Ever since Clay Shirky first used the quote “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure” at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, back in 2008, there has been an ongoing, everlasting, but rather passionate discussion from both sides of the story pondering whether it’s really all about facing and dealing with information overload or whether it’s just purely filter failure. I am sure that this is one of those topics we are never going to get tired of talking about, conversing, share our first hand experiences, try to convince others about our own point of view, etc. etc. You name it.  But what if we throw food out there into the mix? Yes, you are reading it right. What if the key towards dealing with information overload is not just filter failure but a matter of food. Actually, thought for food.

For a good number of years I have shared across my admiration, praise and just pure delight for having the continued unique opportunity to pick up on the brains, and muse further on, from a great group of rather talented and insightful thought leaders in the Social Computing space, who, if anything, have always managed to get everyone thinking differently about certain ideas, trends of thought, and whatever else, around that social transformation of the business world; not to mention as well the impact of our societies going digital, and how we deal, in general, with information and knowledge to make some sense into it, without asking anything in return. One of those folks I have been truly admiring for a long while is JP Rangaswami, a.k.a. @jobsworth. Why? 

Well, not only because of the superb writing that he keeps putting together over at his blog “Confused of Calcutta – A Blog About Information” or his various tweets, amongst several other online places he gets to share his thoughts out loud on, but mainly because, just recently, he may have given us a new way of looking into information overload and how we can deal with it making plenty of good sense, in addition to Clay’s mantra about filter failure. And it’s got to do that with one of my favourite topics du jour as well. Food!

Who would have thought about that, right? Information / knowledge and food walking hand in hand to explain one of those current issues we keep facing in today’s more interconnected, intelligent and information abundant world than ever before. Yet, making perfect sense. Take a look and read further JP’s recently blog entry on this topic under the suggestively provocative title “Thought for food“, where he referenced his recent appearance at TED Salon in Austin as he delivered a truly inspirational speech of a bit over 8 minutes long, that exposed one of those brilliant analogies that, when going through it, as you watch him further dive into it, you realise it just makes perfect sense! Why didn’t we all see it before? 

Take a look into the TED Talk video clip itself that I have embedded below. Like I said, it lasts for a little bit over 8 minutes, but it really is worth while watching in its entirety. And you will see what I mean after you finish it off. So here it goes: 

Basically, on that short dissertation JP comes to confirm what may well be the potential solution to how we deal with information in the knowledge economy. Yes, it may well have to do quite a bit with collaborative filtering; term I have grown to become rather fond of while describing how the networks you keep treasuring and cultivating are those very same ones that will be filtering the best, topnotch content available out there for you!, but it may well not be good enough. JP explained it beautifully with this quote on what really matters at the end of the day on how we handle such information abundance: 

“Information, if viewed from the point of view of food, is never a production issue. … It’s a consumption issue, and we have to start thinking about how we create diets [and] exercise“

And this is where it hit me. And big time! This is where I realised about that wonderfully inspiring connection between information & knowledge AND food. You see? There used to be a time when I didn’t care much about the food I consumed, nor the portions, nor the quality of the ingredients, or the variety, etc. etc. Whatever it was good to fill my belly up with and move on back to what I was doing was just good enough for me. Exercise and good working out sessions were out of the question, too!, for yours truly. I just didn’t have the time and I wasn’t that interested at all. Till around July last year when I reached what I would consider my own tipping point, that is, 101.5 kgs. / 223 lbs and on the brink of reaching 40 years of age. No, not to worry, no body warnings or body alarms blew off, but, right there, right then, I realised I needed to start doing something about it, because I was entering that dangerous situation where I was no longer feeling healthy, based on my food intakes and the non-existent exercise habits. 

As you well may remember, I eventually blogged about that transformation I started right there, how by doing three simple things I have managed to change that dangerous path towards an unhealthy lifestyle with everything that entails. Those three simple things were: 

1. Watch, much more, what I do eat, looking for variety and healthier foods (fruits, vegetables, fish, legumes, etc. etc.) in much smaller portions aiming for no longer feeling full meal after meal. 
2. Start doing daily exercise and some workouts, in order to carry on burning all of that bad stuff I have accumulated over the course of the years. I started small, walking, then fast walking, then moving on into slow running, and, finally reaching a certain level of running where my body feels comfortable and I, too, fell comfortable without putting too much strain, but still getting the job done; then every so often a bit more of rowing, some yoga and off we go. The journey began… and it never stopped ever since.
3. And, finally, ensure that every night I would get a good night sleep, of, at least, 7.5 hours, if not more, since that seems to be the best quality sleeping time I can get, as Sleepyti.me bedtime calculator taught me over the course of time.

And that was it! That was my discovery journey into figuring out that I needed to start working my way on not only how I would consume food, but also how I would burn it all, or a large chunk of it, and how I would need to get better sleep which helps oneself, as you all know, fully charge your own batteries ready for the next day. Right now, as I write these few words, I’m at the stage that I would call on maintenance mode, having lost 19 kgs / 41 lbs; and if I were to describe how I feel at the moment, both physically and mentally I would probably be able to do so with a single word. This one: liberating!

Indeed, feeling and being healthier altogether surely has got its traits and whatever other perks, and it’s just the beginning on to, hopefully, a better good quality life. To me, it’s just that experience in the last year that I have found strikingly close to what JP mentioned throughout his talk about how we should be looking into information, not from the perspective of what we produce, or see others produce, but more from the point of view of how we consume it. That’s what matters. 

That’s where we need to realise that in such a world of over abundance of free information flowing back and forth, and just like we ourselves continue to be more proactive on looking after our own health promoting and living further along with a good number of healthier habits, we should probably be equally religious as well on figuring out how we are going to best consume the information that’s available out there that would matter the most for us and our needs. And I suspect that the key magic trait that would probably make it all work for us is, as JP brilliantly mentioned, how we are going to put in place not only those various different (information) diets, but, much more importantly, how we are going to exercise the mind into figuring out what works and what won’t work as part of that healthy and nurturing mental activity.

In that matter I suspect critical thinking is going to play a key role, just as much as endorphins play it when we engage on some kind of physical activity. The key challenge though is whether we are going to be able to put a stop to the always tempting, increasingly everlasting, and irresistible urge of information gluttony. Because I can imagine that with the huge amount of information and knowledge available out there our brains, most likely, will continue to be enticed by that massive flow of abundance that’s probably going to be far too tough to tame, if at all. Collaborative filtering, as we all know, may well help out, but we may as well be much more effective if we start training our brain(s) about when to strike for the balance of consuming the right info, figure out the right portion, and exercise it well enough so that we can make the best out of it, without having that pernicious feeling of empty saturation. We probably don’t need it any longer. We will be, most certainly, much better off without it, don’t you think?

In the past we have talked a couple of times about the undeniable impact that social networking (for business) is having in traditional management and thought leadership by helping reshape and redefine some of their various long time existing conceptions . There have been, indeed, a few great articles out there that not only have they assessed the importance and relevance of social technologies to help define the next generation of management, leadership and employee engagement, but they have also ventured to state, and rather accurately, how traditional management would need to keep moving on with its own social transformation, if it would want to survive over the course of time. Long gone are the days of command and control. Long gone are the days of micro-management, of managing by fear, power, bullying or mediocrity, or, just simply, by believing that the mantra “I am the boss; do what I say … or else!” would still work in today’s current business environment.

But if that’s the case I am sure at this point in time you folks would be probably wondering what’s the new role of leadership then in the world of Social Business? Can we define it nowadays in some sort of form or shape? Or will we have to create a new one altogether? Well, we may not. Once again, we may not need to go ahead and reinvent the wheel, since we may have had it all along over the last few hundred years and we never noticed… Welcome to the Era of Servant Leadership! 

