Why IT Dollars Will Go Further on Google's Floating Data Center

Is Google preparing another “moon shot”? The barge discovered in the San Francisco Bay this week hints at it, and rampant speculation has Google building a floating data center. Google hasn’t confirmed any ties to the barge, but many observers find it more than coincidental that the company filed for a floating data center patent in 2008.

Since this story broke, the Coast Guard confirmed that the barge is owned by Google, but a confidentiality agreement prevented the discussion of any other details. Basically, Google placed a gag order on the Coast Guard. In any case, the operative question becomes, why would Google be experimenting with an offshore data center?

The Data Center Power Problem

Data centers today have several points of friction, but none is more problematic than power consumption. The most significant operational cost of a data center is the recurring power cost — electricity. The cost of electrical power has been the bane of data center professionals for the last couple of decades. So any experimentation related to alternative data center models by Google would almost certainly include ways to reduce the cost of powering huge farms of servers.

Moore’s Law posits that computing power grows exponentially while the price of compute power drops just as dramatically. For the last fifty years, Moore’s Law has held true. In fact, the cost of the peripherals like storage, switches, routers and bandwidth have dropped nearly in lock-step with the cost of CPUs. But while information technology (IT) costs have plummeted, the cost of electricity has not.

Much has been done to reduce the power consumption of chips, power supplies, fans and other server sub-components. But as computing becomes an integral factor in the global economy, the need for energy-hungry data centers and mega data centers has skyrocketed.

Google Knows Power

Today, computing and powering the Internet accounts for 10 percent of the world’s electricity consumption, and that percentage is growing rapidly. Historically, the annualized capital costs of IT were the majority of the expenses related to data center operations. As the relative cost of IT has dropped, today, up to 70 percent of the costs associated with running a data center are attributable to power or power-related equipment for cooling, power conversion and power generation.

Google has been a pioneer in data center efficiency. In addition to the power used to run its servers, the typical data center uses an equivalent amount of “non-computing” or overhead power for tasks such as cooling and power conversion. Google’s data centers? They only consume 11 percent overhead power. In addition to building highly efficient data centers, Google has been a leader in using renewable energy, with 34 percent of its power consumption coming from renewable energy sources such as wind.

The hidden power cost of computing can rival the cost of IT equipment acquisition, and with the lack of data center expertise, the total cost of ownership can be taxing. That cost can be even more painful when a data center runs at 30 to 50 percent utilization rates, the industry average. Google data centers run at 80 percent.

Saving Dollars in the Data Center

No doubt, much progress has been made toward running power-efficient computing systems and lowering the associated carbon footprint. Some prognosticators predicted the explosive growth of the Internet would bring our power grid to its knees. It hasn’t. But continued research by forward-thinking companies like Google confirms there is more to be done — such as consider floating a barge in the bay to use seawater for low-cost cooling or even power generation.

Actually, cloud computing offers huge potential savings in both power and overall computing costs. You might not have considered it, but moving to a public cloud or SaaS (software as a service) applications eliminates a number of costs associated with running your own systems — namely the cost of power. In aggregate, if you were to move your common productivity applications such as email, office suites and customer relationship management to the cloud, you would reap a huge, direct benefit in reduced power consumption.

In a recent study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, lead author Eric Masanet found that moving just these applications to the cloud could cut IT energy consumption up to 87 percent — about 23 billion kilowatt-hours. The study estimated that businesses run some 4.9 million servers to host these applications. Moving them to the cloud reduces that number to 85,500.

To put that in perspective, that’s enough energy to power the city of Los Angeles for a year.

For the average business, running data centers or even hosting applications locally can be very inefficient and costly. They may be better served by letting Google and others do the heavy lifting. But, don’t be surprised if your data is floating in the San Francisco Bay — or even in space.

Raj Sabhlok is the president of Zoho Corp., which is the parent company of Zoho.com and ManageEngine. Follow him @rajsabhlok.

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/rajsabhlok/2013/10/31/why-it-dollars-will-go-further-on-googles-floating-data-center/

The Next Business Stage Requires Aggressive Growth

Daniel J. Weinfurter photo via ChicagoBusiness.com

Early-stage entrepreneurs rightly keep their focus on creating an innovative product or service. After celebrating success at that level, they often find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage, for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. That’s where I see too much entrepreneur burnout, growth plateaus, and Founders being replaced, to their chagrin.

