Capable or popular: which would you rather be
Stumble It!Research published in the Harvard Business Review , Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools and the formation of social networks, (June 2005) shows that when people need help getting a job done, they will usually choose a congenial colleague over a more capable one.
When you analyse each person in a team in terms of their competence and their 'likeability' you end up with four caricatures:
- Lovable Star - Competent and Likeable!
- Lovable Fool - Likeable but competency issues
- Competent Jerk - Competent but likeability question
- Incompetent Jerk - Neither Competent nor Likeable!
The most important considerations are not around how you deal with the 1's and 4's - that's fairly obvious.
The big challenge for most teams is how you support and make best use of the 2's and 3's - the 'Lovable Fools' and the 'Competent Jerks'!
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Comments
Well as an IT engineer student learning innovative project management and found of KM looks like the futur is ok, just need to continue to make the right choices. Still wonder now how I'll make money out of this potential :p
After skimming through the paper it looks like it's definitely a must read, anybody working in the industry can hardly skip such a gold-mine. Thanks for this I'll this to my fellow students and write a mind map about it.
Posted by: Fabien | May 7, 2006 3:41 PM
Ken, I think you are right by focusing on email archiving as an important issue. However, I would recommend that you go a little deeper than just reporting on Forrester's "analysis"... I found the report to be extremely biased, almost tailor-made for Symantec.
On one hand, the report excludes the most advanced products in the market (e.g., Quest's Archive Manager, Zantaz' EAS, Waterford MeterMail and others). All the products featured in the report are implementation nightmares, resource hogs and available only to very-large installs, certainly not your average IT shop. I have seen installations of Zantaz' and Quest's products that are just as scaleable as the four products considered, serving very large Exchange or Lotus installations, cost much less, and, in the case of Quest, have been implemented in a day or less.
Further, the criteria used in the report are in their majority bogus. Examples: *Including API's as evaluation criteria when Symantec falls in out-of-the-box integration. * Including some vague ability to integrate to DRM (Digital Rights Management) when Symantec is the only product in the group that has any functionality in that area, a functionality that IT shops in the Fortune 10,000 are about ten years ago from finding valuable. * Discounting only one obscure point to from Symantec's score for using Altavista as a search engine (a discontinued product) when in reality it means that any indexes created up to the p oint where the search engine gets replaced in the future will need to be rebuilt for "future-proof" purposes, a daunting task however you look at it. And so on...
That Forrester has a bias towards the companies listed in the report should not come as a surprise: they are their biggest customers. That's precisely why I would expect you to mention the bias when mentioning the report :)
Thanks for your very engaging content
Posted by: Chuck Knight | May 15, 2006 5:27 PM
Ken, I think you are right by focusing on email archiving as an important issue. However, I would recommend that you go a little deeper than just reporting on Forrester's "analysis"... I found the report to be extremely biased, almost tailor-made for Symantec.
On one hand, the report excludes the most advanced products in the market (e.g., Quest's Archive Manager, Zantaz' EAS, Waterford MeterMail and others). All the products featured in the report are implementation nightmares, resource hogs and available only to very-large installs, certainly not your average IT shop. I have seen installations of Zantaz' and Quest's products that are just as scaleable as the four products considered, serving very large Exchange or Lotus installations, cost much less, and, in the case of Quest, have been implemented in a day or less.
Further, the criteria used in the report are in their majority bogus. Examples: *Including API's as evaluation criteria when Symantec falls in out-of-the-box integration. * Including some vague ability to integrate to DRM (Digital Rights Management) when Symantec is the only product in the group that has any functionality in that area, a functionality that IT shops in the Fortune 10,000 are about ten years ago from finding valuable. * Discounting only one obscure point to from Symantec's score for using Altavista as a search engine (a discontinued product) when in reality it means that any indexes created up to the p oint where the search engine gets replaced in the future will need to be rebuilt for "future-proof" purposes, a daunting task however you look at it. And so on...
That Forrester has a bias towards the companies listed in the report should not come as a surprise: they are their biggest customers. That's precisely why I would expect you to mention the bias when mentioning the report :)
Thanks for your very engaging content
Posted by: Chuck Knight | May 15, 2006 5:30 PM
In agreement totally. I suspect that in the business world and indeed in some other contexts e.g govern=ment etc, in order for something to have importance it needs ot be couched in certain terms, terminology and be of certain length.
It's like the Emperor's new clothes. Everyone does it but no-one is brave enough to say, "I don't know what that means!" or "Couldn't we have done that a lot more easily".
JH
Posted by: John Hill | May 22, 2006 8:58 AM
So which penguin is you? Which is me? And does it matter? :-)
Posted by: Nancy White | June 27, 2006 11:37 PM
So which penguin is you? Which is me? And does it matter? :-)
Posted by: Nancy White | June 27, 2006 11:37 PM
Very interesting article, i have found pheromones to be very useful to me personally, however deciding on the best has prooven to be quite difficult, so i found some real pheromone reviews to help me decide which pheromone to use.
Posted by: sophie | February 20, 2008 10:43 AM
Bioteams Books Reviews
Animal Instincts in the office
Just because we might have selfish genes it does not mean we have to behave selfishly; nature knows when to be nice as well as nasty and nepotism occurs in the biological world too with equal destructiveness as our world. This is according to Richard Conniff author of The Ape in the Corner Office and reviewed in the UK Guardian Newspaper (27 May).
Buy it now from:
Amazon.Com
Amazon.Co.UK
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