Indeed, Servant Leadership is 

“[…] a management philosophy which implies a comprehensive view of the quality of people, work and community spirit. It requires a spiritual understanding of identity, mission, vision and environment. A servant leader is someone who is servant first, who has responsibility to be in the world, and so he contributes to the well-being of people and community. A servant leader looks to the needs of the people and asks himself how he can help them to solve problems and promote personal development. He places his main focus on people, because only content and motivated people are able to reach their targets and to fulfill the set expectations” (Quoted from Wikipedia’s reference article on the topic)

and while catching up last week with my good friend, the always insightful and equally thought provoking, Stowe Boyd I just couldn’t help thinking about how we may not need to redefine much what was already hinted hundreds of years ago about servant leaders, but perhaps just fine tune a little bit more the work carried out eventually by Robert K. Greenleaf in 1970 on this very same topic, as a way to help define what will be demanded of, a few decades later, Leaders 2.0 in the knowledge economy of the 21st century where social technologies have finally introduced wirearchy in the corporate world for it to stay, moving right along, with traditional hierarchy. 

And in that context I just couldn’t help thinking about this superb article at Inc.com under the suggestive heading “8 Core Beliefs of Extraordinary Bosses” by Geoffrey James that has been making the rounds on various social networks out there and which clearly portraits the kind of shift that traditional management needs to make in order to help prepare the leaders of tomorrow, if not today altogether already. No, I am not going to spoil the fun and try to reproduce Geoffrey’s article with plenty of quotes here and there. On the contrary, I would like to encourage you all to have a look into that truly inspirational dissertation and be prepared to be wowed big time! As a teaser, here you have got the 8 Core Beliefs Geoffrey talks about, just to get you going: 

1. “Business is an ecosystem, not a battlefield
2. A company is a community, not a machine
3. Management is service, not control
4. My employees are my peers, not my children
5. Motivation comes from vision, not from fear
6. Change equals growth, not pain
7. Technology offers empowerment, not automation
8. Work should be fun, not mere toil”

Pretty powerful stuff, don’t you think? I am sure you would all agree with that assertion, but there is more, there is always more eventually!, because, just as I was putting together this article I bumped into a rather evoking image on Google Plus that can certainly help folks differentiate between traditional management, the boss, and this new kind of management, the leader: 

And as I kept reflecting on that transition from bosses to leaders as the one that is going to shape up management as we know it within the business world, and all of that thanks to social networking, amongst several other timely happenings, I just couldn’t help remembering, quite fondly, the absolutely stunning blog post that Kathy Sierra (Gosh, how much do I miss her mind-boggling blog posts!) shared over 6 years ago!! under the title “Manager 2.0” with this brilliant image that would surely resonate quite a bit with that of servant leadership:

I would happily recommend you all to go through Kathy’s article to realise how close Social Business has been all along, even right from the start!, on helping shape up the way we understand and embrace both management and leadership 2.0 nowadays, 6 years later, into something that perhaps we have been having all along, but that we just didn’t know it, or maybe that we have neglected and ignored for far too long. The reality is that if someone would be asking me to define the new role of leadership in today’s interconnected, instrumented, intelligent, engaged, smarter, trustworthy and transparent social business world the one single key concept that would keep coming up, in a recurring way, time and time again, would be what’s been there all along with us throughout history: Servant Leadership. 

And here is probably the toughest question of them all that will keep coming up repeatedly, now more than ever, and that we all need to try and find an answer for: in todays social business world are your / our current leaders servant leaders? And if they aren’t, what can we do to help prepare them?

If earlier on this week we were talking about the increasing concerns on how high level executives, CIOs mainly, keep taking for granted social collaboration and how perhaps they need to shift gears and stop considering it’s a given, here’s today’s blog post where I will reflect on a recent article put together by the always insightful Rachel Happe at The Community Roundtable under the troubling heading “The Community Strategist Squeeze“, where she comes to highlight the current state of what’s been asked of community managers, facilitators, leaders, builders, stewards, or whatever other term you would want to use: deliver plenty more with a lot less. And the more you do of that, the much better off for the business. Never mind the community facilitators. They never have. 

As you well know, Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable, along with Jim Storer, a rather smart, helpful and very resourceful and talented peer to peer network of community builders that has been around for a couple of years already and that time and time again they keep producing some of the most amazing reports, and other brilliant deliverables, that one can find out there on the Social Web around the art of managing online communities, whether internal or external. Their latest example is The 2012 State of Community Management, a superb white paper / report that I strongly would encourage everyone to read and go through to see what’s happening in this space of facilitating effectively online communities and where we are at that daunting, yet, exciting and rather rewarding task.

I will be putting together another separate blog entry at a later time on that very same report, but going back into the actual piece that Rachel wrote I thought it was incredibly revealing how little things have changed in the last 10 to 15 years, perhaps even more, with regards to online communities. Yes, I know, we do have nowadays better community tooling all around with all of these emergent social technologies, but it looks like some of the most fundamental, deep routed problems are still alive and kicking: businesses keep ignoring the value of online communities, and continue to treat them as just another project resource. When we all know that’s not the case, quite the opposite. They are rather dynamic, living organisms that keep corporations alive providing them with an identity, a corporate culture difficult to surpass and, above all, a strong sense of belonging and ownership by the community members that cannot be found, nor seen, anywhere else within an organization to the point of going the extra mile in getting work done. Just because they all share that common passion: wanting to help and learn from others on that particular subject matter that gathers them around.

Yet, online communities keep being treated as mere resources you can exploit to your own abilities, needs and wants, without realising that they, too, have got their own that you, as a business, would need to feed and nurture if you would want to keep your communities alive in the medium, long term. Communities are different beasts. They are not (project) teams, they are not networks, nor organisations, yet we keep treating them as if they were. See? Nothing much has changed since the late 90s and beginning of the 2000s. 

Back in the day, around 2000, when I was still doing traditional Knowledge Management, Collaboration and Learning, plenty of businesses invested, initially, rather heavily, on the concept of Communities of Practice, the traditional formalised, structured communities and for a good while they were rather successful. However, as time moved on and as the businesses realised how they could start squeezing them one by one to no end, demanding more and more by the minute from their community leaders, having and providing less, as well as the members, with very little in return, the whole model broke down when people stopped relying on them to a great extent. 

No, they didn’t disappear, they never disappeared; in fact, they have always been there, but what at some point were the core critical engine of interactions amongst knowledge workers soon turned out to be that essential resource that everyone could poach to no end till they would eventually drain them to die a painful death by refusing to nurture and feed back some of the most essential, key roles in those same communities; mainly, community leaders / builders / facilitators, core team, knowledge brokers, community managers, etc. etc. 

You would have expected that with the emergence of better community tooling with social networking tools that things would have improved quite a bit and the reality is that they have made things a whole lot better. Key concepts like social capital skills, open knowledge sharing, collaboration, engagement, commitment, passion, trust, etc. etc. are stronger than ever before, but, unfortunately, so is the community leaders squeeze that Rachel talks about on that article, highlighting, once again, how businesses seem to have put very very few resources on helping facilitate effectively online communities hoping that everything will work out and that things would stick around. Yet another time.

The thing is that they won’t. If not, judge for yourselves, to quote Rachel, on the list of pressures that community leaders are facing at the moment: 

• “To assess, reconcile and coordinate the ‘social’ approach across a wide range of enterprise functions
• To justify not just their progress but the ROI when many are still in a highly fluid and experimental state
• To train the entire organization on social media, internal social software, social business, social processes and workflows and community management
• To educate legal, HR and compliance groups about the dynamics and specifics of online social environments
• To understand and report back what is going on – from a conversational perspective – in the online environment
• To share their expertise both internally and externally with a wide variety of groups
• To hire a set of individuals that are hard to find and which their HR departments don’t really understand and then mentor and educate those groups quickly
• To coach executives individually
• To keep up with the ever changing technologies and analytics options
• To integrate internal social environments with closed communities with open communities and with public social channels and none-hosted communities in their markets
• To set up enterprise-wide governance processes and regularly coordinate efforts and approaches globally
• To help the entire organization see the opportunities that social approaches might bring to specific workflows and functions”

And I am certain that’s just a pretty small list of those current pressures. I bet you folks out there would be able to share plenty more in the comments below about the ones you yourselves are currently facing at the moment (Feel free to share them across, if you feel they would contribute into raising some further awareness about them on this post). The reality is that businesses have been playing with fire for a long while, as Rachel quotes accurately with this trend of thought: 

“[…] the limited investment in and strategic exposure of social and community teams is one of the biggest risks to progress in the social business and community space right now  – both in making progress and in keeping staff“

Burnout comes up pretty high as perhaps one of the main reasons that could take the whole thing apart and disrupt it in such a way that it would be rather tough to recover from. And that’s just one of the potentially negative consequences. I am sure there are more. Yet, while I am putting together these thoughts, and as I keep thinking what may well be the potential solution, I can’t help to acknowledge that perhaps the very same ecosystem that we created in the first place around community leaders is the one that’s causing and creating such squeeze.

