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The right job for the right person - across a global workforce.自存倉 That's the 'true North' that LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner seeks. By Amit Roy ChoudhuryAS boss of a social networking site for professionals, Jeff Weiner, LinkedIn's CEO, has set a goal of opening up economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce, irrespective of their level of skills and education.Today, this is more of a vision than something that will be achieved within a fixed timeframe because the numbers are staggering - northwards of about three billion people.Mr Weiner admits that such an endeavour would take more than a decade to achieve. As such, the company's more immediate goal is connecting up the world's approximately 600 million professionals, or "knowledge workers" as LinkedIn likes to call them.With about 230 million registered users - growing at the rate of two per second - and 190 million active users per month, LinkedIn is on track to becoming the social network of choice for professionals."Our mission statement says that our goal is to connect these 600 million knowledge workers via LinkedIn and we are in a pretty good trajectory to realise this."The vision is the dream - that's true North. We want to think about the full potential of the platform and how we can create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce."And in that respect there is a lot of growth still to happen but for now we are very focused on the realisation of the mission of connecting the world's professionals," says Mr Weiner.LinkedIn hasn't done too badly for a company that started out a decade ago as a social network to connect recruiters with job-seekers. In 2008, it had revenues in the region of US$76 million and this year it's on a run rate of around US$1.5 billion. Mr Weiner joined as president late in 2008 and became CEO in 2009. Interestingly, LinkedIn is one of the few Internet start-ups which has managed to keep Wall Street happy after it had its IPO. From a listing price of US$45, the share price has been hovering around US$220-US$225 this month. This gives LinkedIn a market value in the region of US$20 billion, making it one of the most valuable technology companies in the US.Mr Weiner feels mobile technology will play a large role in LinkedIn's endeavour to reach out to more people and eventually to the the three billion-strong global workforce. "Mobile will ensure that people who have access to digital technologies will also have access to the information and knowledge they need to accrue expertise and skills so that they can realise economic opportunities once they become available."In terms of social networks, LinkedIn has always been seen as the smaller brother of the much bigger Facebook. The social network with about one billion users is more than four times bigger than LinkedIn. In terms of revenue generation, Facebook is around four times bigger. However, if share price is a barometer of market expectations of future growth prospects, then LinkedIn is way ahead of Facebook.Social media has really changed the way that people can connect, says Mr Weiner. Historically there was great cost in terms of time and energy that was required for staying in touch with family, friends and colleagues. As a result, one could not share with other people as often as one would like. Now one can connect with even long-lost acquaintances in milliseconds.Share and share alikeNow social media has radically changed behaviour. "We are now sharing things on social media, which if people did 10 years ago, they would have been thought as being crazy. People share what they had for lunch, what they are watching on TV while they are watching it. They are talking about what they have been up to at work. They share everything. As a result, there is this never-ending stream of content that we are constantly exposed to."Mr Weiner isn't worried about Facebook's or for that matter Google's looming presence online in adjacent marketplaces to LinkedIn's."I don't think it's easy for a Facebook or Google to move into our area because context matters. More than 80 per cent of our members want to keep their professional and personal lives separate."Less inane postings happen in LinkedIn because it's a professional site and there is no anonymity. People understand that whatever you post represents who you are professionally. Since this is tied to their livelihood, people think before they post."I don't think a company which is focused on one context (that could be either professional or social) can move easily to another context and this is one of the reasons why we have had success in keeping a focus on the professional context. If you look back on the consumer Web, it's important to clearly define what the site is about. In a situation of multiple options, you have to self-organise these options and this creates enough friction to make people turn to a single focused option. So context is important for companies who have reached scale."Mr Weiner notes that people now represent themselves online with their ideas, ambitions, goals and experiences, skills and ambitions so that opportunities can accrue to them. "It's not just about job opportunities, they could want to collaborate on a project for example. How do they find you? Can they get a warm introduction with you? It's this ability to connect with other people which has forever changed because the friction of connectivity has gone."Just as Facebook has its social graph which has invaluable data on relationships between individuals, LinkedIn has an equally ambitious idea of building a world economic graph once it gets to its goal of connecting the world's three billion workforce. "Right now I would describe LinkedIn as a professional graph as we connect professionals, enabling people to find others and be found themselves," the LinkedIn CEO observes."The economic graph goes beyond that. We want to map the global economy and digitally represent every economic opportunity, both full-time and temporary and the skills required to obtain one of those opportunities."The graph would also include a profile of every company in the world, have a profile for every higher educational organisation and have a profile of every one of the three billion global workers. "We will then overlay the professional knowledge of every one of these professionals, educational institutions and companies to the extent they want to share迷你倉 