Value People as an Asset on the Financial Statements

“What is your organization’s most important asset? CEOs often respond that the organization’s people are its greatest asset. But if this is true, where are people accounted for in the financial statements? Today, people are generally classified as expenses on the income statement and liabilities on the balance sheet — not as an investable asset. Thus, when CEOs seek to increase profit, they cut costs — like people — rather than investing in assets — like people — that can appreciate. “

tags: humancapital accounting finance assets intangibles intangiblecapital financialstatements balancesheet

• In fact, investment advisory firm Ocean Tomo estimates that in 1975 more than 80% of the value in the S&P 500 firms consisted of tangible assets — like land, plant and equipment. In 2010, approximately 80% of the S&P500 market value is attributed to intangible assets. But, today’s accounting systems and financial reporting are still using 20th century definitions, creating a “gap in GAAP” (the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) on how value is created in the 21st century.

• In January 1967, the Harvard Business Review published, “Put People on Your Balance Sheet,” which discussed various methodologies for classifying human resources as assets, including:

  • historical cost,
  • replacement cost, and
  • opportunity cost.

Gambling With Intangibles

“What if the origin of political division in this country could be traced to a simple glitch of the generally accepted accounting practices?
In other words, charging money for baggage essentially transfers this service from the liability column to the asset column of the accounting statement. As a liability, it can only atrophy under the weight of austerity measures.”

tags: accounting balancesheet humancapital customerservice service serviceeconomy

• By charging fees, once neglected baggage service departments have become star revenue performers for airlines. Department managers can now justify new technology and equipment. Where before, baggage service only represented a cost, it now provides millions in revenu
• The basic problem is that regulators have been working for the last two years to define the difference between hedging and gambling, and can’t.
• What if that’s what it’s all about; all the fighting, and slander, and division, and prejudice, and injustice, and violence, etc., caused by a simple accounting system problem.
• When we do not have an accounting system for human values, we can only gamble with them.

7 Lessons Lego Can Teach You About Enterprise Collaboration

“After a turbulent spell and a change in leadership the company decided to open up innovation to the community, initially through the Ambassador program created in 2005, allowing not only collaboration with customers but also suppliers that would enable Lego to churn out more advanced products. This modular approach was borrowed from the open source community and allowed manufacturers to design for the Lego ecosystem.”

tags: casestudies lego innovation openinnovation communities ambassadors customers

• (1) Use external suppliers to fill in your gaps
• (2) Utilize the ‘weak ties’ in your community –
• (3) Develop clear rules and expectations
• (4) Make sure both sides win
• (5) Customers aren’t employees
• (6) There is no one community member
• (7) Be open and transparent

Dear GE: You Can Do Better!

“Despite all the wonderful things in the second paragraph of his letter that Mr. Sheffer says about GE, Wall Street has had persistently negative view of the firm: GE’s share price has declined by 35 percent over the past ten years. GE is one of three firms in the list (along with Wal-Mart and Johnson & Johnson) that is doing markedly worse than the S&P 500, which is at +32 percent over the ten-year period.

“

tags: GE radicalmanagement casestudies marketvalue innovation outcomes ouputs creativeeconomy

• Instead of pursuing maximizing shareholder value as most of the Hay “leaders”, like GE, are doing, these firms are focused on delighting customers with continuous innovation. Paradoxically, it turns out that a tight focus on delighting customers makes more money than a tight focus on making money.
• It’s about understanding the principles of radical management that are needed to succeed in the customer-driven world of the 21^st Century marketplace.
• We know that the 20^th Century industrial-style management isn’t adapted to the emerging Creative Economy, in which the driving force is continuous innovation and customer delight. The Creative Economy is an economy in which organizations are agile and continually offering new value to customers and delivering it sooner. The Creative Economy is an economy in which firms focus less on short-term financial returns and more on creating long-term customer value based on trust.
• The new bottom line of business is: is the customer delighted? It’s a fundamental shift from outputs to outcomes. It’s about, not just finding fast-growing sectors, but rather creating them. Creating fast growing sectors is much more profitable than finding them.