If you think of community management as an outsourced activity away from the business and its core activities, which I would think most people would assume it is, right there you have got the main problem. With community management what we are basically telling businesses out loud, even at the age of the Social Web, is that they don’t have to worry about doing such piece of work themselves, i.e. maintaing, facilitating, nurturing online social interactions in communities, because someone else will do it for them and effectively enough that I can squeeze them to provide me with what I need as a business and don’t provide much in return, as a result of it.

Now I do see the value of having community builders, facilitators, stewards, leaders and whatever other term that you would want to use in this context. I think they are critical to help a community succeed, pretty much like any other of the traditional community job roles themselves, but I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t have put too much preeminence and paramount importance in the exclusivity of their role, because right there we have given carte blanche to businesses to disengage, withdraw support, sponsorship, leadership and what not, thinking that those smart community managers would be able to pull it off themselves, when we know that they would have had a much better and easier job if the businesses would be involved in helping manage and facilitate those communities themselves. 

So if in my previous blog post I questioned how CIOs should not take for granted social collaboration, because it’s not going to happen just like that, I would come to question as well how we are already passed the tipping point as a business to understand how helping your online communities, as well as your community managers, is going to be a critical core activity of your day to day business operations. And the easiest way of achieving that is realising that you, as a major driver of that business, company, organization, i.e. as an executive, with your business priorities, would need to take charge, come forward and become another community facilitator / builder, so that you could understand each and everyone of those pressures that Rachel mentioned above in order to help address and fix them accordingly, so that online community management activity is no longer seen as an outsourced activity, but more of an integrated, critical, business process of your day to day operations. The way it should be. The way it should have always been.

Only then would we be capable of seeing the job role of community managers survive for the next decades to come. Failure to do that would eventually mean we are already starting to witness the slow, painful death of what it is like being a community manager. Squeezed to no end because their business just didn’t understand how communities operate, how they could help bring further along more business value and sustainable growth and eventually how they themselves, the businesses, didn’t understand right from the beginning that a successful online community management strategy begins with them being at the forefront supporting the efforts, in every which way, from those with a passion to transform the way we do work through networks and communities versus traditional top-down hierarchies.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Wirearchy!

Ok, back to Social Business. After the last few days where I have been blogging a number of different times about some musings on redesigning and refining further along the workplace of the future, it’s time to get down to business again and continue to share further insights around social networking / computing for business or the good old Social Business itself. By the way, stay tuned because very soon I will be putting together an article where I will explain why I’m going to move away from the social business concept into another one that I think is much more accurate and fitting in helping explain where we are today with the whole mantra behind Social. But till then, how about if one of these days you come to work and you bump into a rather controversial article, a superb read, actually, that questions the whole social business industry, right where it hurts the most:  Social Networking for Business doesn’t count much on today’s CIO’s top priorities, after all. Disappointing or a huge opportunity? Both, eventually!

A couple of weeks back Prem Kumar Aparanji, a.k.a. Prem, put together an article where he was reflecting on a recent research study by Gartner (Strongly recommend going through the links he references to get a better grasp of what the survey tried to accomplish), where some really interesting data came up; the most thought-provoking piece was probably that one where it was mentioned how Social Networking (for business) wasn’t a top priority for CIO’s out there in 2012. Not all CIOs though, but about 100 of them who took part in the survey study, which I still think is significant enough to notice. You would expect that it would be rather worrying that, still in 2012, the whole area of Social gets questioned and even misses the point of reaching the Top 10 priority list from CIOs. In this case it comes up as the 11th priority. And, it may well be, indeed, worrying to some extent, but it is not new. It’s been happening all along for a good number of years already. But with a different name. 

Indeed, I am referring to good old Knowledge Management and Collaboration, once again, just to detail a bit more the parallel roads both fields have been running all along. And it’s interesting to notice how when I used to work within the European Knowledge Management deployment team inside IBM, about 11 years ago, we faced the very same upsetting reality: KM (And Collaboration, for that matter), wasn’t the business top priority at the time. In fact, it didn’t even show up on the Top 20 priority list for Lines of Business. Thus, a few years later, seeing how social business is coming into the Top #11 is not such a bad achievement. On the contrary. Lots of opportunity in here!

So, I know what you are thinking now, if social is not in the Top 10 priority list from (some) CIOs why is that? I mean, what’s happened for that scenario to be so gloomy and yet strike us as a common reality for the last 18 years and counting… First with KM and Collaboration back then and nowadays with Social Business. Well, I am not sure what you folks would think, but I tell you what my gut feeling has been telling me all along: KM, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Social Networking AND online communities have always been “taken as a given” by both IT and the business. And the higher you go in the organisation the much more ingrained that perception of being a given it is.

Just think about it. When was the last time that you, as a knowledge worker, received some kind of formal, (or informal) training, or education, for that matter around how to collaborate effectively, or share your knowledge in a much more open, transparent and public manner? Even through email (Yes, I know, quite an oxymoron right there, right?!?). Probably never, I would guess. But then again when you join a company that’s one of the traits that is expected of you: be a team sports, of a rather open and collaborative manner, that is, a good team player who can collaborate across the board, otherwise it would be rather tough. Or simply put in another way, in today’s current working environment, would you be capable of getting work done on your own, in a single project, on a single team, and with a single set of priorities and goals without having to collaborate with others? I will go and answer that one for you… You won’t. You never have. You never will. 

That’s why collaboration, whether traditional or social, is no longer a nice-thing-to-have but more than anything else a business imperative. Yet, it’s hardly embraced by the corporate world. Why? Because everyone feels that every single knowledge worker out there is a collaborator by nature and as such it’s a given that everyone would know how to collaborative effectively. When we know that’s not going to happen, at all, and to prove that we have got the perfect example that’s been demonstrating and showcasing it decade in decade out and we are still struggling with it: email.

I probably don’t need to say much more about it, right? Although I can perhaps formulate a single question to try to address and answer that concern: do you feel you are effective and productive enough in your day to day collaborative work today using email, or traditional knowledge based repositories for that matter? Like I said, no need to provide an answer on that one, although I think we all know it already. I think we all know what really needs to happen to turn that situation around 180 degrees and start thinking it’s a good time to shift gears and realise about a single fact that would change the way we do work today: never underestimate the power of (social) collaboration. 

Whether you are the CIO, the CFO, or from whatever other high end of the org chart, you should always consider the fact that not everyone is a true collaborator, that not everyone knows, and fully understands, how to use (social) collaborative tools, that not every knowledge worker out there would know how to get work done in a open, collaborative, transparent and public manner and that as such you would need to accommodate an opportunity for knowledge workers to get properly trained not only on how to make use of the various knowledge sharing, collaborative and social networking tools, but also the behaviours that would involve such change. Social collaboration is all about a mindset. In fact, I would come to question the validity of using social networking tools to collaborate effectively. You can still do that, that is, become much more open, public, transparent, trustworthy, engaged, committed, etc. etc. without perhaps even relying on (social) tools. They are more cultural traits of how knowledge gets shared across. And for that, it’s always important to have the right level of support and don’t expect other people to embrace new ways of working, because they are just simply not going to work. 

That’s why the role of executives, in whatever the organisation, is so important and rather critical, and in the context of social business, even more! Because knowledge workers, as they become more aware and excited about new, smarter ways of getting work done, would need plenty of support, sponsorship, servant leadership, commitment and proper attention to ensure the right mix is put together. I mean, imagine what would have happened if back in the day, folks would have been educated, and trained, on how to use email properly as a powerful collaborative and knowledge sharing tool, instead of being considered today a huge productivity drain, provoked by ourselves, in the first place! 

