Photo courtesy of this lyre lark

Strong processes, weak culture 

• Processes present a limitation in that they encourage what Jim Collins (in Built to Last), or Harvard Business Review’s Leading by Leveraging Culture , call a weak culture. The assumption is that teams are not aligned enough with business strategy, so it is necessary to put prescriptive processes in place to ensure for teams alignment. 
• Operational units, i.e the team that will be using these processes on a daily basis eventually are hardly ever consulted. This way, the processes acquire a Top-Downcharacteristic and the organisation enter into what Thierry de Baillon calls the Taylorist Knowledge : everything is in place to feed the weak culture.
• A strong culture organisation does not need that much strong processes.
• The processes are then bottom-up, operational units validate processes that have proven successful
• From my experience in managing IT projects, I notice that the more prescriptive a method is and the more it embodies a self-powered weak culture.
• The less prescriptive the method is the more it encourages initiative, successful participation and a strong culture.
• My 2 cents is that the 21st century organisation needs more a strong culture than it needs strong processes.

How IBM's Sam Palmisano Redefined the Global Corporation 

• The real story behind IBM's success is the course Palmisano set for 21st century global enterprises. 
• Recognizing that the company's command-and-control culture wouldn't work in the 21st century, he defined leadership as leading by values and created a unique collaborative organizational structure.
• This meant abandoning IBM's existing organization, in which product silos and geographic entities operated independently and frequently were more competitive than collaborative. Palmisano reorganized IBM into a "globally integrated enterprise" focused on worldwide collaboration. He cajoled, pushed, and pulled the company into a client-centric, agile structure able to customize delivery of IBM's software assets, hardware assets, and intellectual property.
• His ingenious first step toward creating a collaborative culture was a massive, global collaboration. In 2003 he launched an online, interactive "values jam" involving all employees for 72 hours to determine what IBM's values should be. The three principles that emerged from that event guided decision-making throughout the organization, giving IBM's huge, globally dispersed workforce the discipline necessary to execute the company's new strategy.

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption 

• Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption — an intelligent manifesto for optimizing the 11 hours we spend consuming information on any given day in a way that serves our intellectual, creative, and psychological well-being.
• Johnson draws a parallel between the industrialization of food, which at once allowed for ever-greater efficiency and reined in an obesity epidemic, and the industrialization of information, arguing that blaming the abundance of information itself is as absurd as blaming the abundance of food for obesity. Instead, he proposes a solution that lies in engineering a healthy relationship with information by adopting smarter habits and becoming as selective about the information we consume as we are about the food we eat.
• Johnson argues that instead of the lens of productivity and efficiency, which have become a false holy grail for our inbox-zero-obsessed culture, we should consider this through the lens with which we assess what we consume biologically: health. Because the problem is now larger than a mere matter of getting things done.
• Like any good diet, the information diet works best if you think about it not as denying yourself information, but as consuming more of the right stuff and developing healthy habits

Do Great Things 

• Whether you’re a programming prodigy or the office manager holding it all together, technology empowers small groups of passionate people with an astonishing degree of leverage to make the world a better place. Yet I fear that our industry is squandering its opportunity and its talent. In companies large and small, great minds are devoting their lives to endeavors that, even if wildly successful, fail to do great things.
• When did beating the competition or protecting your existing business become more important than serving users?
• An abundance of angel capital and increasing fetishization of entrepreneurship has led more people to start companies for the sake of starting a company.
• The result is a massive talent dilution
• It’s good that starting a business is easier than ever, but the pendulum has swung too far from Silicon Valley’s hey-day when a handful of great companies were able to gather a critical mass of great people to do great things.
• No one knows whether you and your teammates will realize your audacious visions, but in order to do great things, we must attempt great things.