How to Engage Your Customers and Employees

“Most customers now ignore targeted marketing campaigns, avoid responding to offers, and provide minimal feedback when asked. Instead, potential customers interact with each other, bypassing sanitized corporate messages devoid of meaning or value.

Meanwhile, employees increasingly look beyond compensation to non-monetary factors such as advancement, recognition, and corporate social responsibility in choosing where to work. And with the retirement of the Baby Boomers looming, attracting, retaining, and growing the next generation of leaders is an essential task for any organization.”

tags: marketing humanresources values culture community context stakeholders employees engagement

Is Gamification A Great Motivator?

“More companies are applying game mechanics to internal and external apps and processes, Gartner says. But why gaming? Why now?”

tags: gamification processes businessprocess

• “The accessibility of information on the Internet and the ability to gather and share information has increased significantly over the past five years,” she said. “Also, you’re competing with other activities that a user might be able to do. How can you make your activity more appealing than other activities?”
• The idea of game mechanics, said Avey, is taking elements of games and putting them into a normal business process.
• Gamification can also be used to encourage knowledge sharing, said Avey, and over time it can help users better understand colleagues’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as their areas of expertise.

CRM traditionnel versus Social CRM

“Aujourd’hui les clients ont plus de pouvoir et sont plus connectés que jamais. Cela appelle une réponse des marques
Le CRM traditionnel concerne la récupération et la gestion des données clients. Le Social CRM est une stratégie d’engagement des clients
Les ventes dirige le CRM traditionnel. Les conversations dirigent le Social CRM et les ventes ne sont qu’un sous-produit.”

tags: crm socialcrm

The social side of strategy

”
Crowdsourcing your strategy may sound crazy. But a few pioneering companies are starting to do just that, boosting organizational alignment in the process. Should you join them?”

tags: strategy socialbusiness crowdsourcing alignment leadership casestudies HCL wikimedia redhat 3M aegon

• The best way to describe the possibilities of community-based strategy approaches is to show them in action. Two examples demonstrate the lengths to which some companies have already gone in broadening their strategy processes, as well as the degree to which the executives who participated are convinced of the benefits.
• The solution was to turn the company’s existing business-planning process—a live meeting called Blueprint, which involved a few hundred top executives—into an online platform open to thousands of people. The new process, dubbed My Blueprint, was launched in 2009, with 300 HCL managers posting their business plans, each coupled with an audio presentation. More than 8,000 employees (including several members of the teams that had submitted plans) were then invited to review and provide input on the individual blueprints. A surge of advice followed. The inclusive nature of the process helped identify specific ideas for cross-unit collaboration and gave business leaders a chance to obtain detailed and actionable feedback from interested individuals across the company.
• To ensure accountability for developing the priorities further and for making them actionable, the company tasked a new group of executives to lead teams exploring each of the nine areas. These leaders were senior functional ones whose responsibilities put them a level or two below the C-suite. Each of their teams fleshed out one or two of the most important strategic initiatives and was empowered to execute the plans for them without further approvals.
• The company invited all of its sales, marketing, and R&D employees to a Web-based forum called InnovationLive, which over a two-week period attracted more than 1,200 participants from over 40 countries and generated more than 700 ideas. The end result was the identification of nine new future markets with an aggregate revenue potential in the tens of billions of dollars. Since then, 3M has held several additional InnovationLive events, and more are on the way.
• Those employees not only understand the strategy better but are also more motivated to help execute it effectively and more likely to spot emerging opportunities or threats that require quick adjustments.
• Of course, adopting social-strategy tools doesn’t automatically create alignment. Companies must create it actively, particularly among middle managers, who as the guardians of everyday operations bear the brunt of making any company’s strategy work.
• The Dutch insurer AEGON sidestepped problems such as these by breaking its strategy discussion into manageable topics related to everyday operational practices. That allowed middle managers to assume responsibility for the discussion and contribute their expertise