That’s certainly something that we wouldn’t want to have around nowadays with regards to Social Business, don’t you think? Take, as an example, the recent entry posted over at Mashable under the suggestive title “5 Things That Waste Your Time at Work” and think about it for a little bit. Here are those productivity wasters: 

1. “Trying to contact customers or colleagues
2. Trying to find key information
3. Duplicating communications
4. Attempting to schedule meetings
5. Unwanted communications”

Now, if your company suffers from any of those business pain points, do you feel that having proper education and training on social networking tools AND habits would help you address and fix some of them accordingly? Take the example of tagging. Done and shown properly, it’ll help address #1, #2 and #3 right there! With very little effort, and yet with tremendous potential and huge benefits. And that’s just tagging. Think now of the huge amount of unwanted communications you could reduce by adopting that social mantra of narrating your work, working out loud or just simply observable work. And the list of use cases goes on and on and on… Here’s another one: how much time do knowledge workers waste on inefficient meetings? Those meetings they get dragged into time and time again for hours no end every single day. Well, imagine what it would be like if those same knowledge workers would reduce, dramatically, the time they spend on meetings and get work done smarter, not necessarily harder, using social, collaborative and knowledge sharing tools. 

Still think that Social Collaboration is a given, and therefore should not be in your Top 5 priority list? Hmmm, you may need to re-think again the business pain points you are trying to assess and a find a solution for. Because you may have it already right there! Waiting for you … 

I really like Inc. I mean, I really heart it. I discovered it by pure chance a few weeks back and I am now completely hooked up to it, mostly not only because of the top quality articles, publications, videos, etc. etc. they keep putting up on their Web site, but also because of how helpful it’s proving to be as an essential resource “to help entrepreneurs and business leaders succeed“. Seriously, if you are looking for topnotch quality content that could very well help you redesign the workplace of the future look no further than those folks. They are doing an outstanding piece of work so far! Ohhh and talking about the workplace of the future, how about if today we spend a few minutes talking about redefining that space embracing over 100 years of research, instead of ignoring it like we have done in the last few years. Ready? Well, here it comes: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week.

Seriously, it’s not helping you become better at what you already do, and, definitely, it’s harming more than you would know, and realise about, and not only your own work, your colleagues’, your customers but, eventually, your business itself in the long run. That is, indeed, the rather thought-provoking premise from a recent Inc. article put together by Geoffrey James under the title: Stop Working More Than 40 Hours a Week which comes out in a rather timeline manner, since I, too, recently blogged about this very same topic under “40-Hour Work Week – The Magic of Sustainable Growth“. 

I am not sure what you folks would think, but I’m starting to find it a rather fascinating topic, that is, how we actually manage work, without trumping our personal lives at the same time. When we all know, giving the current financial turmoil, how more and more is being asked from knowledge workers nowadays, i.e. work longer hours, while on the road, while at your home office where telecommuting is no longer there, therefore you have a couple of extra hours you could make use of, while on vacation, etc. etc. or at a time where we see how pervasive work has become with the emergence of social technologies, but, mostly, also, because of the huge impact on the corporate world by mobile altogether. Yes, it’s expected that we should be putting longer hours on what we are working on; it’s expected that if we don’t do that we are slacking off; it’s assumed that if you don’t work those longer hours, you just basically don’t have enough work, which is, obviously, not seen as a positive outcome, as a knowledge worker. Essentially, it’s just like we can no longer have an excuse not to put longer hours at work, for free, and not only our very own managers would be frowning upon us, but even our very own colleagues, too!

Yes, I know, I can sense all of you out there nodding away in violent agreement with that scenario. But how wrong is it? I mean, there used to be a time when we all used to think that those who remain behind at the traditional office were pretty sad souls who just couldn’t get their work done in 8 hours and therefore were punished to stay behind till they would finish it. Gosh, a few years later, it looks like things have turned around 180 degrees and nowadays it’s actually the opposite: if you leave your (home) office by the end of those 8 hours, something is wrong with your productivity: rather your fault or just basically not having enough work. Where do you think you are going, Mr.?, is probably almost everyone’s perception when you decide to leave the office on time. 

The reality though, as I have blogged in the past, is that numerous decades of research have proved that we start dropping off on our productivity levels when we reach 40 hours, beyond that we keep failing to deliver, yet, we expect people to stick around just because we feel it would make us more productive and therefore provide better business results. How wrong! It’s actually quite the opposite, as Geoffrey nicely describes it on that article I referenced above, as you basically would just be accounting for burnout and eventually be creating more trouble than helping out. Yet, we keep expecting it to take place. Yet, we all feel guilty if we “leave the office” before our colleagues do and we get frowned upon if we don’t stick around long enough. And that long enough is no longer according to your own terms, but someone else’s!

We need to stop that. And the sooner, the better! Yes, social networking tools for business, as well as mobile, are making that job really tough, since work has finally transitioned from a physical space, a la having to go to the physical office every day, to a mental state, where work happens wherever you are. You are work, work is you, as some folks would say, but at the same time You are life, life is you, I would say.  And in most cases we are the only ones who know how to get the best out of it not just for ourselves, but also for those around us, the ones who we care the most about in the first place!

So if that extensive research has proved that 40-hour long work weeks are the best option to remain productive, why don’t we stick around with that notion, instead of giving in to that work and peer pressure? You know, there used to be a time when, back in the day, I always felt sorry for those folks who had to stay behind at the traditional office finishing up work because they just couldn’t finish it off on time. I would try to help as much as I could on my own ability, but time and time again they ended up being on their own. Few years later. I am still sorry, but this time around for those folks who, on purpose, decide to “stay behind in the office” working a few extra hours, for free, without having anything in return, just because it looks good to their bosses and to their peers, because, you know, if you don’t do it, it would look like you would be lazy around. Seriously, why do we keep having this obsession of endless work days with 7, 8, 9 or even 10 hours of meetings, and then have to finish off work, when it’s just that same research I have mentioned above the one that has proved time and time again it’s just an unsustainable model in the long run? What are we trying to achieve eventually?

In a way, we are just killing ourselves, slowly, but steadily, and without even realising it. Yes, I know, we may be all working really hard, specially, now with the pervasiveness of social networking tools within the workplace, because they enable us to put up more work hours breaking the barriers of timezones, geographies, and whatever else, but what at what costs? Is it really worth while sacrificing your only one single life on this planet and those who matter to you the most for that promotion, for that advancement in your career, for that looking good to your boss and colleagues, when eventually, according to that research, you won’t be even capable of enjoying it to the fullest just simply because you would lack the energy, the good health and the ability to do so? Really, do you think it’s worth while the fight? Or aren’t out there much, much, better things that you could be doing instead?

It’s interesting to note how time and time again I always have plenty of people admiring how religious I have become in protecting my own personal, private time, versus work time, in becoming a zealot on how I split up what’s work and what’s everything else. Basically, what I have been talking about in the past around “Work Life Integration“, versus work life balance where I have always claimed that there isn’t such balance because work always wins. What most folks may not know though is that I have become so good at it, because I learned, through the hard way, as usual, how to do it. It goes back to 2004, January 22nd, to be more precise, when I learned that unless you look after your own personal life and make it count, no-one else is going to do it. And I had to reach the state of being in a rather poor healthy status to realise about it. Stress was one of the minor worries at the time. I was very happy I was in time to react and acknowledge that I no longer need to apologise to anyone when I am done with work within those 40 hours. There is no reason to do it. It’s not even worth it. Yes, you may think that you may be risking your own career, but let’s face it, do you want to risk your career or your own life? You know, you still have the choice. Always have.

At a time when most knowledge workers spend 3 years per average on any given job, if not shorter altogether (More on this one shortly!), I guess it’s time that we, knowledge Web workers, start protecting more, and set the boundaries of both work and personal, because at the end of the day, if we ourselves don’t do it, no-one else is going to do it for us. And don’t worry, there isn’t even a need to apologise. To anyone. After all, you are all looking after your own health. And that’s just priceless. And much to treasure for, regardless of what other people may think or say. You would still need to break the chain and keep challenging the status quo to keep your sanity intact. You need it. They need it. We all need it. 