And once that's done, we want to get out of the way and we want to allow capital, all forms of capital - intellectual, working and human - to flow to where it can be best leveraged," says Mr Weiner.Once that happens, you can start to predict which economies are growing and which are declining and the skills of the aggregate workforce by geography, the fastest-growing jobs in those geographies and the size of the gap between them, he adds."You can predict how you can best prepare the workforce for the jobs that will be as opposed to the jobs that once were. We would be able to enable students to select schools based on outcomes. They can check the schools where the top professionals went to and reach out to them for advice and mentorship. Economists can use this data and pose questions; all of this is not possible now."Mr Weiner agrees that companies like LinkedIn are riding the cusp of the tectonic shift that is happening in how technology is both perceived and used."It goes way beyond LinkedIn or any single company. By virtue of technology and the rate of innovation, we now are faced with a situation where innovation is happening at a rate that exceeds our capacity to be trained at how best to leverage it. If you look through human evolution and history, innovation has unfolded at a pace that enabled people to retrain so that they could best leverage the new technology and create productivity gains. Until now."He gives some examples of past technological innovations. The agrarian age unfolded over a millennium. That's a long time to learn how to use new farming equipment."The industrial revolution happened over two centuries and people learned to take advantage of things like the steam engine and printing press. Then we had the information age which also unfolded over decades."With digital technology, however, you now see new innovation and companies coming up within years, if not months. So what's happening is a growing divide between economic opportunities that are being created by these innovations and the skill sets of the aggregate workforce capable of taking on these opportunities."So it's very important that we keep on retraining the workforce with the skills necessary to take up the roles that are available today, as opposed to the roles that were available yesterday."Mr Weiner asks a rhetorical question: "How do you do that?"His answer: "I think there's a number different ways. The most important of this is education and it's not just primary school reform. We need to recognise that the way in which we have taught children historically has largely become antiquated."We need to do a better job of leveraging new technologies and teaching kids how to collaborate in a world that is increasingly networked and inter-dependent. We need to inculcate in them critical reasoning, a habit of challenging assumptions and not just learning by rote and develop creative problem-solving capability. So primary school reform is going to take some time."He adds that Singapore does an unbelievable job in education and has become a model for the rest of the world. "But in markets like the US there's a lot of room to improve."Mr Weiner feels that new technologies can be used to help kids learn at their own pace and according to their own requirements.Along with better education, immigration reform is a must in order to make it easier for people with unique skills to take up jobs within markets that most need them, he adds.And lastly, digital infrastructure has to be built up rapidly. The more ubiquitous access to digital technology becomes, the more people can tap the knowledge and information that exists today so that they can be trained to take on new roles, he notes."So education, immigration reforms and the build up of digital infrastructure are the three ways we can start to close the digital gap."The dual passion for education and technology has had a great influence in shaping Mr Weiner's career. "I have been very fortunate to have had an understanding with what I've wanted to accomplish at a pretty young age and I haven't veered from that, it has evolved somewhat but it's remained pretty much on course."He has always been interested in the education reform. Mr Weiner notes that when he finished university, he could have chosen a public sector career path where he could have opted to teach or become an education administrator. "Or I could go down the private sector path and amass enough influence and resources so that I could make change happen. I opted for this path."After graduating with a bachelor of science in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Mr Weiner became an analyst in a strategic management consultancy arm of Deloitte & Touche in 1992. After a couple of years there, he joined Warner Brothers. After working his way up to become VP at Warner Brothers' online division, he joined Yahoo! as an executive VP in its network division. His next stop was a stint as executive-in-residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners, top Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Around this time, he met Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder, who brought him onboard LinkedIn in late 2008.It may not come as a surprise that the LinkedIn CEO is an information junkie. "I like reading and consuming information. And so for me, believe it or not, it's an unwinding experience. To decompress I like to consume information and lots of it."But he's no workaholic. "When I'm working, I concentrate on my job. But when I'm with my family I don't want to be using my device, especially when I'm with my daughters. I don't want to convince myself that I'm with my family when actually I'm online."So to me it's less about the hours; between waking up pretty early and catching up on email late at night it's a long day, but there is plenty of time in between to catch up with other things in life."amit@sph.com.sgJEFF WEINERLinkedIn CEO1970 Born in New York, US1992 Graduated with Bachelor of Science, Economics from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School1992 First job - Analyst at Braxton Associates, the strategic management consultancy arm of Deloitte & Touche1994 Second job - Senior analyst at Warner Bros corporate strategic planning & development division1999 Vice-president Warner Bros Online2003 Executive vice-president, network division at Yahoo!2008 Executive-in-residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners2009 CEO, LinkedInmini storage