•   

   Taking these principles to their logical conclusion suggests a shift in the strategic-leadership role of the CEO and other members of the C-suite: from “all-knowing decision makers,” who are expected to know everything and tell others what to do, to “social architects,” who spend a lot of time thinking about how to create the processes and incentives that unearth the best thinking and unleash the full potential of all who work at a company

• For a mass digital dialogue to succeed, people need to express themselves openly, which may leave some participants feeling exposed. Leaders can help by demonstrating vulnerability as well—peeling off the layers of formal composure.

Barriers to Change: The Real Reason Behind the Kodak Downfall

“Kodak has recently declared bankruptcy. Usually, when this hits the news it is analyzed by the numbers people who, looking at five years’ worth of financial data, give their quantitative and financial explanation of the failure. More qualitative types will go back 10 years sometimes, and even go beyond finances to talk about strategy, CEOs, competition, and the like. Recent well-done Financial Times articles (here and here) go back even further for Kodak. And yet people still fail to see Kodak’s real problem.”

tags: casestudies kodak innovation culture change

• a new technology has fierce competitors, low margins and cannibalizes your high margin core business. And Kodak did not take decisive action to combat the inevitable challenges.
• Answer: The organization overflowed with complacency
• Historically, Kodak was built on a culture of innovation and change. It’s the type of culture that’s full of passionate innovators, already naturally in tune to the urgency surrounding changes in the market and technolog
• One key to avoiding complacency is to ensure these innovators have a voice with enough volume to be heard (and listened to) at the top
• As Kodak became more successful, complacency grew, leaders listened less to these voices,

Leader Meter 2.0: Spotting the natural leaders in your company

“True leadership often comes from people with personal power, regardless of whether they have positional authority [1]. This hack proposes a dynamic system for measuring an individual’s “natural leadership,” — the extent to which their contributions are seen as valuable, both inside and outside of an organization, and publish these results for all to see. This hack borrows concepts from the popular reputational capital sites like Klout.com and Peerindex.com, the Net Promoter methodology, as well as from Gary Hamel’s ideas of how to identify natural leaders [2]. In addition to providing insight into who an organization’s natural leaders are, such a system can provide motivation for employees to make more valuable contributions.”

tags: management leadership

Millennials Present a Management Challenge

“While a Traditional, born 1945 or earlier, would accept almost any order as long as it came through the proverbial chain of command, Boomers and Gen X might hesitate but comply. But Millennials most likely will balk at doing things “the way we’ve always done it” because they want freedom of choice in everything. They may not balk at the assignment itself but instead may challenge the methodology.”

tags: humanresources management millenials geny feedback

• The one positive result in establishing Millennial generational characteristics is this: when we pay attention to their characteristics, we reexamine our management and leadership style, which ultimately brings us full circle: all human beings want to feel good, want to do good work and be recognized for it, and actually are pretty good people. This is not rocket science!

5 Questions to Ask When Choosing an Enterprise Social Network

“With that in mind, be sure to ask these five questions when considering which social network platform to use:”

tags: socialsoftware socialnetwork enterprisesocialsoftware

• 1. What specific tasks do you need it to accomplish?
• 2. How will the software ease productivity or communication bottlenecks in your organization?
• 3. Do you want a hosted or installed service?
• 4. Can the system grow and adapt easily to changing needs and technology?
• 5. What level of training is required before someone can use the system?

