Reads Mini-Microsoft and Wears Shorts in Winter - Lisa Brummel, VP of HR

I must say, this was a great video.  She reads C9, watches videos, reads Mini-MS, has listening sessions.  She's very proactive and extremely down-to-earth.  It must be tough dealing with 60,000 people in a company...I guess I can somewhat relate being one of 200,000+ at Citigroup.  Having a good HR dept is very helpful and I've found that to be the case at Lava Trading (part of Citi).  So, you've seen the challenge - if you are productive in your comments on C9 or during the listening sessions, she will be listening as much as possible.  That's really cool.

I'm not familiar with the whole mentoring thing.  I could see it potentially having benefits and possibly causing problems.  Perhaps a waste of time...although I only speak from my experience.  I like a tight-knit subgroup where the manager and us are close as it is currently in my group. 

OK, so maybe my perspective on WM_IN is changing a bit.  Thanks Lisa for your positive attitude and focus on forward thinking w/r/t CS + other disciplines.  It's definitely high time that other backgrounds start to focus on technology and we can look forward to a renaissance in technical achievements by our younger technically-savvy students.
I refer those interested to an insightful blog by Gayle Laakmann, a work friend of mine (fellow former Student Ambassador to Microsoft like I was). She's got an interesting post on Women in CS and technical careers as well as an insightful post on teaching CS in colleges. Anyways, she was an energetic person who has been an inspiration to me personally. She's now at Google, but we still keep in contact and discuss technology. To those in HR within MS (Lisa as well) - you have a great asset with your SAs. Don't outsource the interaction to Volt or another similar agency but devote some time/effort to getting these (generally) bright students excited about MS technologies. It could use a real revamping, at least from what I've seen as an SA for two years.

Just a couple of other things: Lisa does know a lot about various groups and dynamics within those groups, and I'd love to get more of a detailed view as to how she goes about getting into the lives of so many diverse people.  She's very respectful of those who criticize her policies as long as they are trying to be productive, and not taking that stuff personally is a quality too many people in the biz world lack.

My only thought is to encourage people to be themselves on camera.  She had no problem with this, but others seem very nervous.  For example, if you had the camera "around" but not actually recording for a few minutes as you discuss the weather and other small talk, some may warm up to an interview better than they have.  I guess it boils down to if people can hope to have respect when their interviews are posted and whether they ultimately care what people think about their looks, their presentation style, and other trivialities.