This Is Generation Flux: Meet The Pioneers Of The New (And Chaotic) Frontier Of Business 

• And here's the conundrum: When businesspeople search for the right forecast--the road map and model that will define the next era--no credible long-term picture emerges. There is one certainty, however. The next decade or two will be defined more by fluidity than by any new, settled paradigm; if there is a pattern to all this, it is that there is no pattern. The most valuable insight is that we are, in a critical sense, in a time of chaos.
• Some people will thrive. They are the members of Generation Flux…What defines GenFlux is a mind-set that embraces instability, that tolerates--and even enjoys--recalibrating careers, business models, and assumptions
• “In an increasingly turbulent and interconnected world, ambiguity is rising to unprecedented levels. That's something our current systems can't handle.”
• You do not have to be a jack-of-all-trades to flourish in the age of flux, but you do need to be open-minded.
• If ambiguity is high and adaptability is required, then you simply can't afford to be sentimental about the past. Future-focus is a signature trait of Generation Flux. It is also an imperative for businesses: Trying to replicate what worked yesterday only leaves you vulnerable.
• Our institutions are out of date; the long career is dead; any quest for solid rules is pointless, since we will be constantly rethinking them; you can't rely on an established business model or a corporate ladder to point your way; silos between industries are breaking down; anything settled is vulnerable

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 iPadded textbooks are still textbooks, but they're personalized textbooks. They take advantage of the emotional connection people, and especially young people, feel to their devices. They encourage, rather than frown on, active note-taking. They demand, rather than curtail, exploration. They create a kind of kaleidoscopic experience: video, text, audio, all whirring and whirling into each other in a self-guided tour of history or chemistry or biology. They invite students to create learning environments that, though standardized on one level, are, on another, uniquely theirs. And that changes everything. 

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~Sam Palmisano's speech on IBM's 100th anniversary

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- Cohesive construct: A networked team is a cohesive social network. It is not too tight that homophily takes stage nor too loose that it becomes difficult to diffuse knowledge and  new innovations. A networked team can have a core subgroup that instills the team's culture and insures a good environment for nourishing peripheral members with the needed knowledge. If many subgroups emerge within the team, they need to be interconnected to keep the knowledge flow going.

- Connected unit: A networked team is anything but siloed. It doesn't evolve in an independent realm but rather bridges the gaps among itself and other teams effectively. It recognizes its weavers and leverages their access in order to reach out to novel ideas and processes. 

- Just the right amount of power : While a certain degree of leadership is necessary for stimulating innovation, the power within networked teams is decentralized to some extent. Team members are actually empowered enough to function as a business within the business. 

Why networked teams are winner teams?
Networked teams grant the organization a fluid structuring based on relentlessly changing templates, quick improvisation and ad hoc responses. This can easily be translated into competitive advantage as it allows for innovation through continuous creation of new (combination of) resources. 

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Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

Mining the social web: Analyzing data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites

By Matthew A. Russell

"You'll learn how to combine social web data, analysis techniques, and visualization to help you find what you've been looking for in the social haystack, as well as useful information you didn't know existed."

Why read this book? Because there is so much data out there and so much knowledge hidden in its folds and this book may grant us some of the necessary skills to uncover it.

The Age of the Platfom: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google Have redefined business 

By Phil Simon

The Age of the Platform demonstrates how the world of business today is vastly different from that of even ten years ago. Today, the most successful companies are operating under an entirely different business model-one predicated on collaboration, emerging technologies, externally driven innovation, different types of partnerships, and vibrant ecosystems.

Why read this book? Because it was recommended to me by my good twitter friend Kelly Craft and I trust her judgement very very much. And because I've taken a glimpse at this video and it convinced me on the spot that it will be worth my time.  

Microwikinomics: Rebooting business and the world

By Don Taposcott and Anthony D. Williams

In their 2007 bestseller, Wikinomics Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams showed the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace. Now, in the wake of the global financial crisis, the principles of wikinomics have become more powerful than ever. 

Why read this book? Because I read wikinomics and I can say it was one of the best books I read last year. And because taking the wikinomics' principles to a larger scale can only mean one thing: More goodness! 

Where good ideas come from: The natural history of innovation

By Steven Johnson

This sweeping study of the history of innovation breaks out the seven patterns of innovation like "the slow hunch" and "serendipity." It debunks the myth of the lone genius and presents the real-world dynamics and context that enable innovation. Johnson shows how understanding the roots of innovation can lead to our own creative breakthroughs.