Oh, by the way, if you have got a chance, take a look into the 4 minute long video clip, towards the bottom, (Wish I could share the embedded code below…), included in Geoffrey’s article, that features Lisa Price - President and Founder of Carol’s Daughter – sharing plenty of insights on how she manages it all, no apologies to anyone either, and you will see why I titled this article in the way I did…

Positive Psychology. Goodness! How cool, and how timely, is that concept? At a time where we are constantly being bombarded by all sorts of various different news items, most of them on the negative side of things, about the global financial crisis, the need to reboot this or that other country in order to get back in shape, their own public institutions, their own business models, or their societies in general, here comes positive psychology to go and change all of that and demonstrate to all of us how we may have been holding, all along, the wrong end of the stick! Well, time to change all of that! Welcome to “The Happy Secret to Better Work“.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you would probably know by now what a big fan I am from TED Talks. Those rather inspiring, thought-provoking, mind-blowing at times, truly life transforming presentations / speeches by incredibly amazing talented folks on a wide range of topics. Well, in the last couple of weeks I have bumped into one that would fit in that profile and so much more! The beauty of this one is that it’s totally unexpected on its final outcome, and you will see what I mean shortly, and on the good side of things it’s just a bit over 12 minutes long. So rather easy to digest, pause and ponder, and even worth while watching several times! 

This particular TED Talk I’d like to spend a few minutes on today is coming from Shawn Achor under the rather suggestive title “The Happy Secret to Better Work” and in it Shawn shares plenty of insights around some interesting issues that we seem to keep neglecting and that perhaps we shouldn’t, like the dangers of measuring the average, because, according to him, that’s exactly what we are going to get: the average, instead of excellence. His views on wanting us all move the entire average up, so that we don’t just focus on our current average, is just remarkable. 

Essentially, he comes to proclaim that in order to become better at what we do and to become better at who we are, we need to focus on the lens which the brain sees the world and change that lens so that we would also be capable of changing reality, our reality. That way, by shifting that focus, we would have a great, unprecedented, opportunity to change our happiness, our education, our business. Anything. And everything.

Mind-boggling, to say the least! But it gets better as you move along through the TED Talk. What he then comes to state in rather powerful messages is how we need to shift gears into changing, or even better, reverting the formula for happiness and success with a rather simple equation: focus on the positive and not on the negative. Going away, slowly, but steadily, from that mantra we have lived on over the course of decades along the lines of “If I work harder I will be more successful, if I am more successful I am happier“. More than anything else because every time our brain hits success, you already get to change automatically that goal of success, meaning it’s already embarking on to the next piece of success. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success we will never reach that state of happiness. What we have done, according to Shawn, is “push happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society“. WOW!!! I told you, mind-blowing!

But there is even more, because coming close to the end of his dissertation he mentions how what we should eventually be doing is focusing on raising everyone’s level of positiveness in the present, so that the brain would experience what it’s called a happiness advantage. Meaning that if our brain is positive it will perform significantly better than thinking neutral or negatively. Yes, I know. Think about it, it makes perfect sense, don’t you think? 

So essentially, what we would need to do in both our work and personal lives, is to find a way to become positive in the present, then our brains will work even more successfully. Doing so it will make us all happier, but it would also turn on all of our learning centers in our brain allowing us to adapt to the world in a different way and better. Much better.

Wrapping up his TED Talk presentation, Shawn proclaims that when thinking about small changes rippling outward we could surely start creating lasting positive change with a good number of very simple, yet, incredibly powerful, things to consider, such as these:

• “3 Gratitudes
• Journaling
• Exercise
• Meditation
• Random Acts of Kindness“

No, don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil all the fun explaining much in detail each and everyone of those items I have just quoted above. Instead I would strongly encourage you all to make time (Like I said, a bit over 12 minutes…) and allow Shawn to wow you big time by watching the video, because he’s certainly going to do that, I can guarantee you! In fact, I would take things even one step further and state that Shawn’s Talk will not leave you indifferent. Rather the opposite. Forever. It will challenge you to think there is a better way out there, a way you can certainly influence right off after you finish watching the attached embedded video clip: 

Because, like he just said, by doing that not only would we be creating “ripples of positivity“, but eventually we would be creating a real revolution that we can all relate to and feel even more attached, engaged and committed to providing us all with much better quality lives, lives where fulfillment and happiness rule big time altogether over everything else! And that’s just such a fine feeling, don’t you think?

You bet! It’s already helped me think about things in a completely different manner, whether work related or on a personal level, to the point where something I was not expecting did eventually happen. Moments of happiness galore, if I can say that! WOW!! Rather liberating and incredibly re-energising to say the least… Yes, you should try it, too!

Thank you, Shawn! 

Over the last few days I have been relatively quiet on this blog, more than anything else because I have been doing plenty of thinking, along with drafting a bunch of blog entries, on venturing to re-design and redefine the corporate workplace as we know it seeing the huge impact social computing is causing on how we get work done. I already ventured to share some of those insights on previous blog posts, as you may have already noticed, but I’m now ready to share plenty more. So it’s time to pick up my regular blogging schedule and get down to business. How about if we take a look at the state of one of the most powerful use cases and success stories behind social networking and social media out there, Customer Service, and see whether we have got another winner or not… Hummm … not really. Colour me an skeptic then: “I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me” [by Charles Townshend]

For a good number of years, actually, for as long as I remember, my all time favourite default Web browser has been Opera. I know that may sound as pure heresy by those who live on Internet Explorer, FireFox or Chrome, for that matter, but, it’s true. I have always been in love with that browser from the very first moment that I used it on Windows and now on Mac. Something that I cannot say for any of the others, as they have taught me, over the course of the years, to not trust them much for doing an effective job or for making my Web work any easier. Opera did though.

For those folks who may not be familiar with Opera it’s that massive swiss knife-like Web browser that allows you to do a bunch of various different tasks and activities without leaving the application itself: email (Ha! Before you run into the wrong conclusions, like when I mentioned this over on Twitter, I still use *personal* email for private exchanges, specially, with those folks who loathe social networking tools or for those other who haven’t bought into it just yet, but it’s still my personal email, not work related); newsgroups and forums; Internet Relay Chat (a.k.a. I.R.C.); RSS / Atom newsfeeds; torrents, etc. etc. It’s all you need in a browser to help you become a powerful knowledge Web worker. And it works. It *does* certainly work. Till you lose 7 years of history. 

That’s right! Last week, I got a prompt to upgrade Opera v 11.62 to v 11.63 on the Mac through the Mac App Store. Free upgrade, as usual, rightly embedded into the App Store experience for the first time *ever* and ready to take the plunge. And there I went, and there I lost 7 years of both personal and some work related stuff. Ouch!!! The upgrade went all right, or so I thought. No glitches noticed and in a matter of minutes I was upgraded. The problem though became apparent when, after starting the browser, I could have access to everything (Bookmarks, links, speed-dial options, etc. etc.), except the Mail folder. The folder that contained all of those personal private email messages, several hundreds, if not thousands, of RSS feed items, newsgroups, forum posts, and so forth. All of that completely wiped out. Gone! 1.76GB of data smashed as if they never happened. 

Initially, I thought that the folder may have just been misplaced, or it may have been located elsewhere, but when trying to use Grand Perspective and WhatSize I just couldn’t locate that 1.76GB of disk space anywhere. Just anywhere. I looked and looked for a couple of days and nothing to be found. All deleted. Wiped out. Completely. No more available and slowly entering into panic mode at that time! One of the reasons why I have delayed blogging about it because you know how it goes as one of the golden rules for blogging: never blog when you are upset or angry. But I was. I *certainly* was. Right there, last week, I was prompted to upgrade to a new version of my all time favourite browser and right there it managed to destroy that trustworthy relationship of the last 7 years. Panic mode growing stronger by the minute. So I turned to Opera’s customer service hoping they might be able to help out. But, no, they couldn’t. In fact, they didn’t. Or worse, they never ever even responded! Talking about the power of Social Media in providing good customer support / service… Not!

I opened a Forum post at the Opera Forums for Mac users. 4 days later I’m waiting for the first response / reply from any of the support folks from Opera itself. Nothing has happened so far. So in an effort to get back to normal, I decided to reach out to them on Twitter and experience their customer support through social media channels. Just as inexistent, and still waiting for a response through a Mention, Forum Reply or whatever else. Yet, nothing: 

.@opera I could do with some further help on this thread > is.gd/A8JTde please? So far not much support offered Thanks!

