Page 80 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

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The Virtual API: Greg Kaiser, President and Chief Business
Development Officer, ISB Global
Greg Kaiser is one of those people who seem like a walking
electromagnetic force field. We interviewed him in a cof-
fee shop, but the place didn’t seem big enough to hold all
the ideas he threw at us over the course of a late afternoon.
He’s had a busy career already, and one supposes that he is
really just getting started. A key person in quadrupling the
Blanchard organization, he has since gone on to work with
many of the world’s thought leaders. An entrepreneur and
successful professional speaker in his own right, he currently
works around the globe as president of ISB Global, which is
the parent organization of the International Speakers Bureau.
We were intrigued when he used the term API (applica-
tion protocol interface), to talk about what mobile workforce
managers can do to put structures and processes into place
to connect people. An API, in layperson’s terminology, basi-
cally allows two things to talk to each other. In computerese,
it’s the interface between two software programs that al-
lows them to interact with each other. So the “human API”
is the person who connects it all together for the mobile
workforce. He explained it to us:

If we envision this archetype of the mobile worker and what [he or
she needs], and that the manager’s responsibility is to anticipate
that, and to put into place structures that support the direction
that we want this independent agent, this mobile worker, then
we want to structure their direction and structure [around] what
they do but do it in a way that is encouraging to them rather than
enforcing to them. We need to anticipate the experience [he or
she is] going to have as a mobile worker and marry that to our
strategic agenda. 7