From The Seedy Underworld of Drugs and Prostitution To Entrepreneurial Success: David Sharpe’s Journey with Empower Network (Part 1)

From drugs, sex, prostitution, David Sharpe has seen it all. Hopelessly lost since his teens, a father at 15, jailed in his twenties, David has found his way back to a healthy life through entrepreneurship. Enjoy reading one of the most unusual stories we’ve done in the eighth year of Entrepreneur Journeys.

Sramana Mitra: Dave, tell us where you’re from. Where were you born and raised – what kind of circumstances?

David Sharpe: My name is Dave Sharpe. I was born in Clearwater, Florida which is right outside of Tampa Bay in 1983. I turned 30 last November 17.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit more about the circumstances. Where did you do school? What did you study? What kind of mental set are you coming from as an entrepreneur? What’s your family background?

David Sharpe: The fascinating thing is I don’t come from an entrepreneurial family. My mom was very involved in a lot of what I did, extracurricular wise. I was a sports player. I was an athlete. By the age of five, I was on a baseball field throwing the baseball around. My parents divorced when I was 2-years-old, but my dad always showed up for my baseball games. Then I had a stepfather, still do. My mom and my stepfather are still married.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What I was trying to get to was the whole enterprise social network. The impact of social sharing behavior inside the enterprise is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s probably five years old, right?

Sameer Patel: It’s actually 2006, so seven years.

Sramana Mitra: Maybe seven years for the early adopters but five years after coming into the mainstream. Now we are coming to a point where, continually, there are actual metrics available on what kind of real ROI impact we are seeing. I remember I started covering the cloud computing trend a long time ago and then we started seeing actual metrics around 2009 when the companies were able to hard-core quantify what was the impact of Cloud Computing on enterprises. I was getting numbers from Intel and CIL which were really hard-core numbers. The question I was asking is where are we in that evolution?

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You said you were going to do a couple more customer examples. Are you going to do one from the CRM side? Let’s hear about the deal cycle optimization.

Sameer Patel: CRM will be an interesting scenario. There’s a customer,Kaiser Compressor, who are a large manufacturing organization in Europe. Kaiser was going through a business transformation where their business was going to move from a manufacturer of products to a services business. Customer relationships are going to be at the center of what they do, not just the product they sell.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If I were looking at the multi-vision and the psychology of what’s happening, if there’s an incentive to create content and knowledge, and then you get credit in your appraisals and promotions. Those are the more direct psychological incentives, I think.

Sameer Patel: I agree. Again, we haven’t spent enough time looking at the value of these technologies in the context of what’s in it for the employee. Outside of the soft benefits and maybe the bragging rights of the stars and badges, they only go so far. You should use it in a way where it can actually drive both employee productivity, which is natural for them to understand, and also be cognizant about what the companies are trying to drive.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The one thing that I haven’t heard you talk about in this whole picture is the incentives for the employees to create this kind of knowledge. That must be part of the system, right?

Sameer Patel: That’s a really good point. In the last few weeks, we met some pretty big investments in how you can use, what the market calls, gamification in a very different way, rather than just badges and challenges. Today, a lot of gamification is useful, but it has its limitations because it’s 100% dependent on social. To incentivize people to utilize the social network, we look at the value of incentive based on not just what someone is doing in the social system but what they’re also doing in the transactional system.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In the example that you gave us about training, you talked about crowd sourcing through videos of enterprise tips and knowledge. That’s essentially the use skills that you described. It sounds like the real power of the system that you are trying to develop is both providing the employees and the enterprise the tools with which to both record and develop small nuggets of knowledge and then, making that searchable for the ones who are trying to find that knowledge. Is that a correct observation?

Sameer Patel: That’s absolutely correct.

Sramana Mitra: Your view of the training and knowledge management in this case is more the structure of how to crowd source knowledge and then the structure of how employees find that knowledge at the point of consumption.

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 1)

SAP plans to step-up business integration a notch further with an extension to SAP Jam that aims to deliver personalized information to enhance organizational productivity. Join us in this interview with SAP’s Senior VP and GM, Sameer Patel, as he gives us a blow-by-blow account on this new addition to its arsenal and other latest developments in the ERP landscape.
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When Networking Isn’t Working: Another Smart Way to Land a Job (Often) Fast

By guest author Dr. Marty Nemko

This article is an adapted excerpt from his book How to Do Life: What they didn’t teach you in school.

It’s been said ad nauseam that your network is the best source of a job. That’s true, but most people who are seeking career advice have already exhausted their networks.

For them, the most potent way to land most jobs is cold contact–if done right. >>>