It’s Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement

“Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean, and other variations on continuous improvement can be hazardous to your organization’s health. While it may be heresy to say this, recent evidence from Japan and elsewhere suggests that it’s time to question these methods.”

tags: sixsigma lean kaizen continuousimprovement

• Looking beyond Japan, iconic six sigma companies in the United States, such as Motorola and GE, have struggled in recent years to be innovation leaders. 3M, which invested heavily in continuous improvement, had to loosen its sigma methodology in order to increase the flow of innovation
• Customize how and where continuous improvement is applied. One size of continuous improvement doesn’t fit all parts of the organization. The kind of rigor required in a manufacturing environment may be unnecessary, or even destructive, in a research or design shop
• Question whether processes should be improved, eliminated, or disrupted. Too many continuous improvement projects focus so much on gaining efficiencies that they don’t challenge the basic assumptions of what’s being done
• Assess the impact on company culture. Take a hard look at the cultural implications of continuous improvement. How do they affect day-to-day behaviors?

Networks Eat Strategy for Breakfast…Everyday

“The new year is here and businesses everywhere are in the process of developing, refining or finalizing their strategies for 2012. That said, how many organizations are taking a close, in-depth look at their culture as a basis for driving strategy?”

tags: culture networks strategy hierarchy organizationalcharts

• 
• honest portrayal of how the fabric of human relationships (and the differences, nuances thereof) = culture.
• While companies look to their org charts as pathways for executing on strategy, our intuition and experience tells us there are informal channels and relationships that largely dictate how work really gets done. Each company’s ”networks” are different and unique. They can be quite independent of hierarchy and form the basis for culture
• Understanding informal networks enables leaders to align the organization (not the org chart) with its strategic direction and move more quickly and effectively
• Once you get the culture, you can execute on strategy with greater ease and efficiency.

Le monde du travail au 21e siècle

“« Après le e-learning, le social learning [apprentissage social] est le nouveau concept qui doit révolutionner la formation dans les années à venir. Cette approche collaborative de la transmission des savoirs a réellement pris son essor avec le développement des réseaux sociaux. Les technologies du web2.0 permettent désormais de regrouper, de structurer et de diffuser les savoirs informels contenus dans une entreprise. Pour le plus grand bénéfice des collaborateurs, qui s’en trouvent plus impliqués et motivés, et des clients, qui voient la compétence de leurs interlocuteurs améliorée. Mais aussi des DRH [ressources humaines], pour qui ce mode de formation collaboratif représente une opportunité peu coûteuse, rapide et efficace de capitaliser les connaissances présentes à l’intérieur de l’entreprise et d’en favoriser la diffusion. Le social learning devrait venir compléter l’offre existante de formations traditionnelles, présentiel et e-learning, et favoriser l’avènement de l’entreprise collaborative.”

tags: sociallearning skills competencies

• « le social learning ne repose pas tant sur le contenu que sur la façon dont on va se connecter aux autres
• 1. votre mobile sera votre bureau, votre salle de classe et votre concierge, 2. les utilisateurs du web forceront les corporations à se réinventer, 3. la description de tâches pour un dirigeant inclura d’écrire dans un blogue, 4. une littératie des médias sociaux sera requise de tous les employés et 5. la distinction entre le marketing, les communications et l’apprentissage sera confondue.

• La Apollo Research Institute publiait récemment leurs prédictions quant aux compétences qui seront (sont) requises dans un milieu de travail ouvert, réseauté et collaboratif. En voici une traduction libre :

   

  • Transdisciplinarité – cette capacité de comprendre des concepts au travers de divers champs disciplinaires
  • Collaboration virtuelle – capacité de travailler efficacement, de susciter l’engagement et de s’afficher comme joueur d’équipe virtuelle
  • Dégager un sens – dégager le sens sous-jacent de ce qui est exprimé
  • Intelligence sociale – capacité de se «connecter» aux autres afin de susciter les réactions et interactions de qualité
  • Compétence interculturelle – savoir travailler dans divers contextes culturels
  • Gestion de la charge cognitive – savoir discerner, filtrer et trier l’information abondante et savoir comment optimiser l’usage d’outils de communication pour y arriver
  • Pensée innovante et adaptative – proposer des solutions qui vont au-delà du cadre usuel de raisonnement
  • Pensée rationnelle (« computational») – capacité de traduire des données en concepts et comprendre le raisonnement à base de données.
  • Littératie numérique – Évaluer la pertinence et développer des contenus en formats numériques, et utiliser ces nouveaux médias comme effet de levier pour une communication efficace
  • État d’esprit «design» – savoir représenter et développer des tâches ou processus pour atteindre objectifs.