By definition, second-stage ventures generally have 10 to 99 employees and/or $750,000 to $50 million in revenue, and see that as just the beginning. Of course, not every entrepreneur wants to tackle this challenge. According to one study, only 45% of Founders plan to exit after stage one, and my guess is that less than half the remainder survive the next stage in their own company.

If you are one of the many entrepreneurs who aspire to get beyond the “art of the start,” there are some proven principles to follow. I just finished a new book, “Second Stage Entrepreneurship,” by Daniel J. Weinfurter, who has made the leap a couple of times himself, and spent many years consulting with other companies who have done the same. I like the ten steps he defines, which I can summarize here as follows:

1. Seek major capital infusion. Very few startups are cash-rich enough to self-finance aggressive second-stage growth. They need a large infusion from venture capitalists, private equity, bank loans, or mezzanine financing. Of course, that means a new level of risk, giving up some control, and a new business plan. There is no free lunch.


2. Install a real board of directors. Most entrepreneurs are mavericks, and their passion drove their new business. But to scale the business, they need the complementary expertise, experience, connections, oversight, and new capital connections of a formal board of directors. Recruiting, compensating, and engaging the board is a critical priority.


3. Focus on creativity more than smashing competitors. To achieve second-stage growth you need to stay at the top of your creative game, more than a focus on beating competitors. Growth is more than simply repackaging existing products, and adding bells and whistles or slick incentives. Keep delivering something new and fresh.


4. Hire more help than helpers. Smart staffing is a key step to ensure your success at the second stage. In addition to fresh products, you need people smarter than you for real help, with the right combination of skills, experience, and passion to foster and manage new growth. You don’t have the bandwidth to keep filling positions with more helpers.


5. Switch your attention from product development to sales. Second-stage growth usually requires a formal sales model, an experienced and disciplined sales team, and a well-defined process to meet your new goals and demands. These only come with the proper training, investment in tools, and focus on customer relationships.


6. Managing business growth is more than metrics. You can hire the best salespeople, have great products and define good metrics, but without decisive and innovative managers, the sales organization will not reach its full potential. Leaders are needed to coach each salesperson, keep the team on message, and spur new growth and goals.


7. Separate marketing from sales for further leverage. In the second stage, marketing and sales are highly specialized functions. Marketing shapes the concept, branding, packaging, pricing, and positioning. Sales builds relationships, translates needs, makes proposals, and closes the deal. The skills required are complementary, but not the same.


8. Optimize the total customer experience. Successful second-stage companies often create an entire organization devoted to one-on-one relationships with their customers, not just customer service for exceptions. Delivering a superlative experience is the only way to get truly loyal clients, repeat business, and expansion through social networks.


9. Build a winning culture and make it pervasive. In these rapidly changing times, in your own rapidly evolving company, culture will be the rudder that guides your path in a fashion that is consistent with your vision and values. Reinforce the values and operating principles with clear behaviors and guidelines to keep the culture healthy and thriving.


10. Separate management from leadership, and provide both. Leadership is the quality that inspires people to do their best every day. Management guides people in what needs to be done, by creating sustainable and repeatable systems, with education and guidance to make sure all efforts are productive. Neither is effective without the other.

Many startups are family businesses, and these don’t need to be grown into large enterprises. Yet the steps outlined here still have value in building a business that lets you enjoy the entrepreneur lifestyle, and lets you work “on the business” once in a while, rather than “in the business” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

On the other hand, if you aspire to be the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, these principles for aggressive growth to the enterprise level are absolutely required for survival. It really is a decision to grow or die. Are you enjoying your entrepreneur lifestyle today?

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/martinzwilling/2013/11/02/the-next-business-stage-requires-aggressive-growth/

Why Gates Is Wrong About Poverty And Development And Zuckerberg Is Right

The Financial Times has an interview with Bill Gates and the main subject is his attempts to make better the lives of the world’s poor. Such things as the polio eradication campaign and the malaria vaccine. However, I think he rather gets a part of his argument wrong: and Zuckerberg, in this one part of the argument has it right. Or more nearly correct I should perhaps say. None of this is, of course, to detract at all from the fact that Gates is doing both good and noble work: I am simply making the argument that the specific argument that he’s using here is not quite the slam dunk he thinks it is.

