Starting this month, we’ve begun a program where we invite experts to our office to talk about their area of specialization. It’s an extension of the Brown Bag Knowledge Sharing sessions that I’ve helped conduct earlier in other companies. The idea is to look beyond our core business areas and learn from other related fields.
I’ve been wanting to do this for a long time and the real trigger came when I got invited to Standard Chartered bank recently to talk to their CxO level senior management about Social Media. Every Friday, they make it a point to allocate one hour of their time to interact and learn from people from other fields. I was impressed with their attitude and willingness to learn.
I realized that holding such programs has lots of benefits. It’s a nice work perk for the employees. They get to learn and hobnob with the experts for which you really can’t fix a value to. It’s an initiative that most companies can do but they don’t. So, when you do it, it adds a few brownie points to your overall retention strategy.
Over the years, I’ve made lots of friends in the industry and built sizable networking. It needs only one friendly phone call to request for the expert’s time and I’ve realized that most are very forthcoming and willing to help out. There is an inherent longing in each of us to share our knowledge and people look forward to such opportunities.
I’ve accepted dozens of invitations and enjoyed speaking at organizations. It’s a good symbiotic gesture that everyone benefits from.
Two days ago, I invited Arun Nair, Head of Online Marketing at Club Mahindra to come talk about the challenges in digital media marketing. He also deals with various agencies specializing in media buying, creative, digital media, SEO and explained how it all fits into the overall online marketing jigsaw puzzle.
For the next session, I’ve invited Balaji Sowmyanarayanan, who dabbles a lot with SecondLife. He is one of the few folks in Chennai who is a SecondLife consultant and it’ll be interesting to take his views on how corporates are leverages SL and to take a reality check on its real usefulness. He’ll also walk us through on how exactly SL works and how to go about building your business online.
We are extending an open invitation and welcome anyone interested to come attend these sessions. These are free. The next session is on Saturday, March 29th at 11:00 AM. Here’s the address
F5ive Technologies,
C-1, Raj Paris Apts,
82, Kamaraj Street,
Virugambakkam, Chennai – 92
If you are interested, leave your details in the comment box below or shoot me an email to Kiruba at Kiruba.com. If you need directions or more info on the program, call me at 98415 97744. Yes, you can bring your friends along.
One of the things I want to do is open source all these talks so that they reach an audience much beyond the four walls of my office. To start with, we’ll put up the key learning from the sessions and then slowly graduate to recording audio and video of the sessions and putting them up as podcasts.
Are you doing similar programs at your workplace? I’d love to hear more about how we can improve such programs.