Chart Focus: How business uses social technologies

“McKinsey’s fifth annual survey on social tools and technologies shows that when integrated into the daily work of employees and adopted on a large scale throughout a new kind of business—the networked enterprise—they can improve operations, financial performance, and market share. “

tags: socialsoftware usage socialbusiness enterprise2.0 networkedenterprise

Social Business – Where Bosses and Managers Become Servant Leaders

“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! “

tags: management leadership servantleadership

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

L’architecture organisationnelle est sensible à l’échelle

“La taille d’une organisation influe sur les modes de prise de décision, de transfert d’information ou de coopération, ce qui fait que les « bonnes recettes » à 10 personnes ne fonctionnent pas forcément à 100 ou encore moins à 1000. Plus précisément, un grand nombre de problèmes apparaissent lorsque la taille augmente, et l’efficacité n’est pas proportionnelle à la force de travail disponible. Cette constatation n’est pas sans rappeler ce qu’on observe dans les systèmes parallèles (cf. la loi d’Admdhal) qui montre que la puissance que l’on obtient en multipliant les processeurs est compensée par la tâche croissante de synchronisation. Ce n’est pas une surprise : les petites structures souffrent moins des problèmes de coordination et de synchronisation !”

tags: organization coordination dunbar scale scalability context teams management structure organizationaldesign lean interfaces autonomy SOA complexity networks socialnetworks enterprise2.0 socialbusiness podularity

• La tentation d’éviter les tares des grandes organisations opérationnelles en les découpant en plus petites est pertinente si le coefficient est faible, et pas forcément efficace dans le cas contraire. Ce qui nous ramène à la thèse initiale : la bonne organisation dépend du contexte et de la taille.
• Je pense que la taille de 150 est un seuil critique dans la gestion des organisations, et ceci est conforté par 20 ans de discussions avec des managers opérationnels.
• C’est ce qui explique qu’en dehors des réunions d’information, il existe des tailles idéales pour des réunions de brainstorming ou de prises de décision, entre 7 et 10.
• dans le monde complexe du 21^e siècle, les activités de communication qui sont nécessaires pour coordonner des tâches obtenues par décomposition d’un objectif unique prennent une part sans cesse croissante du temps actif disponible.
• C’est ce qui explique les limites de la Taylorisation : en décomposant/spécialisant, on multiplie des interfaces qui, contrairement à la vision mécanique du 20^e siècle, exigent des flux d’information de coordination à complexité quadratique.
• Dès que l’organisation dépasse une certaine taille, les échanges indirects (qui passent par la médiation d’une autre personne, d’un groupe ou d’un support) dominent les échanges directs.
• . Si l’on souscrit à la thèse de March & Simon qu’une des fonctions clés du management est de gérer les flux d’information, il est clair que cette structure de management est forcément sensible à l’échelle.
• le management a une responsabilité essentielle dans la transformation de l’entreprise face aux défis de l’agilité et de la complexité.  Il est clair que tout ce que j’écris depuis quelque temps d’appuie sur la « puissance des petites équipes », en particulier les méthodes agiles de développement et le lean software development. En revanche, il ne faut pas s’y tromper, ces bénéfices sont très fortement dépendant de l’échelle et on n’organise pas une grande équipe comme une petite
• • En revanche, tout ne se règle pas par auto-organisation.
  • Il faut donc bénéficier des avantages des « small teams », au sein d’une architecture modulaire semblable à celle du système d’information
• « lean management » gère cette problématique avec des équipes autonomes et indépendantes, reliées par des interfaces « dures » (stables et contraignantes).
• Une des craintes des spécialistes du lean par rapport aux pratiques 2.0 est qu’elles créent des interfaces « molles » et renforce les dépendances.
• on retrouve les principes du SOA : organiser en termes de services, définis par des interfaces « strictes » pour favoriser l’encapsulation, c’est-à-dire l’autonomie locale
• Les équipes doivent être organisées au sein d’une structure, avec un véritable management qui joue un rôle, et qui s’appuie sur une culture propre aux grandes organisations, celle de la maîtrise de la complexité.
•  