— Luis Suarez (@elsua) April 19, 2012

I know at this point in time most of you folks may have been thinking that I’m making too much of a fuss with all of this, since I could just fire up my most recent copy of my data stored in my Time Machine, copy it across and move along. I did do that already and I managed to recover almost entirely from it, having lost only two weeks of data, but I still think it’s beyond the point. If I am a customer, and end-user of your product, and I have run into trouble because of an upgrade you are advising me to take upon, the least I’m going to expect is for you to be there when I need you. When I need your help to get me back in business, because something may well go wrong, like it did. What I was not expecting at all was not perhaps a feedback comment that I had too much of bad luck, but the fact that there hasn’t been a single reaction, *at all*. Again, talking about customer service in the era of Social Media engaging through social channels. Colour me skeptic once again, because it’s just not happening!

And Opera is not just the only recent occurrence of this lack of customer service through social channels. In the past, and just through my own personal experiences, although my good friend Euan Semple has also got a recent, rather interesting, upsetting story on poor quality customer service from an ISP provider: Orange, other businesses like Delta Airlines, Movistar, Swisscom & NH Hotels have been running into the same issues of poor customer service and they have never gotten in touch. Months have gone by without anything happening and, at this point in time, I won’t expect a response either. And the same would apply for Opera. Thus just like I did with all of those businesses (No longer flying with Delta, no longer supporting Movistar, no longer staying at NH Hotels who employ Swisscom as their wi-fi providers), over the weekend I recovered fully from the huge mess the upgrade caused and I have now stopped using Opera altogether and have moved on to RSS feed readers, specific mail clients (Sparrow), and both FireFox and Chrome as my new browsers. 

Now, I know I won’t be trusting them to do the right job, since they never have done it properly in the first place, the browsers, I mean, but I already know that. I’m on guard with both of them and keeping an eye on my data to ensure it’s all there in a consistent manner. However, I trusted Opera. I have trusted it for over 7 years to do the right thing and it has done so all along, but for one instance where a big mess was caused the last thing I expected was a lack of response. Not a single comment, not a single reaction. Sorry, but that hurts. Customer loyalty takes years to build effectively, just as much as trust does, but it just takes a split second to destroy and to not recover it again. So time for me to move on and don’t look back, since they have done so just the same. 

I can imagine that plenty of businesses are buying into the whole mantra of using social media to be closer to their customers and help support them accordingly. The thing though is that you eventually need to do that. If you are going to be there, be there, be willing to actively listen to not only the wonderful, positive feedback that you get from your customers about your products, but also the rough commentary, the constructive feedback that people share kindly with you without expecting any kind of compensation except than you fixing your own problems with your products so that they can be happy customers again. If you are only willing to listen through social media to the kool-aid and how great your products are, you are just use social technologies as another marketing thingy, whatever name you would want to insert there, and we all know how much we, dear customers, loathe that kind of cheating behaviour. End result? What I started this blog post with: 

“I cannot go to the Opera, because I have forsworn all expense which does not end in pleasing me”

I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- “The Magic of Sustainable Growth”), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating “Get a life!” we may as well need to do so! As we may be missing far too much of what really matters… because of work.

Like I said above, the video is a short, crisp and rather powerful awakening call for all of those knowledge workers out there who may feel that their job is eating up not only all of their work time, but also most of their personal time, along the way, too! Now, I understand the video has got some strong language, but I think Pam gets the point across very nicely and in a tone that while I understand may not be getting through for some folks, I think it’s all just too down to earth, and rather realistic on helping everyone understand where we are and how we may need to keep on challenging a good number of the presumptions that we have always been taking for granted in a business environment when talking about work time AND personal time.

“Go the F*ck Home: Engineering Work/Life Balance” is a rather provocative watch, for sure, but well worth the time to discover the real consequences of working overtime, of giving up your time, just like that!, for free, of constantly being used (and treated!) as an asset, of showing how there are better, smarter ways of getting the job done, of re-focusing on what you would need to do and do it!, in the time that you have been allotted, so that you, too, could get a life. I loved her comment about naming more than two things that we all get to do outside of work and if you can’t name more than two, you have got a problem. Indeed! Too much work time, too little play, personal time! Priceless!

You see? It looks like the best option for all of us is to have an escape plan, something else to do, other than work, to occupy our time during the course of the day, when we are no longer working, and still have the feeling we are achieving something meaningful. And all of this going all the way to the top, including management!, who should be acting as leading examples, in the first place, helping their employees understand that they, too, have got a life and therefore should leave work, and do something else, before they would come to realise that their knowledge workers may be rather unhappy with their overall jobs, just as much as they themselves. When we all know that happy employees are the ones who produce the better outcomes: happy customers. After all, if Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg can do it, why can’t everyone else, right? What’s our excuse?

And if you need an escape plan, how about having a vacation? That would probably help out everyone out there start up with making that separation between work and personal life, right? And stick around with it altogether as well, upon your return. After all, we all know how beneficial, relaxing, chilling, unwinding and healthy it is to take a good long vacation, of, at least, two weeks disconnecting from everything for optimal results (Yes, even my own boss is confirming that!). Even better, we all know and embrace the many other good benefits from having unlimited vacation days, as I have also blogged about in the recent past sharing the experience of the delightful Maggie Fox from Social Media Group So why not do it? No, don’t worry, contrary to what most people would think, knowledge workers, in general, would not slack off. Why? Because they are hard working professionals, remember?, the ones you hired in the first place, the ones who you have trusted all along to do the right thing, i.e. getting their work done. So they are not going to abuse it. All the other way around! They are going to become even more productive and effective at what they do and work harder, because they are the first interested parties in keeping things that way!

Ohhh, that you cannot take vacation, because you can’t afford it? Even your work project won’t allow it? Well, let’s take it into the next level… How about *not* having any vacation, nor off sick time altogether? Let’s go to the other extreme. Let’s wipe out the entire concept of taking a vacation from the workplace and instead, like my good friend Kevin Jones blogged about just recently, let’s introduce this rather fascinating and refreshing new policy: “Need it, Take it“, which goes pretty much as follows:

“If you need time off, take it.  If you are sick, stay home.  Just continue to do amazing work“

Yes, I know, if you have been reading this far you are probably thinking I am just crazy. But why not? Why couldn’t we just live without vacation days and, instead, shift gears ourselves and change mindsets thinking that you may not need to have a fixed vacation period eventually, but, maybe what you need is just taking the time off, when you need it, for the time you consider responsibly enough to take off and just go ahead and do it! Knowing that it will happen when you know it will have the least impact on the business. Your business.

Smart companies like Evernote are already doing it and proving that it can be done and I guess at this point in time you may be wondering what you would need to do in order to make it happen for yourself, right? Well, something relatively simple: just ask! You know, like I have always been telling people, if you don’t ask, you already got the “No!” for an answer; if you do ask and get a “No!” for an answer, that’s just totally fine, remember you already had it. But if you get a “Yes!” for an answer you may find yourself you are right on track and you got it! A win-win situation for everyone, because when you get that “Yes!” you would probably be *the* most interested party in keeping things going that way. And I can’t blame you. I would do the very exact same as you would be doing. In fact, I have already been doing it myself for the last 8 years working AND living in Gran Canaria. Remember, for many years I didn’t ask, so I had a “No!” already. But then, one day, I eventually asked, took the risk, a good chance that things could work out, and, I got it! I got the “Yes!” and two weeks later I moved permanently to Gran Canaria where I have been living and working ever since. And still having a blast!

But if you don’t ask, if you don’t provoke that conversation to take place, it will never happen. So you are back to square one. And I am not sure what you would think, but I do believe it’s worth while taking the risk of asking away (your immediate management or whoever else), because in a way you are also helping your management line to understand how they need to shift gears themselves and instead of measuring your performance by the amount of hours and days that you work, they would probably be much better off measuring your overall outcomes, your deliverables, your output, and understand fully how, in a good number of times, you would be providing that extra level of top quality value by taking time off to focus on what you need to focus on: yourself. Re-energise, charge your batteries and come back for more!

After all, it’s a beautiful, wonderful world out there and every extra hour that we spend doing overtime or not having that time off for ourselves to do other things as part of that personal work life integration strategy you should all start working your way through on it, you are losing out. And you are losing big. As big and mind-blowing as this:

Don’t you think it’s worth while asking after all? Don’t you think it’s a good time now to take your life back and instead of talking about work life integration you start living more that life work integration for yourself and for what really matters?

