Saturday, July 9, 2016

AppsJack Share Human Resources Meeting Held in Seattle June 28th

Post-Meeting Recap
AppsJack Share Meetup: Tuesday, June 28, 2016 4-7 PM


WHAT: The June 2016 Monthly AppsJack Share Meetup
TOPIC: Human Resources Management
ORGANIZER and HOST: Eric Veal
LOCATION: Big Fish Grill, Kirkland

AppsJack Share meetups are local business events that gather talented and interested individuals in the areas of business, management, and technology.  The events are free, fun and provide an opportunity for attendees to share their knowledge about the named monthly topic as well as glean insights from the others in attendance.  After the meeting, the attendees are connected and able to deepen their professional, working relationships.


14 Attendees




Fourteen contributors showed up for the meeting and enjoyed good conversation, community, food and drink.  Eric and Dominic Wong got there first and started chatting.  Jehan and his wife Arnaz joined next.  Then Berry, Michael Lazer, Richard, Bruce, Joe, James, and PJ arrived.  Berry introduced himself as “creating and enriching collaborative teams”.  Richard shared about his work on and passion for “Tiny Houses”. Some examples http://www.countryliving.com/home-design/g1887/tiny-house/.  This reminded Eric of his friend Corey’s tow-behind trailer business http://www.homegrowntrailers.com.


The conversation got richer and richer.  Later in the event, Samuel arrived and shared about his Diversity and Inclusion business called BizDiversity.net.  Steve Kubacki showed and shared about his interesting projects.  And finally, Andrew Sengul showed up and told us about his solutions for “learning about learning”.


Here is a complete list of the attendees and their contact information:


Dominic Wong dominicwong@att.net  | LinkedIn
Jehan Bharucha jehanb@improcon.com | LinkedIn
Arnaz Bharucha   LinkedIn
Berry Zimmerman berry@bizenrich.com | LinkedIn
Samuel Rodriguez sam@bizdiversity.net | LinkedIn


At least three books were mentioned during the meetup.  Bruce sited “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” and “The Glass Cage: Automation and Us”, both by Nicholas Carr.  Richard mentioned "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers" by Alexander Osterwalder.


Richard, a highly entertaining and intelligent man, is known for dropping wondeful, unique, newly-coined quotes and one from the meetup this month was, “Talent is like migrating birds.”


We discussed a variety of topics: “Humans and Machines”, “Is the resume dead?  Hiring for cultural fit.”, “Bad HR policies and practices”, “Social Networks and Personal Profiles”.  


We got into specifics about the recent acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft and also the potential applications, scope and scale of Crystal Knows (http://crystalknows.com).  Crystal puts people through a simple personality test (DiSC profile) and then provides services to help individuals best connect with and relate to others based upon their assessed types.  Richard also said that CK has algorithms to crawl users’ social medai profiles from Facebook and other sites to determine personality.
  
We talked about the technology of Human Resources Management and specifics about Learning Management Systems and applications like Enterprise Search.


Jehan led us in a discussion where he shared about differences he has noticed between India and USA.  He sees USA kids as “gullible” and the India kids as more street smart.  India has a bigger focus on STEM and he has seen India transform substantially (from “another planet” to what it is now) over the decades.  He sees India as “dog eat dog” and the USA is as “procured”.  Jehan said, “We [in America] live in a virtual world.”


Richard, always entertaining, talked to us about thinking of people as either A) talent or B) task worker.  Others made us think of the world split between products and services. According to Richard, two properties that he sees defininig millennials are that they have A) anger issues and BO( a plan.  Richard has Millenial children.


Richard shared with us a topic that I hadn’t yet encountered: 4D Printing.  Here is a TED Talk on it.  4D printing is concerned with micro and nano scales.  In watching the video, I learned about CAD Nano software http://cadnano.org/.  The speaker talked about combining the world of nanoscale with other worlds, talked about “self-assembly” and companies involved in the domain: http://www.stratasys.com/, https://www.autodeskresearch.com/projects/cyborg, and https://www.autodeskresearch.com/projects/4dprinting.


We talked about 1099 and W2 relationships between employers and workers and were blessed to be led by PJ and Mike Lazer, both experts in the industry.  Solid contributions came from Dominic as well.  Some of the reasons that go into picking one or the other are trade secrets, risk management/mitigation (blame and culpability), as well as changes in business models.


The question was asked if Seattle the hottest market in the USA and many agreed that it may be.  Seattle has “the cloud” here (Microsoft Azure and AWS).  We are the platform.  Compare this to the bay area, for example, that has / makes many of the apps that run on the cloud.  Seattle is infrastructure and the rest of the world is the apps / things.  Where will this place Seattle in 5-10 years?

In all, it was a great and fun meetup, informative, and well attended. I am looking forward to the ongoing discussions about HR and upcoming discussions about IT Management, generally.


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We look forward to seeing you and your pals at the next Seattle-area AppsJack Share meetup will be on Tuesday, July 26th, 2016 at 4 PM at Big Fish Grill in Kirkland.  The topic will be Information Technology Management.  Discussion topic ideas should be shared with eric@appsjack.com.  The meeting will be an open discussion rotating throught the topic naturally with contributions and discussion-leadership from guests.  Sign up for the July 26th meetup here.  Some topics that may be covered at the July meeting are:


  • The Internet of Things (was also the 2015 topic, led by Garth Vander Houwen, Hsuan-Hua Chang and Marco Micheletti).
  • Wearables and Computing everywhere
  • Security, Privacy, Governance and Politics
  • Virtualized Desktop Infrastructure and Enterprise IT
  • Cloud Computing
  • Smart Machines, Robots and Drones
  • Context-Rich, Intelligent Learning Systems and Bots
  • Visual Analytics
  • 3D Printing
  • 4D Printing
  • Genetics
  • Nanotechnology
  • Robotics
  • Other topics that YOU bring to the table!

Full calendar of meetups this year is here.  Follow us on Twitter.  Like us on Facebook.  Contact Eric to join the AppsJack Slack community.  Also, please help us get the word out, invite friends, and help us make these events and this community even better and more vibrant.

Our illustrious June guests were:

Andrew

Arnaz

Berry

Bruce

Dominic

Eric

James

Jehan

Joe

Michael

PJ

Richard

Sam

Steve