   

   

   
  1.  La structure de coordination de l’entreprise – en particulier les réseaux créés par l’Entreprise 2.0 – est une structure multi-échelle, elle ne globalise pas les problèmes, mais elle se décline de façon fractale à des échelles multiples.
• La science des réseaux sociaux nous enseigne qu’une bonne structure de coordination est « scale-free » dans un sens très particulier qui signifie que la répartition des degrés dans les nœuds de connexion suit une « power law », ce qui implique qu’il existe de nombreux nœuds très connectés
• Un réseau podulaire est la combinaison de  petits sous-graphes fortement connectés (les pods) dans un maillage plus large
• On trouve dans cette conclusion une clé d’articulation pour le management : l’autonomie est fournie par l’utilisation de « small teams », le « mastery » est une des ambitions des pratiques du lean, et le management est bien là pour expliquer et nourrir le « sens »

Social Project Management – Narrating the project as it happens.

“What happens in a consumer social environment like Facebook is that people “narrate” their lives. So, in a social business environment, workers can learn to “narrate” their work. In a previous post, we argued that social business applications help to make work “observable”, and more recently we’ve argued that a key benefit of social project management (and other social applications) is to “make the invisible, visible”.”

tags: narration socialbusiness socialprojectmanagement workflow projectmanagement enterprise2.0 report statusmeetings

• Knowledge processes are notoriously difficult to observe – so much so that identifying the current state of a knowledge process is almost impossible
• In addition, distribute teams lose significant observability that comes from being collocated. However, social business changes both of these issues – IF the people executing the process “narrate” it as it happens.
• In a project execution process, narration typically happens during status reporting meetings, by project managers chasing down people for updates, in daily stand up meetings, etc.
• In a social project management environment, this can happen via narration by individuals (and by the software itself) on the project activity stream.
• The same dynamic applies when our project teams narrate the work of a project. We need far fewer status reporting sessions, because everyone is being made aware of things as they happen.

Social Business: Where It’s Been & Where It’s Going

“Having had several recent engaging conversations with smart people who I respect, I’ve picked up a hint of exhaustion around usage of the word “social”. Could it be that some who saw the “change” coming years ago are weary of having carried that torch for so many years as we move into the heavy lifting? It’s natural to want to move to the next thing—but I’m convinced that today we are largely still talking about the “social media” era. The best of “social business” is yet to come in my opinion and we have a lot of work to do in between.”

tags: socialbusiness socialmedi businessmodel

• Despite much of the chatter around “social business”, the reality is that most organizations are currently dealing with the realities of social media and only a few truly recognize the potential of social business.
• Business models where new connections are formed to the benefit of both the business, customer and even employee and shareholders are a core tenet of “social business”
• Having lived and worked during the “Digital Media” and “Digital Business” era, I think we’re scratching the surface as we straddle the worlds between social media and social business today. While there are many similarities to the past, there are also several key differences.
• 

Organization is a process, not a structure

“It is time to rethink. Rather than thinking of organization as an imposed structure, plan or design, organization arises from the interactions of interdependent individuals who need to come together.”

tags: organization process structure agility flexibility information

• The accumulating failures at organizational agility can be traced to a fundamental but mistaken assumption that organizations are structures guiding, and as a consequence, limiting interaction
• It is not about hierarchies vs. networks, but about a much deeper change. Organizations are creative, responsive processes and emergent patterns in time. All creative, responsive processes have the capacity to constantly self-organize and re-organize all the time
• What we still have not understood is that people need to have access to information that no one could predict they would want to know. Even they themselves did not know they needed it – before they needed it.
• We seek organization, but organization is a continuous process, not a structure.