Why read this book? Simply because of this!

Happy reading everyone and I'm curious to see what are the most anticipated books on your reading list too!  

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The Web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner. 

~ Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web

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Design to Thrive: Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that last

• The thinking here [flatter organizational structure] is that it doesn’t matter where good ideas come from—if you empower all of your employees and all the members of a community with the same information and if members of a department also understand that they’re expected to share all the information that they have with you—then the best solution will evolve.
• Knowledge isn’t static. That old saw that encourages people to “collect pearls of wisdom” is false because, unlike pearls, knowledge changes. Knowledge is a process; it’s something that is made, and consequently, communities and social networks aren’t about and shouldn’t be about collecting facts.
• People tend to get siloed in and are inclined to communicate with others in the same silo rather than reaching across what Burt calls structural holes in a network. People tend not to talk across the gaps between silos and don't discuss ideas with people in other silos.
• The ability to see how something obvious in one field (such as bicycle chains) can be applied to a problem in another field (such as how to transfer power from an engine to a propeller) is often how new knowledge is created. Membership in multiple communities enables that.
• The future, therefore, doesn’t lie in everybody being connected to everybody. I don’t agree with those who see us headed toward a single, flat, monolithic culture where we all share the same values and the same literacies and sense of purpose. 

Social Networking for business : Choosing the right tools and resources to fit your needs

By Rawn Shah

• The basis for high-performing individuals and groups now includes those who demonstrate social intelligence and find the best ways to incorporate the wisdom of crowds
• Blogs and Wikipedia emphasize the role of individuals, their ambitions, preferences, competitive spirit, interactive behavior, personal characteristics, interests, and personal goals. In contrast, most organizations still try to manage themselves through centralized, hierarchical structures, forged in the days of ancient empires. This command-oriented structure emphasizes predictable and standardized processes to manage an operational environment, while deemphasizing individual expression and direction.
• Culture, an integral part of social environments, can exist in obvious or professed levels, or can hide in the unspoken but shared behavior of members. It emerges as a confluence of shared ideology and values, behavior and rituals, imagery, and stories about the social group.
• Researchers were able to demonstrate that the topology of the network has a strong relationship to their work performance...they found that just the size of a consultants network did not translate to increased performance.
• Social computing facilitates new strategies that change how businesses can apply the collective efforts of many individuals to solve problems and contribute to the success of the organization. Understanding the dynamics of how these methods work is both a science and an art.  

Here come everybody: The power of organizing without organizations

By Clay Shirky

• But like a chain of volcanoes all fed by the same pool of magma, the surface manifestations of group efforts seem quite separate, but the driving force of those eruptions is the same: the new ease of assembly.
• Information sharing produces shared awareness among the participants, and collaborative production relies on shared creation, but collective action creates shared responsibility, by tying the user's identity to the identity of the group. 
• It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen
• All businesses are media businesses, because whatever else they do, all businesses rely on the managing of information for two audiences employees and the world.
• Revolution doesn't happen when society adopts new technologies, it happens when society adopts new behaviors.

 

Collaboration 2.0: Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World

By David Coleman, Stewart Levine

• In the 90's, collaboration was primarily about working with colleagues within the corporate firewall. Today, it often means working with people inside and outside the organization (in your value network) who have a wider spectrum of roles and relationships in this ecosystem that develops across and between organizations.  
• Mary OHara Devereaux and Robert Johansen: Historically businesses have viewed diversity as a chronic problem that had to be minimized and managed. The new challenge of globalization represents an opportunity to take a radically different approach: one that embraces diversity in ways that allow business to grow and profit from the many dramatically different cultural qualities that characterize most of our communities and organizations.
• Multiple realities inform each other, fertilize, stimulate, and stir the cauldron of creativity. David La Chapelle
• A trend in the industry is moving toward contextual collaboration, where user access to collaboration features is integrated within the business process or application being used. This can improve rates of adoption, since the use of the collaboration technologies becomes seamlessly melded into the way people work.  
• In order to work in the space effectively, People, Process, and Technology must all be addressed simultaneously

