As the CEO of LiveOps, I talk a lot about the opportunity of flexibility for both companies and workers. Flexibility has become a modern day value that everyone wants.

But flexibility comes with a cost. The cost is accountability, which is necessary to gain the opportunity to work where you want, when you want, and how you want. Just as it is in pro sports, (click here for Part One–Meritocracy and the World Cup) being managed by outcomes, maintaining an outstanding record, and doing something to get voted onto the team every day is mandatory to make our system work. What gets me most excited though is what accountability yields: a work environment ruled by meritocracy. The result is a new culture that is better for workers, better for the company, and better for customers.

I came out of retirement to work at LiveOps because of the opportunity to support and promote such a culture. Meritocracy is at the heart of LiveOps’ business. Our technology platform tracks real-time information about our independent agents’ results. All of the freelancers who use our platform for work have access to this data. The technology also provides access to information about how each freelancer compares to other independent agents, creating a healthy sense of competition and providing incentive for improvement. Read on… »

World Cup fever is here again and I’m more excited than ever — especially because this year I can catch the live games on my smartphone and laptop. The games are expected to get more online coverage than any major sporting event, and while fans across the planet are going ballistic monitoring matches, results, and statistics, I can’t help but think: Why can’t work be more like this?

I’m not talking about the obvious good stuff — the energy, the teamwork, the camaraderie — I’m talking about the way the World Cup works. The event, like all athletic activities, represents a meritocracy at its finest.

Soccer is the most popular sport in the world, and the one most widely participated in. Making it into a top league is harder than in any other sport; making it into a country’s World Cup squad of 23 is harder still! Millions of aspiring players from around the world are out kicking the ball from the time they are 3, practicing their skills, honing their talent, and bettering their game enough to stay in it and avoid sitting out on the sidelines. Unfortunately, for all their effort, most players will still wind up watching from the bleachers. Those who do succeed get a chance to play in one of 700 professional spots scattered across 32 international teams. Of these, only the most skilled and hard working get to take home the Cup.

This acceptance of meritocracy, which is so assumed and so essential in athletics, doesn’t always carry over to the world of work.

Read on… »

FrontRange Solutions, a California-based CRM solutions and service provider, recently announced the launch of GoldMine Premium Edition 9 (click here for the press release). The GoldMine product will now include real-time dashboard capabilities and full integration with Microsoft Outlook.

FrontRange boasts that its dashboards are real-time and allow businesses to react quickly to customer need. The dashboards are configured to integrate with third party systems. The Microsoft Outlook configuration means users won’t have to change venues to retrieve information from Office products. Users will also be able to share calendars and emails across the enterprise.

I spoke with Greg Anderson, general manager of the GoldMine business at FrontRange, about the release. Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

“GoldMine has been around for about twenty years and we’re an industry leader for small to mid-market-sized companies.  Over that time things have really changed. People are putting all their information into a CRM package. How do you make it easy to get that information out to take some kind of action? One of the things that we’ve done is provide Universal Search, which is kind of a Google search for your desktop and your GoldMine data.”

“Another important thing about this release is dashboard capabilities. You’re probably thinking: everybody does dashboards. Well, here’s what we’ve done differently: unlike most of the products out there are static. If you look at Salesforce.com or some of the low end products you get a good view from a manager perspective but what if you need to drill down into that to really start understanding what that information means?”

“Every product has Outlook integration today. But how are you able to use that to your advantage as people are trying to adapt to new technology and a customercentric approach? Outlook is email-focused, but how do you take that and turn it into a more customercentric approach and be able to access all the information you need out of GoldMine?”

“What’s nice about our product is that with a number of products in the marketplace, you have to get a third-party tool to create your dashboards. Our designer’s included in the tool and it’s click-to-configure. We’ve built in templates so that you can go after data in social media and bring that into you’re dashboard.”

“The product is available on Blackberry. We’re expanding now for iPod and we’re testing out iPad at the moment.”

I have to say, I’m pretty dissapointed that the new product isn’t available on iPod or iPad yet – especially considering that in 2008 CRM praised FrontRange for being a leader in mobile solutions. There’s still time to play catch-up though, and I look forward to covering the iPad release.