmmmmm, something like “Vendor Wipe Out” comes to mind….

If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.

I could have just as easily titled this post “An Old Dog Learns ANOTHER New Trick” (“An Old Dog Goes Back to High School“), but I really have quit taking notes at conferences. Instead I have crowdsourced this task. How, you ask, did I do that? With Twitter, of course (right now everyone reading this who is under 30 something is saying “Duh”)! Hey, keep in mind, I am a former COBOL programmer that once declared, “Real programmers don’t need mice!”, these lessons are a big deal!

In the past, I would dutifully scribble notes, sometimes pages and pages of notes. Later, I would go back and transcribe them (assuming I could actually readBusiness, connectivity, technology them!). About a year ago, I got really technologically advanced and used my iPad to type notes, thus saving the transcription step. I still found that I would miss things because I was busy typing the previous nugget. (on this subject, don’t those people that use laptops with noisy keyboards to take notes incessantly throughout a conference just drive you nuts?).

Several weeks ago, I attend MIT’s CIO conference (#MITCIO) and decided I was going to try to use Twitter to take my notes. I set up a stream on Hootsuite to monitor the hashtag (jeez, three years ago I didn’t even know what a hashtag was, now I am using it in a sentence!). When one of the speakers or panelist said something that struck a chord with me, I tweeted it. Of course, there was a room of several hundred other people also tweeting. By monitoring the stream, I could see what others thought were important points, or see what comments someone might disagree with, or what thoughts were amplified through additional ideas. Since there were multiple tracks, I was even able to follow the comments from sessions I could not attend. Weeks later attendees are still adding thoughts to the dialogue. When I returned from the conference, I merely archived the stream and have my notes (and hundreds of others’ notes) to review for as long as I like.

As I write this, I am attending the Connected World Conference (#CWConf13) in Santa Clara. I have used the same crowdsourcing techniques to take notes at this conference. Talk about being connected! This morning I attended my first Tweet Chat. Peggy Smedley (@ConneectedWMag) of Connected World Magazine and the Peggy Smedley Show (www.PeggySmedleyShow.com) interviewed Mike Tinskey from Ford (@Ford) about their connected and electric cars. People could join live at the conference, on the web, or by following the conversation and posting questions on Twitter (#FordCW) or on the Tweetwall hosted on Tweetwally (http://fordtweetchatcw.tweetwally.com/) and presented to the live audience. It sure beat the old way of Q&A…of writing down your question to be handed to the speaker, or stepping up to the microphone to ask questions. Again, by archiving the stream, I have a permanent record to review later.

So what of the random thoughts, ideas, or actions that I didn’t want to share with the Twitter universe? Since I live in my in-box anyway, I just jumped over to Gmail and shot myself a quick email. All the follow up items are now sitting safely in my in-box and I don’t have to remember to go back and read my scribbles.

Business, connectivity, technologyI think over time as more and more event planners adopt these strategies the process will improve even more. For example, I would love to see separate hashtags for each session. This would enable you to further organize your “notes”. Also, it would be great if events included the speaker’s Twitter handle and LinkedIn link in their bios to facilitate learning more of their thoughts and potentially continuing the dialogue. I would also like to see more events put their guides online, in e-book format or even in app format, that would enable clickable links.

Will I ever take notes again? Sure, most meetings aren’t appropriate to Tweet publicly and some conferences or events may not support the technology to make it possible or some sessions may not have the critical mass of  attendees that tweet, but you can bet, when I can…I will.

If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.

Part 5 of the series on Corporate Connectivity, other posts include: N.C.I.S. Indianapolis – The PilotN.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 1: NetworksN.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 2: Communication (and Collaboration), N.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 3: Information, and N.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 4: Systems

So, are you asking yourself, “Why are we doing this?” or “What’s in it for me?” The answer will differ depending on your view of the organization.

If you are one of those we serve, you will benefit from a much more holistic approach to assisting you with the barriers and roadblocks you may face.

As a customer, shopper or donor, we will be able interact with you on a much more personal level, understanding what you want and need from your experience with us.

Our partners will have a much more cohesive view of our relationship with them.

We will be able to communicate to the central Indiana community the economic impact of our programs and services.