The Organizational Network Fieldbook: Best Practices, Techniques and Exercises to Drive Organizational Innovation and Performance

By Robert L. Cross, Jean Singer, Sally Colella, Robert J. Thomas, Yaarit Silverstone

• It does little good to make changes in the community if  the organizational context will simply drive the community back to ineffective patterns
• Too often, a firm's potential for innovation goes unrealized because it is unable to combine the ideas, energies, and skills of  people working in disconnected pockets of  the organization.
• A collaborative innovation network reaches beyond a firm's boundaries; it taps into and connects talent regardless of where it dwells; it is diverse and often cross-disciplinary; and it builds relationships in which knowledge and discovery are shared so that learning is both fostered and accelerated. 
• We tend to be comfortable with close connections to others who get  it, or  share  our  world view. The challenge is to reach out and remain connected to those whose views are very different. Often these are the relationships that push us to grow, develop, and be more effective leaders. 
• One of  the most important characteristics of  high performers is their ability to generate energy and enthusiasm among those in their network.

The Art of Innovation

By Tom Kelley

• People talk about racial and cultural diversity. Mental diversity can be just as important. we need individuals who celebrate different viewpoints
• In the stream of innovation, many companies make the mistake of building dams instead of doing everything possible to increase the flow. But when the culture is devoted to searching for breakthrough ideas, it's as if the river keeper has opened all the floodgates.
• we all benefit by periodically cleaning out our organizational and mental attic, seeing if our thinking and processes need some spring cleaning.
• Innovation and structure are like oil and water.
• So go ahead and color outside the lines, but try your best to stay on the same page.

Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality
By Scott Belsky

• Ideas never get made unless everyone makes it their business to do so
• After all, consensus-driven teams run the risk of settling on what offends no one and satisfies no one.
• Leadership is about instilling a genuine desire in the hearts and minds of pthers to take ownership of their work on a project. Only then can we act together, motivated by a shared purpose
• We should be wary that "best practices" -the tries and true ways of doing things- often become conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is often wrong
• Please take yourself and your creative pursuits seriously. Your ideas must be treated with respexct beacue their importance truly does extend beyond your own interests. Every living person benefits froma world that is enriched with ideas made whole ideas that are made to happen through passion, commitment, self-awareness and informed pursuit

Goodies:

http://www.ted.com/speakers/clay_shirky.html

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/tom_kelley
http://wearelikeminds.com/videos/scott-belsky-making-ideas-happen

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"Kind of LEGOs. The more of these building blocks we have, and the more diverse their shapes and colors, the more interesting our castles will become. Because if we only have one color and one shape, it greatly limits how much we can create, even within our one area of expertise." ~Maria Popova

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source: Topprospect

It's the culture, stupid.

Signs are spread on Facebook walls and employees are encouraged to comment them.

Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Facebook.

"What would you do if you weren't afraid?" A question that according to Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering at Facebook, lies in the middle of the company's culture. A culture that incorporates transparency, embraces failure, encourages going fast and breaking things and inspires its employees on being bold. No wonder that Hackathons are a huge part of Facebook culture ("Hack" is actually written on the face of the building). Mike enumerated the number of projects that saw the light during hackathons, Facebook's chat, video, Hip Hop for PHP project to name a few. He said that these events offer employees and interns a chance to launch ideas they're excited about and help create a collaborative dynamic that is essential to stirring innovation within the company.

 

Going bold has also been the motto of the Prineville project which aimed to Build a Data Center that approaches the theoretically most efficient Data Center and that doesn't require any air conditioning. By circulating the air from the outside into the building, the Data Center was based on a "We just open the window" approach which was a first in the industry. The details of Prineville's design have been made public and can be accessed on http://opencompute.org/ to "help other companies save money" says Mike.   

Prineville primary design.

It's not not about Technology.

Having a culture that readies the ground for innovation is essential, but building the IT to support it is the voucher of its sustainability. Tim Campos, director of IT, gave us a compelling overview of how IT at Facebook supports a "move fast and break things culture". 