You bet!

I am sure that if I would go and ask you folks about naming over here some of your pet peeves from traditional collaborative and knowledge sharing tools, you would probably be getting on a roll for a good while and share all of those gripes you have been exposed to and that you wish something could be done about them. I am sure that if I would go ahead and ask you the very same question for social networking tools, they may not well be the same pet peeves, but I am certain you could name quite a few of them as well. No doubt! Well, that’s exactly what the folks from Dice News did just recently, while at SXSW, by interviewing a whole bunch of people about that topic. Calling it rather revealing, thought-provoking, mind-bloggling and sobering would probably fall short altogether. Just think of it, what’s your social media pet peeve? Ready?

Hang on for a minute though. Let’s go first and have a look into what some of the folks who were interviewed briefly by Dice News said about what were their main gripes with regards to social networking tools and the Social Web in general. Here’s the embedded video clip that lasts for a little bit under two minutes and which can surely make up as well for some really good fun to kick-off another week at work! Get your bingo cards out as well to see how many of those pet peeves you get to experience during the course of the day and check them all off! Oh, and don’t cheat!! This one is going to hurt a bit! Here it comes:

Frightening, don’t you think? I am not sure what you folks would think about this one, but when I watched it for the first time I just couldn’t help identifying a good number of the same reasons why I stopped using corporate email at work living “A World Without Email” over four years ago, without opening up another can of worms along on my pet peeves on corporate email itself, thinking we could do better, much better, with social technologies, to help make us much more effective and productive at what we do at work, and yet we are finding out, probably through the hard way, that’s everything, but helping us out!

I am sure that at this point in time you may be wondering what would be my main gripes, right? Well, at the moment, and judging by my own user experience over the course of the years I guess I could just nail it down, for me, to three different items:

• Social technologies themselves: I mean, when was the last time you were 100% happy and content with the potential and your overall end-user experience from any of the external social networking tools out there, as well as your favourite Enterprise Social Software platform? If you have been reading this blog for a little while now, you can see how I still think we are at the infancy of defining truly inspiring, engaging, rewarding social technologies experiences and, when we do we seem to nail it, we mess up with other things like privacy, security, copyright infringements, and whatever else. And we are back to square one.
• Think of social networking as just another marketing channel: This just would apply not only to Marketing and Communications, for which it’s a given, as I am sure you would agree with it if you have been exposed to either of those groups in social channels, as they themselves call them. Well, no, this is out for everyone who thinks that social tools are just another means of blasting out messages, their messages, broadcasting them along with very little interaction along the way. If anything, social networking is all about building strong personal business relationships, networks of people with a common interest, a common passion, wanting to do things better at their jobs, while still having fun, and still learning along the way. Remember “Life in perpetual beta?” Well, 10 years later, it’s still about conversations!
• Distraction: This is probably the one that most of us would feel identified with big time and probably right so, because the amount of noise one gets exposed to over the course of the day on the Social Web is starting to become mind-boggling, if not too worrying! Never mind my cry-out from a few weeks back about embracing a much more focused and purposeful social networking experience. We still aren’t there yet! Therefore, we need to work harder, smarter, on it.

And we probably won’t be able to address it and fix it properly during the course of 2012 either, as my good friend, Bill Johnston, annotated a couple of days back on a brilliant tweet he shared over at his stream:

IMHO, we will look back at 2010-2012 as period of mass distraction on the social web, vs. 2013 relationship building & focus on shared value

— Bill Johnston (@billjohnston) April 2, 2012

Spot on! That’s what I will certainly be looking into over the course of the next few months, so that when 2013 kicks in, I’ll be ready, if you can ever say that for the Social Web, because you are never ready. It’s a constant learning experience where every day there are dozens of new precious gems you get exposed to that you didn’t know were going to help or benefit you, and, yet, there they are for you to embrace them and make you better at what you do, if you can find them amongst that noise, that is.

So, a little bit of homework for us social networkers out there, I would think, if we would want to turn the tide around of bumping into more and more pet peeves around social technologies, and our consistent and growing abuse of them! We may as well start doing something about it, before it’s too late and break them like we have done with *cough* email *cough* over the course of the years. Now, I am not going to propose what folks can do, or should do, about it, since I have always felt it’s a very personal opinion, and experience, engaging with social networking tools, which is also the main reason why I have never believed in best practices for social networking in the first place, nor for knowledge work, for that matter! There aren’t any! What works for some people may not work for others, so where is the “best” in that? (More on this topic on an upcoming blog post, not to worry… hehe).

What I’m planning on doing myself though is continue to focus and redefine the purpose of my social presence, both internal and external, with simple activities like doing a bit of virtual hygiene of the social tools I rely the most on, like Twitter and Google Plus, for instance, so that over time I can continue to fine tune the overall experience, reduce the noise to a certain degree, and bring back that building of personal business relationships that Bill mentioned on that tweet, but, specially, focus, even more, on that shared value, because, at the end of the day social networking for business is all about: the value add (that shared value) you can provide to those who care about you and your business. And that all starts by asking yourself how can I help you today to become better at what you do?

Let’s bring back the focus on the WE, and move on from the ME. We will all be much better off. I can guarantee you all that!

Over the course of time you come to realise how there are a number of different articles published out there that you know are going to have a higher impact than others on how you perceive various different things, whether personal or work related. But what happens when you stumble on perhaps the most essential and critical article you have come across in a long while that manages to question a good number of the things we have been taking for granted at work for years? An article that dares to question how the business world has been functioning and operating over the course of decades by claiming, loud and clear, how companies keep ignoring 150 years of invaluable and precious research on how we become most effective and productive while at work. Are you prepared to be challenged, too, about your core work beliefs? Really? Are you sure? I mean, are you really sure? I can tell you it’s going to hurt, but maybe we need it that way, as one of those massive, unprecedented wake-up calls that may mark the beginning of something new and rather powerful: a smarter knowledge workforce.

A few days back I bumped into this very intriguing and rather helpful article put together by Jessica Stillman under the rather provocative title of “Why Working More Than 40 Hours a Week is Useless” where she points us out to a superb piece of writing done by Sara Robinson at Salon under the suggestive heading of “Bring back the 40-hour work week” where she questions something that I am sure most of us knew, deep inside, from all along, but that very few have dared to even bring up as a topic of conversation. Specially, at work. Basically, when was the last time you worked 40 hours a week? Or, more importantly, does working more than 40 hours per week make you more effective and productive at what you do? Well, Sara claims on that article that, contrary to what we may all believe in, it doesn’t. In fact, working over 40 hours per week is the most unproductive thing you can do to damage not only your work or your colleagues’ work, but also yourself, as a knowledge worker AND as a human being. And she has got 150 years of powerful research to back up that argument!

Whoahh! What do you say to that? I mean, really, what can you say to that? Right there, after having gone through that absolutely stunning piece (Long entry, for sure, but well worth reading every single word of it!), I came to the conclusion that in the 15 plus years I have been working in the corporate world I have never managed to make only 40 hours a week. And, notice how I am using the word manage, because I feel it fits in quite nicely in the whole context of how we have been taught over the course of decades that if you are only working those 40 hours a week you are just basically being underutilised and pretty much lazing around (Perhaps, nowadays even by checking out all of those social networking sites!). Well, it’s actually quite the opposite! You have just been abused left and right by the system into making you believe that working overtime is not only an expected behavior, but a desired one! By our employers, of course! But here’s the twist, by ourselves, knowledge workers, equally so, too! And that’s where things have gone horribly wrong. Apparently.

I can strongly recommend you make the time today to read through Sara’s dissertation, as I am sure you will then be thanking her for sharing it across in the first place and for being capable of opening your eyes, and brain!, to the unthinkable, specially, in today’s current financial turmoil: you don’t need, you shouldn’t have!, to work more than 40 hours a week to be effective and productive. So stop doing that today! Stop working those unpaid hours that research has proved don’t contribute much to your overall performance, or to the overall business outcomes!, and for a good number of reasons. Stop working longer hours than you should and you will even feel much better as a result of it eventually. Although it looks like things were not like that a while back.

