Meet Michael Amoah!

 

Transcript

Hello, my name is Michael Amoah, and I am a member of Cohort 10 in the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute at Miami University.

Cohort 10 is excited to present “Reimagine Collaboration: Navigating the Evolving Workplace.”

In exploring our topic and ways that we can reimagine collaboration, I read the book “Reimagining Collaboration: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and the Post-COVID World of Work” by award-winning author and workplace-technology guru Phil Simon.

Reimagining the way we collaborate and work together is no easy task.

But in the book, Simon offers essential insight and concrete tips for organizations, leaders, teams, and individuals on how to transform the way they work.

From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to now, it is clear to see how much the way we work together and get things done has changed. Working from home virtually has become a new norm. Yet as Simon explains in his book, collaborating virtually is difficult and quite often isn’t done successfully. During the pandemic, we have witnessed the rise of collaboration hubs like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom.

Simon defines collaboration hubs as a general use software application designed to promote effective communication and collaboration. Ideally, all organizational conversations, decisions, documents, and institutional knowledge exist in a hub.

Today's collaboration hubs are more versatile, powerful, affordable, and user-friendly than ever before. Yet few companies are taking advantage of what these tools can do.

Today's collaboration hubs offer an effective place for knowledge management and provide efficient search tools to find documents. For example, Slack is a hub that is actually an acronym that stands for searchable log of all communication and knowledge. Hubs make finding knowledge simpler.

Collaboration also becomes more accessible with hubs, since you no longer need a laptop to work, offering portability. Hubs also have more robust and customizable notification systems. Hubs offer automation, and through automating tasks employees save more time. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t start the trend of adopting collaboration hubs like these and others, it accelerated it.

Today we see companies are embracing virtual work, and the importance of utilizing these collaboration hubs is already and only going to further increase in the future.

As you can see, hubs are extremely powerful and beneficial to collaboration, but with the integration of spokes there will be a tremendous improvement of employee, group, and organization communication and collaboration.

Spokes are software applications designed for a specific purpose like productivity, content creation, customer relationship management, and project management. Spokes can easily be integrated to exchange information from hubs, provide status updates, and more.

Today you and I use lots of different applications and systems daily to get work done, and we need different applications for different purposes.

So you can see why spokes are beneficial.

Simon provides a new and more holistic model of work based on hubs and spokes, which he calls the Hub-spoke model.

An example of the hub-spoke model that Simon mentions is Zoom's announcement of Zapps, which is an array of third-party applications that Zoom will soon host on their application. In this, you can see that Zoom is the hub that connects the spokes.

This is a model that we all need to adopt into our collaboration toolbox. One thing I plan to do and you can as well is to figure out how to best utilize the hub-spoke model to maximize productivity, collaboration, and communication with others. Integrating critical applications to hubs is simple to do and can be done no matter technical expertise.

Knowing this I plan to explore what spokes would help me the most to increase my productivity, create content, manage projects, and more. I plan to get more out of today's collaboration tech and prepare myself for the future of work through collaboration hubs.

If you found this video interesting, I would definitely recommend you reading this book.

Thank you for watching this video, and stay tuned for more content and information on reimagining collaboration.

Bio

My name is Michael Amoah and I am a Computer Engineering major from Bronx, New York. I was born in the Gambia and came to the US when I was five years old. When I was younger I would constantly take things apart to understand how they worked, and then try to put them back together. Not only did this curiosity get me into trouble when I couldn’t succeed in reconstructing what I took apart, but it also sparked my passion for problem-solving. In high school, I was fortunate enough to have been a part of a program that took my classmates and I, out of the classroom and exposed us to the various branches of engineering. It was there that I realized how the world of technology is constantly progressing and I wanted to be a part of the teams that are leading society towards a better future.

Since then my goal has been to create life-changing advancements to help those in need. I am looking to work in the semiconductor industry, for leading companies such as Intel, Samsung, Texas Instrument, and Nvidia. The semiconductor industry is responsible for most of the essential technology that we use such as most electronic devices, that allow us to communicate, compute, transport, interact, and offers many other applications.

I never imagined that I would end up at Miami University, getting the opportunity to further my studies and pursue my passions. I joined the Lockheed Martin Leadership Institute to learn how I can develop my personal, professional, and strategic thinking skills. I wanted to gain skills that could help me produce more value in society than the knowledge that we get from the average college course or university studies. I was also intrigued by the opportunity to work with a diverse group of minds. I am grateful to be a member of Cohort X and can’t wait to see what this journey has in store for us. On campus I am an Evans Scholar, involved in the National Society for Black Engineers and the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation program.