And last, but certainly not least, our employees will experience an organization in which information flows throughout the organization, where ideas for innovation can come from anybody, and where collaboration enables us to achieve more together than we ever could apart.

In their book, “The Social Organization,” authors Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald raise the questions: “What if you couldHorizon_Sun_rise__Wallpaper_jjwbl tap into the full talent, creativity, experience and passion of your employees, customers, and suppliers? What if you could minimize the constraints imposed by specialization and compartmentalization? What if you could retain or recapture some of the benefits, human and organizational, of that collaborative start-up without losing the glue that currently holds the organization together?”

This is the promise of N.C.I.S.: To leverage the work of Marketing, Technology Solutions and our cross functional teams — the Corporate Connectivity Committee and Goodwill Connections Team — to transform Goodwill Indy into a social organization; an organization that “strategically applies mass collaboration to address significant business challenges and opportunities” and further offers opportunities, provides services, and leverages its resources with those of others to improve the education, skills, employability and economic self-sufficiency of adults and the future employability of young people.

If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.

Part 5 of the series on Corporate Connectivity, other posts include: N.C.I.S. Indianapolis – The PilotN.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 1: NetworksN.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 2: Communication (and Collaboration), and N.C.I.S. Indianapolis – Episode 3: Information

Information-Systems-and-Computer-Applications-CLEPThe underlying systems that tie all of this together are evolving at a lightning pace. Driven by the continuing consumerization and “appification” of IT, we have seen an explosion of technology, including smart phones and tablets. In 2012, for example, the number of smartphones in the market exceeds 1 billion, and it is estimated that by 2015, tablet sales will exceed that of traditional PCs.

This technology explosion has help to drive the skyrocketing growth of social media platforms. Facebook users have exceeded 1/7th of the world’s population, and during the 2012 presidential debates, people tweeted over 10.5 million times in a two-hour period.

Add to this the growth of software-as-a-service and other types of cloud-based applications, which are expected to triple in the next three years, and you have a pace of change that is mind-boggling. IT departments the world over are trying to keep up.

Goodwill Technology Solutions has embraced all of these changes with the motto of “any time, any place, any device.” Our internal server architecture is about 90% virtualized. Server virtualization was the first step in our strategy to become more agile and reduce the time spent “keeping the lights on.”

The next step was to move away from dictating which smartphone an employee must use to a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach that enables our employees to pick the smartphone that works best for them. We were also one of the first companies to embrace tablet technology, using iPads throughout the organization, including issuing one to each of our IT Service Technicians to enable them to stay on top of their support tickets.

We took a significant step in the “cloud” by migrating from Microsoft Exchange and Outloook to Google Apps for email, contacts and calendaring. Most recently, we launched cloud-based HRIS (Human Resources Information System) and payroll systems using Workday as Goodwill’s Employee Management System.

Next Up: Series Finale: The Results

If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.

No, this is not about some crime new drama (though people say I do look a lot like Mark Harmon…NOT!), this is about socialmicroscope-pictures6 organizations, mass collaboration, big data, the future of work, and some technology thrown in for good measure!

We recently announced a re-organization within Goodwill Industries of Central Indiana. This re-organization included the creation of a new position, Senior Vice President of Corporate Connectivity. When I’m asked what this means, it would be easy to respond, “Well, it means that both Technology Solutions (Information Technology) and Marketing report to the same person.” But that would be a simplistic view of what is, really, a very progressive and complex organizational move.

I really need to work on my elevator speech! So, then, what does it mean to have both Marketing and IT report to the SVP of Corporate Connectivity? Why would we do this? What are we going to accomplish? What is Corporate Connectivity anyway?

Corporate Connectivity is the confluence (“Confluence” is a very carefully chosen word to describe this convergence. The science of fluid dynamics finds that when rivers come together at a confluence, the resulting power of the water downstream is not additive; rather, it’s compounded exponentially) of Networks, Communication and Collaboration, Information and Systems (ahem, N.C.I.S.; after all, I have been an IT guy for 30 years; everything can be boiled down to an acronym). Over the next several posts we will explore each of these streams and what impact they will have on our company.

Next up: N – Networks

If anything you read here or in other posts strikes a chord, I would love to hear from you. Leave a comment, hit me up on Twitter (@jtongici), find me on LinkedIn, or Google +.