I recommend the entire interview but the part I’m interested in is this:

Bill Gates describes himself as a technocrat. But he does not believe that technology will save the world. Or, to be more precise, he does not believe it can solve a tangle of entrenched and interrelated problems that afflict humanity’s most vulnerable: the spread of diseases in the developing world and the poverty, lack of opportunity and despair they engender. “I certainly love the IT thing,” he says. “But when we want to improve lives, you’ve got to deal with more basic things like child survival, child nutrition.”

I don’t doubt at all that we’ve got to deal with child survival, child nutrition.

A central part of this new consensus is that the internet is an inevitable force for social and economic improvement; that connectivity is a social good in itself. It was a view that recently led Mark Zuckerberg to outline a plan for getting the world’s unconnected 5 billion people online, an effort the Facebook boss called “one of the greatest challenges of our generation”. But asked whether giving the planet an internet connection is more important than finding a vaccination for malaria, the co-founder of Microsoft and world’s second-richest man does not hide his irritation: “As a priority? It’s a joke.”

Where Zuckerberg is wrong is in thinking that connectivity is a good in itself. No, it’s hugely important, but it’s not the thing itself that we desire. It is the consequences of it that we do.

Then, slipping back into the sarcasm that often breaks through when he is at his most engaged, he adds: “Take this malaria vaccine, [this] weird thing that I’m thinking of. Hmm, which is more important, connectivity or malaria vaccine? If you think connectivity is the key thing, that’s great. I don’t.”

I’ve said before that I think Zuckerberg is wrong in thinking that there needs to be some campaign to ensure connectivity as well: all of the things that he describes as being necessary for someone to do are things that, as he himself points out, people are already doing. So there doesn’t need to be a campaign, nor resources redirected.

And once again let me point out that the work that Gates is doing is just great, no complaints about it at all. However, I still would insist that connectivity is indeed what needs to happen and that it will be vastly more productive to worry about that than about any one other point. Yes, even than malaria vaccines and the eradication of polio, hugely important subjects thought those are.

For the main problem in the world is not disease, nor malnutrition, nor education: it’s poverty. Solve the poverty and all of the other problems become infinitely more malleable, hugely easier to solve. We also need to recall that it is not poverty that is made: no one has caused the poor of the world to be destitute. This is in fact the natural condition of mankind. This is how our own ancestors lived for millennia.

Just to give you an idea Mozambique, Guinea, Togo, the sort of places that we regard as the poorest of the poor these days. GDP per capita of around $1,000 a year. These places are richer than the Roman Empire. As rich as England was in 1600 AD and richer than Scotland or Wales were at that time.

What is made is the wealth to lift people up out of that destitution. Thus the great need of our time is to bring the tools of wealth creation to those places that don’t have it.

The economics literature is full of people arguing about what it is that either allows or causes wealth creation. Jeff Sachs insists that he knows, the socialists insist they do and an awful lot of economists mutter that it’s all very difficult to actually pin down in detail. Could be education, contraception, local ownership, I even know of people who insist that taxing the people who invest in poor countries more will do the trick. But there is one thing that we do know adds considerably to growth. That is the ability to communicate: to be on the network, to be wired up that is.

The effect, for any one technology or action, is huge. One paper insists that for every 10% of the population that gains a mobile phone connection then GDP grows by 0.5% a year. That’s assuming, like all the currently poor countries, that there isn’t already a landline network. Other similar work has been done on the value of broadband (the 2Mbits type that is easy to provide on mobiles) and it is similar. Just the presence of it within the economy boosts growth. Not that this should be all that much of a surprise: trade is based upon having information, an increase in trade is the same thing as an increase in GDP and mobiles, being connected, most certainly increase the flow of information.

So I would argue that absolutely the most important task is indeed to get that other 3 billion connected. It’s rare for us, in economics, to know of one basic enabling technology that has such an effect on growth rates. We happen to live in a time and place where we’ve got that knowledge: we should use it.