It starts by breaking the old school paradigm and maintaining an environment that values productivity and efficiency, gives employees "Choice", offers them awesome support ("If it's not awesome support, it's not good enough" according to Tim) and is essentially agile. The Facebook way, as Tim calls it, is based on living the enterprise's standards, personalised automation and a menu of choices. 

"We think that employees don't need to be controlled, they need to be empowered". To illustrate this, Tim presented the supply vending machine. A dispenser that tags supplies with their price to create self-accountability in employees. "It's ok for them to use, but it's good to tell them how much it costs".     

Courtesy of fortunebrainstormtech : Vending machine @ facebook 

Tim Campos also gave us an overview of some internal tools used by Facebook to support a culture of openness, sharing and transparency. Facebook uses platforms that enable employees to know where they are positioned within the organization. Each employee has an internal Facebook page that states who he reports to and what projects he has been working on.

Discussions aren't done around emails but rather occur in a Facebook-notes-like fashion with features such as comments and likes. 

Employees review are also revisited. Facebook uses Rypple to get feedback from employees. If an employee does something exceptional (even outside of his team), he can get recognition "Give a Thanks" from fellow collaborators and a notification is sent to his manager. This not only helps with performance reviews but means a lot to employees who feel valued for the job they do.

Facebook's story is an impressive example of how a culture backed up by solid IT can create an ecology for innovation. In the end, it's about empowering your employees and reinventing yourself on regular basis. less control is really equivalent of more impact!

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“Being innovative is more than hiring the right people and buying the best technology. You've got to create a culture where space matters.” ~Tom Kelley.

I remember the first time I saw photos of Google’s offices in Zurich few years ago. It was a huge shock. I couldn’t imagine a workplace that could offer its employees that much comfort and fun and yet get them to do their job seriously. I understood later that the physical space reflects the whole culture of the enterprise and actually makes innovation happen. I understood also that placing your employee in the center and making his work experience more fun is ironically the only way to get him to do a better serious job.

But there is a huge difference between reading about things, seeing pictures of them and actually getting to experience them firsthand.

As part of TechWomen, an exchange program I was part of. we got to visit a number of tech companies for workshops and tech talks. And every time I set foot in their offices, it felt as though the enterprise culture could be smelt in the air. Here are some rather obvious examples to illustrate my case:

Youtube: we’ve got it covered!

Although we didn’t get to tour YouTube, the little I’ve seen gave me a great overview of the culture there. Simple and comfy spaces, massage chairs, basketball court, climbing machine, open cafeteria, snacks à volonté…  the visual presence of the company was everywhere and in everything you touch. There are definitely this “make yourself at home” and “don’t worry about a thing, YouTube got it covered ” messages floating all around. The space emitted what I believe are the main characteristics of YouTube: simple yet efficient. 

Facebook: 1% achieved, 99% to go

The TechWomen program assigns you technical and cultural mentors that would help make your experience a richer and better one. My cultural mentor happens to be Kinh Demaree, university recruiter at Facebook. So while we were invited to Facebook for a tech Talk (On which I’ll blog later), Kinh was awesome enough to grant us a private tour. Open, fun and abounding youthful power, Facebook’s offices have this funny way of reflecting the organization’s main philosophy: “our work is 1% finished”. When you walk in the offices, you’d think they are in the middle of a renovation project with their unpolished floors, electrical cables hanging from the ceilings etc. All of this is done on purpose to reflect the need of working consistently on creating add-value.

Facebook is also known for its HACK culture. Every now and then, interns and facebookers organize all-night hackathons that not only bring to life great ideas but nurture a culture of collaboration, prototyping and innovation.

Google: office is your second home!

Well, you have to give it to Google, they definitely go the extra mile. From nap pods to bicycles for traveling between buildings, Google not only seems to have thought of everything (they really really do your laundry…) but adds its own grain of creativity. The Dinosaur, the shark, the replica of the spaceShipOne, the mobile meeting room… a googly touch to prove that the world is the canevas of your imagination, all you need is dare! Google not only offers the best conditions possible for its employees but it also conveys strong messages: be comfortable, have fun, give way to your creative impulse…

Doping the culture

I could go on and on about all the great companies we had the pleasure to visit. But I’ll wrap up with my major takeaways:

- Your way to success starts by building your unique culture that best reflects your DNA, by living that culture, embodying it and breathing it in everything you do.

