Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors (Part 8)

SM: The “mush” factor in corporations is amazing. LD: That is a beautiful word for it.

Now we have products through which you know what people you need in different roles. Now you need to recruit people to fit into those slots, so we built a recruiting product to get them into the right places and get them on board in the right way, where they have clear expectations as to what they will have when they get into the job.

Then we have products that allow us to track what happens when you fire somebody. How is it that we are losing more people in engineering and we are not losing anybody in sales, is that hurting us?

Then we have a career development tracking tool to make sure people can see that they have a career. We also have an internal directory; apparently people have never built easy to use directories which use a lot of fun technology where we will have tag clouds … it is very much like an enterprise Facebook. We use it over the Blackberry so you can find different people, find out whom they work with.

SM: It is an internal LinkedIn. LD: That is exactly what it is.

SM: Do you also have people outside of the firewall of the company, like consultants and partners? LD: We do on one of the products which is the 360.

Here, people link with others in the network as a whole, and they can link outside of the company on that. I met the CEO of a very small company, and I asked, “Hey, why are you here?” and he said “Because you changed my company.” I asked him how and he said, “I implemented the 360, and over the last 10 years I had entrusted my company with another guy and sort of felt there was something going on but never really knew what it was. But then I got these 360 reports with outside vendors, accountants, and everybody commenting and everybody said that he was an asshole. Everybody! So I found out that I had hired a guy who was an asshole, and I was like holy shit … he’s not an asshole with me but he is with everybody else!”

SM: A 360 is a very powerful tool. LD: It changed my career.

SM: Can you talk more about your 360 product? With a 360 there are all these personality and team dynamics tests … Myers Briggs, 16PF. Do you have all of those as part of the 360? LD: No, those are brands of their own. We have our own content.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Lars Dalgaard and his Success Factors
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