None of this means that what Gates is doing is in any manner wrong. Indeed, as above, he’s doing good and noble work. And he’s also doing work that no one else has grasped in the same manner he has whereas there’s hundreds of companies and millions of investors happy to put up mobile phone networks. My argument is only that I think Gates is wrong in dismissing the value of connectivity: from what we know of the economics of development it’s the single most important technology to boost economic growth. And everything else that is wrong with the world becomes a great deal easier to deal with once there is indeed growth. For much of what is wrong with the world is that some one third to near a half is still stuck in the vileness of historical peasant destitution. Deal with that, get growth moving, and we’ll be more than halfway to dealing with everything else.

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/02/why-gates-is-wrong-about-poverty-and-development-and-zuckerberg-is-right/

It's Not Just The NSA: Europeans Spy On Europeans Too

I’ve rather been waiting for this other shoe to drop in the Edward Snowden affair. The first couple of months of revelations stoked the outrage that the US was doing this, the US was doing that. And of course there have been all sorts of cries from European politicians about how terrible the Big Bad Uncle Sam is for doing so.

And now we are told, as everyone who had been paying attention already knew, that European governments spy on their own citizens just as much as the Americans do.

Spy agencies across Western Europe are working together on mass surveillance of Internet and phone traffic comparable to programs run by their US counterpart denounced by European governments, Britain’s Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday.

And here is that Guardian report:

GCHQ and European spy agencies worked together on mass surveillance

Edward Snowden papers unmask close technical cooperation and loose alliance between British, German, French, Spanish and Swedish spy agencies

There’s also a super timeline of the whole affair and the revelations here.

OK, so there’s an amusement at seeing politicians with egg on their faces after their denunciations of the US. But above and beyond that is the importance of the actual story itself.

All of the various spy agencies around the world are doing their utmost to spy on all of the other spy agencies. And all foreigners. For no other reason really than that’s why spy agencies exist. And anyone who didn’t think that they did this is not only now disabused of that notion they were also hopelessly naive to begin with. Further, when the first stories started coming out about PRISM I rather welcomed what they were doing. For, really, the purpose of a spy agency is to try and work out who the bad guys are and how to either stop them being bad guys, dissuade them more forcefully or collect the evidence so that they can be jailed. That’s why we have them in the first place.

I also went on to make the distinction between our spy agency spying on people in other countries (or even the governments of other countries) and our spy agency spying on us. The first is what they’re there for, the second is a gross abuse of civil liberty and the first steps towards a totalitarian state. So clearly, we don’t want that second form of surveillance.

As the drip feed of revelations continues it is worth remembering all of this: if the NSA has been tapping Angela Merkel’s phone then that’s what it is there for. If the BND have been tapping Angela Merkel’s phone then there needs to be some serious clearing of the house in Germany. And what we might decide to try and do about such agencies in the future should also depend upon this distinction. They’re there to spy on the foreigners, not us, and as long as that distinction is maintained then there’s little harm to it and quite a bit of potential good.

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/02/its-not-just-the-nsa-europeans-spy-on-europeans-too/

The Tragedy Of The Commons Seen Live In The Wild In New Forest Mushroom Picking

There’s an economic concept called the Tragedy of the Commons. It’s the idea that if there’s some resource that everyone has access to well, that’s just fine. But if everyone wants to take more of that resource than there is then that resource is going to disappear. Thus, if demand rises above possible supply then someone, somehow, is going to have to limit access to the resource.

This was originally laid out in this form by Garrett Hardin and he related it to human population. Fortunately we’ve since found out that humans limit their own population very nicely without it having to be limited for them so it doesn’t apply there. Hardin also went on to point out that there seem to be two methods of limiting that access: we could make the resource private property or we could write regulatio0ns, pass laws, about access to it. Elinor Ostrom pointed out that there’s a third way: communal action and agreement amongst the users of the resource. This breaks down once you get over a few thousand who desire access though: communal agreements don’t seem robust above that sort of number of human beings.

Sadly there are those who insist that the Tragedy never actually happens: it’s all a plot (almost) to stop us from living off nature perhaps. But it really is true that it does indeed happen as events from this week in England show:

Large parts of the countryside are being left with no edible mushrooms because groups of pickers are turning up in vans in the early hours of the morning, the National Trust has warned.