 - Organization’s values aren’t to be framed in A3 posters and stuck on walls nobody cares to see or discuss. They have to be felt in every ounce of the organization’s building, maybe through the names of rooms (I particularly loved Facebook’s “all your bases are belong to us” and Twitter’s offices that had employees’ twitter handles on their door…), through color codes or innovative office spaces...

 - Physical spaces don’t only reflect a culture that is reigning within the organization, they actually reinforce it.  And guess what? The office doesn’t have to be extravagant it only needs to convey your culture in a set of messages and make them stick! 

TechWomen : A professional mentorship program that pairs women from the Middle East and North Africa region with their counterparts from Silicon Valley. Mentees are paired to technical and cultural mentors from leading technology companies and assigned a four-week project in their hosting companies. Techwomen is an initiative of the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), managed by the Institute of International Education (IIE), and implemented in partnership with the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI).

Googleplex photo by Laughing Squid

Lamia Ben.

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Many organizations are asking about how much will it take them to come afloat/ succeed / innovate / become a fortune 500... ? well, here are some simple truths:

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The concept is simple: every day I record and capture a single second of video—just something interesting about that day. I will compile these tiny slices of my life into a single, continuous video.

But what started out as a fun way to chronicle my year off grew quickly into a catalyst that forced me to reevaluate how I approach my day-to-day life. Soon after I started the project, I realized that I couldn’t even spend a couple of days on the couch without detracting from the whole video. Footage of my typical routine was, frankly, boring. The One Second Everyday project has helped me to maintain my creative drive, as I am constantly attempting to capture something noteworthy. It has become a perpetual reminder to wake up and seize the day.

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours." 
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

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Disclaimer: I’m a morning person, so my focus function is negatively correlated to the afternoon hours, hence the slimer notes. But I’m sure you’d get a clearer idea once the keynotes are online :-)

HTML5 and the future of the web

It’s well known that Google is betting High on HTML5. Whether you too think HTML5 rocks or you’re one of those who secretly damn Apple for not supporting flash, one thing is sure HTML5 is going to be part of the future web landscape. And nothing spells this better than WebGl in the ro.me Demo Sylvain Weber & Pascal Corpet showed us on “mobile and web development” session. Here is a video I once stumbled upon which gives a rather clearer view of the power of WebGL capabilities:

Google App Engine: Developing on the “Cloud”

Google App Engine is the infrastructure offered by Google to let developers build, maintain, scale and run their web applications easily on the cloud. Not sure about its penetration among Moroccan developers, but according to Nicolas Garnier, Developer Programs Engineer, App Engine has 100.000 active developers worldwide, introducing 200.000 active apps per week and reaching 1.5 B Page views per day. Applications can be written in Java, Python or Go and a simple adaptation of the relational DB Layer could do the trick for migrating your native apps into the app Engine. Here are some interesting apps and websites hosted on Google App Engine:

Webfilings: Enterprise adoption of App Engine

BuddyPoke: Gaming at scale

The Royal Wedding: Example of event-based websites

Roundtable: Women In Technology

No, we were not plotting to take over the world (well, kind of). And yes, I'm aware that in the end it's a false debate. But the women and technology roundtable was a great opportunity to meet inspiring women working at Google and to draw wisdom from their rich experience. Luisella Mazza, Noha Salem, Nada Faridane & Shaden Mohamed sent a loud and clear message: it takes hard work, perseverance (obviously for everyone and not only women) and more self-confidence (being honest about your capacities does not imply under-estimating them). I ceased the opportunity to share my simple observation: Women in technology are not less competent; it’s just that they are less present online and offline. So it comes down to encouraging them to take center stage by 1) Setting the example and 2) Empowering them to do so. (Hold that thought, I might have something to announce soon).

 Well, these were pretty much my major takeaways from G|Maghreb, a successful event overall. I would definitely love to see another Google event taking place in the near future, only this time it would make more sense if it dived a bit more into the advanced aspects of the technologies. My only advice to you dear reader: Get your gears ready, it’s time to deliver your star performance.