Sara mentions how this work behaviour, and expectation!, probably, comes from something that’s been implanted in our work brain from all along. To quote:

[…] But you push on anyway, because everybody knows that working crazy hours is what it takes to prove that you’re “passionate” and “productive” and “a team player” — the kind of person who might just have a chance to survive the next round of layoffs.

But you eventually find out, through the hard way, you don’t survive it. And then what? That’s exactly what Sara covers successfully in her write-up. Like I have mentioned above, it’s a rather long column that she has put together, but in it she covers, in-depth, where the traditional 40 hour per week work schedule comes from (From the most of the unexpected places, I can tell you!), how and why it was established on that timeframe and how the whole concept of working overtime and staying productive is a myth. A myth we have been told to believe in all along, but that it doesn’t have any scientific validation it actually works. It doesn’t. At all. It makes us all sloppier at what we do. It drains our physical body, our brain, our capacity to collaborate, share our knowledge, innovative and think clearly; it damages not only our very own health, but also our very own healthy, and much needed!, relationships with the outside-out-of-work world: family, friends and relatives, etc. etc.

In her commentary, Sara gets to build up the case how the 40 hour a week work schedule got started with the labour based workforce, and how when we made the transition into the knowledge based work we pretty much ignored that good practice thinking we could demand more of our knowledge workers, because, you know, after all, they are no longer working hard with their hands, but with their brains, so there is this assumption you can get more out of that than whatever you have thought about it. In reality, it’s worse! Apparently, knowledge workers can only produce good quality work in a range of 6 to 7 hours per day. No more. Yes, I know! Really!!

I didn’t know that myself either! Fascinating! But it gets even better, because she then gets to build the case of when, how and why did we destroy the healthy and rather productive 40-hour week. Now, this particular section from her piece I find it really disturbing and rather uncomforting, because, in a way, she comes to claim how we, ourselves, knowledge workers, were the ones who demolished such well established industry standard of only working a certain amount of hours, before our work and output both start deteriorating. Very sobering piece for everyone out there to read through, ponder, reflect, and evaluate whether you yourself feel that you have contributed to it. I know for myself I surely have and having read the whole thing I’m glad I have now got an opportunity to do something about it.

That’s just what she gets to cover next with some very powerful and inspiring counterarguments. “Can we bring it back?” Should we bring it back? That we is not only knowledge workers themselves, but employers alike. According to her, for employees:

“[…] The fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life. How will you make up the lost time? Will you ditch dinner and grab some fast food? Skip the workout? Miss the kids’ game this week? Sleep less? (Sex? What’s that?) And how many consecutive days can you keep making that trade-off before you are weakened in some permanent and substantial way? (Probably not as many as you think.) Changing this situation starts with the knowledge that an hour of overtime is a very real, material taking from our long-term well-being — and salaried workers aren’t even compensated for it“

For employers, she adds:

“[…] the shift will be much harder, because it will require a wholesale change in some of the most basic assumptions of our business culture. Two generations of managers have now come of age believing that a “good manager” is one who can keep those butts in those chairs for as many hours as possible. This assumption is implicit in how important words like “productivity” and “motivation” are defined in today’s workplaces. A manager who can get the same amount of work out of people in fewer hours isn’t rewarded for her manifest skill at bringing out the best in people. Rather, she’s assumed to be underworking her team, who could clearly do even more if she’d simply demand more hours from them. If the crew is working 40 hours a week, she’ll be told to up it to 50. If they’re already at 50, management will want to get them in on nights and weekends, and turn it into 60. And if she balks — knowing that actual productivity will suffer if she complies — she won’t get promoted“

Goodness! I am not sure what you folks would think about those two quotes, but I fear that she has described, tremendously well, and rather accurately, how the business world operates today, in 2012!!, and even more so when you start considering the current financial crisis and how precarious working conditions have become in most countries. So how can we rebel against that? How can we change the tide and revert back to what research over the course of 150 years has proved that it works just all right? I bet most of you out there would feel it’s not an easy task. Sara would agree with you on this regard, I would think. In fact, she offers a good number of options, and potential solutions, that would be worth while considering and pondering further. Go and read those, while over here I am going to take the liberty of adding a couple of suggestions myself on how we, both employers and knowledge workers, can get things back on track and into the right direction if we would want to survive further in this 21st century Knowledge Economy.

For employers:

Stop measuring the performance of your employee knowledge workforce by the amount of hours they put together on completing tasks or by their sheer physical presence at the office. Instead, measure the deliverables, the outcomes, the outputs, what they eventually provide as value-add to the company, i.e. to your customers, and if they can do that in, say, 4 hours, don’t add on them new tasks or additional work to do. Remember, there used to be a time when knowledge workers worked in a single project, with a single team, with a single mission and a specific set of goals. Bring that back, since you can only stretch productivity up to so much, before it takes a big hit on your overall business, which I am sure is the last thing you would want to do.

Also, it would help if businesses would, finally, understand that their knowledge workforce are, actually, people, knowledge workers, and not just some resources or assets that they can shuffle around freely at their will. Those knowledge workers have got many more better things to do than being treated like those resources you can place here or there at your own leisure, just because you feel you are entitled to. Well, may be not. There is a formula out there that’s been around since the 19th century (in Britain) that pretty much describes it rather nicely: “eight [hours] for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works. It’s a formula that needs to come back, because, as Sara mentions: ”[…] the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help” (Their as in industries and branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress).

For employees:

It’s going to be even harder and tougher altogether. I am sure you folks would have a good number of suggestions of what we, both employers and employees, could do about this important topic (And I would love to learn more about them in the comments!), but I sense that one of the key, important things that we could do, as knowledge workers ourselves, in order to make this happen, is to, finally, put a stop to that silly attitude of competing against each other to see and prove who is better in order to claim that well deserved promotion. When we all know, in most cases, no matter how hard you work, how competitive you have become with your colleagues, by protecting and hoarding your knowledge, assets, skills and expertise, or by how much you have managed to put down your peers so that you can stand out that, there is a great chance that you won’t get promoted. And then? Where does that leave you? … Exactly!

Yes, you may get promoted, but you may not. The thing is that while I’m writing these words there is a single key concept out there (And it is not slacking off work, nor stop working altogether, just in case you were thinking about that! heh) that we need to have plenty more of in our corporate world to help us understand how we are much much better off helping each other than fighting each other. Everyone out there would probably want to become an executive or a senior technical leader at some point in time, but, time and time again, in the age of the Sharing Economy, in the age of interconnectedness, of earning their trust by merit (More than anything else you may have done in the past!), of transparency, of engagement, of passion, of intrapreneurship, even, etc. etc. I can imagine how fighting others is not going to be very helpful, never has, eventually!, nor will it help you advance that much faster. And, definitely, stopping others from excelling at what they do, so you can come on top, will take a whole lot more than 40 hours a week. Indeed, in order for us to revert back into that 40 hour a week work mentality where we continuously aim at helping each other becoming better at what we already do, we need plenty more of Servant Leadership. At all levels, but starting with you, not everyone else, but you.

So, eventually, I couldn’t have agreed more with Sara’s conclusion on what’s at stake over here, in today’s business world, if we don’t take any action about it and just move on with what we think is the workplace of the future. I sense it’s got to be better than this, much better than this, because what’s at stake right now, and in the next few years, is our mere survival as knowledge workers, as human beings:

“For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies [Or any company], and the future of the country [any country], this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth“

A few times in the past I have been talking over here in this blog about striking for smart work and sustainable growth in our knowledge based societies and after reading Sara’s last few words from her conclusion I can only say it’s now our job, our duty, perhaps, to make it happen, and the sooner, the better; we probably cannot even wait much longer, specially (to quote her:) … “If we’re going to talk about creating a more sustainable world, let’s start by talking about how to live low-stress, balanced work lives that leave us refreshed, strong and able to carry on as economic contributors for a full four or five decades, instead of burned out and broken by a too-early middle age. A full, productive 40-year career starts with full, productive 40-hour weeks. And nobody should be able to take that away from us, not even for the sake of a paycheck” [Emphasis mine to which I would add as well that it's probably not even worth it any longer. It never was in the first place]

So, have a good guess into what I’m going to start doing from next week onwards …

How about you?