Hundreds of mushrooms have been plundered from land in the New Forest after dog walkers reported seeing groups, often of Eastern Europeans, dropped off in vans in the early hours, armed with carrier bags to collect fungi.

The National Trust said there are now no edible mushrooms left in northern parts of the New Forest because they are being stripped on such a large scale, and there are fears if pickers continue to plunder stocks so regularly some species may not return.

This is exactly what the theory predicts. Wild mushrooms have become much more fashionable in recent years with restaurants being willing to pay up to $40 a lb for them. So, obviously, people go off and pick them. But there are so many picking them that the demand is rather higher than the supply and thus we face the exhaustion of the resource. To which the answer is one of the three above: either the mushrooms, the resource, must become private property, or we regulate or legislate to reduce the number picked, or the few hundred to few thousand people involved make up some voluntary agreement.

The point of this piece though is just my delight at seeing such a clear example in the real world of a sometimes disputed economic theory. There really are parts of economics where people have got things right over the years: OK, so no one can predict recessions, the values of stocks and bonds vary randomly in the short term, people still argue where government is better than markets and vice versa. But a resource where demand is greater than supply? Some restriction must be placed upon access to that resource or it will disappear.

There really are parts of economics where we do know what we’re doing, much as that might surprise some people.

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/02/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-seen-live-in-the-wild-in-new-forest-mushroom-picking/

Story Power: The Hero's Journey

Sandra Bullock and George Clooney arrive for the opening ceremony of the 70th Venice Film Festival and the screening of the movie 'Gravity.' (Image credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

The year’s surprise megahit movie is Gravity, starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Warning: I’m about to spoil the plot. Stop reading if you want to see the movie with fresh eyes.

While orbiting Earth in a space shuttle, Bullock and Clooney survive a collision with debris. The accident kills the rest of their crew. Clooney, the veteran astronaut, and Bullock, a medical doctor and space rookie, now must find a way to get back to Earth. They concoct a plan: Get to an orbiting Chinese space capsule and blast home. Along the way things go haywire, and Clooney sacrifices himself so that Bullock may have a chance to live. But Bullock is overwhelmed by the challenge of getting back to Earth by herself. She accepts her fate and turns off the oxygen in the space capsule to begin a painless death by hypoxia.

The movie doesn’t end with Bullock’s suicide, of course. It ends rather heroically, which is why Gravity has been such a smash hit with men and women, old and young. It’s about a triumph of the human spirit. It’s an updated version of a classic plotline: the hero’s journey.

John Ford, the great Hollywood film director of the mid-20th century, had a favorite saying. Every good movie western, Ford said–and he made dozens of them with John Wayne and others–shared the same story: “The bad guys show up while the hero is still evolving.”

Don’t you love that? It’s the shortest and best summation of what the late scholar Joseph Campbell called the hero’s journey. In fact and fiction, as well as in religion and secular life, the hero’s journey is an eternally appealing story: Abraham Lincoln, Jesus Christ, Luke Skywalker, a near-crippled Kirk Gibson hitting a game-winning home run for the Dodgers in the 1988 World Series opening game.

The mystery is why businesses are so reluctant to tell their stories in this way. Most businesses, in fact, do the opposite. They take perfectly good raw material about their customers and turn it into Barbie doll stories, fake and plastic. An example of this travesty is that old yawner, the customer case study. As told by most corporate marketers, the customer case study goes like this: “The customer had a problem. They came to our company. Our company’s complete suite of [snore] and [zzzzzz] solutions was implemented. The customer was happy and went on to greater heights.”

Really, that’s it? No sweat? No arguments? No false starts and false dawns? No harrowing walk through the valley of the shadow of death? Everything just worked, right from the start, as if by immaculate conception? Such is never the truth. Even worse, it’s boring.

STORIES DRIVE CHANGE

As story expert and executive consultant Nancy Duarte told me, “For thousands of years story has been used to transfer insights and morals, keeping entire cultures knit together. And this is preliteracy–thousands of years of preliterate people.”

Stories saturate our lives. Why do we love sports? For the stories. In our personal lives we think in stories, talk in stories, communicate in stories and even dream in stories. When we’re asked what we did over the weekend, we don’t provide some analytical abstraction–we tell a story. When we’re asked about our dinner out last night or our most recent vacation, we tell a story. And these stories are replete with a cast of characters, multiple plots and plenty of drama.