Lamia Ben.

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Once I started writing down my notes from the first day, I realized that I had more to say than a single blog post can bear. This is my review from the morning of the first day of G|Maghreb, the second post will be published shortly, stay tuned! :) 

You don’t get an auditorium full to its last seat, cheering whenever you show up, enthusiastic geeks waking up before 8 am to attend your event, unless of course you’re Google. That was the first thing that came to my mind when I set foot in the G|Maghreb, the first Google event in Maghreb, taking place in Rabat from 21^st to 23^rd May.     

I only had the chance to attend day 1 a.k.a “The mobile and web developers’ day” since it suited most my “PHD student” and “Geekette” hat (Yes, my hat is big enough to bear both). That’s to say that my review of the event would actually be from that perspective, not the hardcore developer’s one. (It’s worth pointing out that the keynotes will be available on the event’s website very soon)

Let’s start from the beginning, shall we? Once badge in hand (Not as easy as it sound believe me!), I headed to the auditorium where G|Maghreb would officially start. A countdown (see picture below), hundreds of giddy geeks with phones and laptops in hand, in short, I’ve never felt so “at home”. 

Google MENA strategy: up for the long haul

After a funny Arabic-oriented welcome speech from Sebastian Trzcinski-Clément - Outreach Programs manager for MENA, we were introduced to Google’s strategy regarding the region in Juergen Galler’s keynote: “Towards an Arabic Internet Ecosystem: Locally relevant, vibrant and with an enriched user experience”. Galler listed the obvious reasons why Google would be interested in the region but also the challenges ahead: Lack of high quality content (while 5% of Internet users speak Arabic only 2% of Arabic content is published online), underdeveloped infrastructure and lack of online forms of payments to name a few. He said that Google’s mission is to: Foster the growing Internet Ecosystem by delivering a locally relevant product portfolio and promoting a mature user experience. In short, two main focuses: Relevance and sustainability.

Innovation @ Google: Culture + Technology

The second keynote by Ahmad Hamzawi, Head of Engineering - MENA, was more culture oriented as he spoke about Google’s philosophy of innovation summarized in one word “its environment” (Google Zurich headquarters point in hand).  If Google is one of the most innovative workplaces in the world it’s no accident. It is bathing in a culture that encourages quick learning, embraces failure (Fail early, fail often, fail gracefully) and attracts top talents from around the world. Alongside these cultural aspects, Google is geared up by a set of internal tools that help foster innovation. Hamzawi made us a quick preview on:

•  “Google Ideas”, the platform that encourages employees on acting on their ideas by sharing them and having colleagues rate them.
•   “Google Snippets” that ensures transparency by submitting employees’ progress report to the system rather than their hierarchy (which takes a flatter form in the Google world by the way).
•  “Google Projects” lists the various projects an employee has worked on
• and “MOMA”, Google’s intranet with various search capabilities. 

Hamzawi closed the session by demoing some of Google’s innovative products. I have been most impressed by Goggles and visual search as they unleashed some of the great potential laying in augmented reality.

Now that the first set of keynotes was done, came the difficult choice of workshops (ok, it wasn’t that difficult in the end). I of course, geared up with my PHD hat, headed to “Google and students” and “Google and Professors” workshops, both presented by Noha A. Salem, University relations manager in MENA.

Google || Students: Myriads of opportunities

Noha first presented the interesting opportunities Google is offering students such as Google Ambassador program, Google summer of code and Google Code Jam. I had the nice surprise to discover that they also offered excellence awards (If you’re an excellent student, have your teacher contact Google right away!), conference and travel grants (300 € registration Fees and 400 € travel grant) and Internship programs ranging from 3,6 to 9 months. Google is also encouraging women to excel in technology and computing fields by offering the Anita Borg Scholarship. The scholarship recipients will be granted up to 7000 €, and along finalists will be invited for a 3 days stay at a cool Google office where they will meet Google Engineers and exchange experiences.