No matter the form, a good storyteller describes a conflict. The main character, the hero, is called upon to make decisions, take action and, ultimately, discover a new truth. “With storytelling, in particular, the thing that we love is watching someone transform,” says Duarte. “The three-part story structure is clear: One, you meet a likable person; two, that person encounters roadblocks; three, that person emerges transformed. Storytelling creates a tension and release that is so important to creating change.”

What does this have to do with business? Well, business is terribly competitive today. Who doesn’t secretly wish it were easier? Blame slow growth, the march of cheap technology, Internet transparency–which erodes pricing power–or global competition. These and other disruptive threats will never go away; they’ll only increase. Stellar strategy and execution once offered protection, but these can be copied.

What survives? The best stories.

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/richkarlgaard/2013/10/30/story-power-the-heros-journey/

Backstage At LinkedIn's Talent Cafe: How Do You Guys Hire?

Jeff Weiner (Credit: AFP/Getty Images via @daylife)

“You probably want to know if we eat at our own restaurant,” says LinkedIn Chief Executive Jeff Weiner, with a smile. Tapping into LinkedIn’s databases has become second nature for big companies battling for talent. Organizations as diverse as Dell and National Public Radio use LinkedIn’s most expensive search tools to widen and accelerate their hunts.

So what about LinkedIn itself? Weiner runs a fast-growing operation–revenue was up 59% last quarter–and constantly needs more engineers, salespeople and corporate managers. Sure enough, LinkedIn’s own recruiters have a lot to teach others through their incessant and highly demanding use of house products, constantly testing new features in search of more powerful results.

Start with something as fundamental as where to look. LinkedIn’s databases can generate heat maps of the U.S., showing local variations between job listings and available talent for specific industries. So while LinkedIn still does much of its software engineer hiring in the obvious places such as Silicon Valley, Seattle and New York City, it is alert to “hidden gem” markets such as the Washington, D.C. metro area and Dallas/Fort Worth, where the supply and demand of engineering talent are in better balance.

To catch candidates’ attention, LinkedIn’s first moves are disarmingly low-key. Anyone who happens to glance at a LinkedIn employee’s profile is likely to see a nearby ad or piece of sponsored content from LinkedIn sharing a bit of itself. The goal is to induce these site-surfers to “follow” LinkedIn’s company page. Once that happens it’s easier to aim job ads or more content at them. Such digital serenades are known as “adding warmth.” In a recent hunt for systems-infrastructure engineers, Weiner’s team discovered that more than 35% of leading prospects were people who were already digitally acquainted with LinkedIn. That’s no accident. Three years ago LinkedIn had fewer than 50,000 followers; today it has more than 550,000.

Another lesson learned the hard way: Just because you can create a fussy list of criteria for candidates doesn’t mean you should. When LinkedIn hunted for its first data-center manager, the company’s own site originally found only seven identifiable people on Earth who met all conditions. Brendan Browne, the company’s director of global talent acquisition, warned that it could take 18 months to pry anyone from a current job.

So LinkedIn loosened up. It lopped off four dubious requirements, such as insisting that candidates have spent at least three years in their current jobs. Voilà!–126 candidates. Within a few months the job was filled. “We don’t need eight to ten years of people doing x,” says Weiner. “In fact, we may not want someone who has spent too much time working in a large-company culture.” Instead, LinkedIn needs agility and speed.

Even in data-rich LinkedIn, Weiner emphasizes intangibles that don’t show up on a résumé–qualities such as leadership, resourcefulness and humor. When he interviews candidates face-to-face, he often asks how they want to see their career in 20 to 30 years, to discern who is well-aligned with LinkedIn’s culture. “It’s a lot like M&A. People sometimes get too caught up in getting the deal done, when maybe they shouldn’t be doing the deal at all,” Weiner says. Unlike a lot of Web 2.0 firms, LinkedIn is a haven for disciplined planners. Managers create detailed road maps–and stick to them. For constant improvisers, there’s always Twitter.

from Forbes.com: Most popular stories http://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeanders/2013/10/30/backstage-at-linkedins-talent-cafe-how-do-you-guys-hire/