To postulate for an internship: mena-recrutement@google.com

Google || Professors: Bridging the gap

On a rather different note, where most attendees were professors and grad students, Noha affirmed that they don’t get enough candidates from the country. Bridging this gap is a priority for Google as it is trying to reach out to professors by helping them set curriculum, offering them research awards, post-Doc positions and encouraging them to weave a collaborative network through initiatives such as faculty summit.

Research awards: is a program initiated twice a year (on August and February) with grants reaching 150k$ a year. Last December’s round attained 6M $ for 112 proposals from 20 areas around the world. There are also focused grants on 3 years that could reach up to a Million $.

Visiting Faculty: is a program that welcomes faculties into Google’s offices for a year where they can use Google’s material and human resources. The project stays the researcher’s propriety.

Noha also brought out the AndroidEdu program that provides teachers up to 10 Android handsets to help their students coding and testing on the gadgets. An upcoming program dubbed ChromeEdu will do pretty much the same with Chromebooks.

And that wrapped up the morning of the first day of G|Maghreb. This was Lamia, live (with a slight 24h jetlag) from EMI, Rabat. Stay tuned for more details on the second half of the day as I will squeeze publishing the blog post into my busy schedule of tomorrow.

Have a great start of the week!

Lamia Ben.

 

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Photo courtesy of HikingArtist.com

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but it seems that Cisco’s boards and councils’ structure is stirring much conversation about the optimal collaboration effort to implement within organizations. Let’s get something out of the way first; I truly believe that collaboration is not necessarily good. As Morten T. Hansen puts it in “When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company”

“…the conventional wisdom rests on the false assumption that the more employees collaborate, the better off the company will be. In fact, collaboration can just as easily undermine performance.”

As the context of organizations is getting more and more complex, getting collaboration right is becoming a hard and critical job. In Social networking for business, Rawn Shah states that “Although collaboration is at the heart of modern business processes, most companies are still in the dark about how to manage it...they do a poor job of shedding light on the largely invisible networks that help employees get things done across functional, hierarchical, and business unit boundaries.”

So “Let’s collaborate” is no silver bullet. The right questions to ask are how much collaboration we need? And how can we avoid under-collaboration and/or over-collaboration? Through a network perspective, it comes down to finding which bridges to cross and which to burn based on intrinsic characteristics of the nodes, the ties and based on the context the team evolves in. How do you know when enough collaboration is enough? How do you set the line between over and under-collaboration? A very tough question indeed and no single fix can fit it all. I’ve been pondering this for a while and I really think that analyzing organizations through a network lens can help shade some light.

Targeted collaboration

Here is a fact that is often overlooked: every formal organization has in its shadow an informal “invisible” organization. And this informal organization is where the real work gets done. So the first thing we need to do is acknowledge that any effort aiming to enhance collaboration must go beyond the organization chart and dive in its shadowed structure.

Once we come to that realization, we need to analyze collaborative and decision -making networks and identify the weak spots. Over-collaboration is recognized by a very dense collaborative network and by high costs in terms of traffic and communication between its different nodes. Under-collaboration on the other hand is identified by a fractured network and too many bridges with few people to span them.

Once we get a clear picture of the organization’s collaborative network, we can start remedying to the situation by implementing targeted connectivity. This means that we need to cultivate collaboration precisely where it is needed the most. A way to solve under-collaboration issues for example is by identifying the most connected employees from different clusters (small-scaled interlocked structures) and encouraging them to connect, which by extension means spanning structural holes among their clusters as well.

It becomes obvious then, that any collaboration initiative depends less on the technological choices but rather heavily on the network components of the organization. Leaders need to weave their collaboration efforts into the organizations' strategy. They need to design the underlying collaborative networks as much as they do with the matrix structures they've been acustomed to manage. Leaders will therefore need to upgrade their skills by adding yet another crucial one, what Ibarra and Hansen like to call "collaborative leadership".

Lamia Ben.

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People whose networks span structural holes have early access to diverse, often contradictory, information and interpretations which gives them a good competitive advantage in delivering good ideas. People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not cre­ativity born of deep intellectual ability. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be a valuable insight in another.

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