The Power Of Coordination

“My research shows that this principle of coordination is more important today than it has ever been. Dissect how the CEOs of winning companies speak today and compare them with their less successful peers, and you can actually measure the difference. Winners speak more of coordinating things while losers focus more on controlling them.”

tags: coordination

• The trick is that people underestimate the effort and value of coordinating things because we think that to coordinate in a way that creates defensible advantage, we need to buy and own things

• But the winners today are reconnecting with that old Taoist saying that we see the spokes in the wheel but it is the empty center that lets the wheel move. It’s the empty center that matters, not the spokes.
• Power comes from coordination. You no longer have to own things to coordinate them. Do it before your competition does

New IBM Security Study: Finding A Strategic Voice In The C-Suite

“To that end, now for the new information security study results. The new IBM study reveals a clear evolution in information security organizations and their leaders, with 25 percent of security chiefs surveyed shifting from a tech focus to one of a more strategic business leadership role.

In this first study of senior security executives, the IBM Center For Applied Insights interviewed more than 130 security leaders globally and discovered three types of leaders based on breach preparedness and overall security maturity.”

tags: securit it chiefsecurityofficer CIO

• 
• Security seen as a business (versus technology) imperative: One of the chief attributes of a leading organization is having the attention of business leaders and their boards. Security is not an ad hoc topic, but rather a regular part of business discussions and, increasingly, the culture.
• Use of data-driven decision making and measurement: Leading organizations are twice as likely to use metrics to monitor progress, the assessment showed
• Shared budgetary responsibility with the C-suite: The assessment showed that within most organizations, CIOs typically have control over the information security budget
• To create a more confident and capable security organization, IBM recognizes that security leaders must construct an action plan based on their current capabilities and most pressing needs

Getting to Effective Social Business Results: Applying Culture Change

“This corporate immune system, as you might have guessed, is known as company culture. It’s a shared set of norms, practices, customs, expectations, and habits that have formed around and perpetuate how a company works and operates. While company culture is great at making the business function as expected and helps foster continuity and order, it’s also astonishingly good at killing off attempted changes to the system; undesirable and desirable both. It’s one reason why the entire industry of change management has emerged, so that companies can keep up with the our era’s ever increasing rate of change, of which technology itself is the most disruptive and high-velocity example.”

tags: socvialbusiness enterprise2.0 culture change transformation changemanagemen education businessprocess businessprocessdesign leadership

• 
• In reality, the technology of social business isn’t much of an obstacle, at least once you get beyond the internecine platform battles that are common in many large organizations.
• 

• In the first visualization above, I’ve depict the general stages of culture change across the major areas of an organization: supply chain, customer experience, and workforce experience. The stages themselves are:

   

   
  1. Augmentation. Partial and non-strategic addition of social to non-critical business functions.
  2. Adaptation. More effective use of social in the business. Movement of social business to core functions.
  3. Transformation. Remaking in place of business functions using social business concepts.
  4. Reinvention. Complete renewal of how the business operates around social business.
  5. Singularity. The core operation of the business as a fundamentally social set of constituents with little discernible boundary between them.
• This shows the key activities that drive culture change including executive and community leadership, strategic goals, business process redesign, education and training, risk management, and governance.

How To Get Middle Managers To Support Flexible Work

”

Over the years, we’ve succeeded in getting even some of the most skeptical middle managers on board the work flexibility train. But it requires a larger upfront commitment of resources (e.g. time, money, and people) than it takes to write a policy or rely on attrition. However, the return on that investment is a group of middle managers who not only accept work flexibility but understand how to use it as a powerful tool to run their business.”

tags: management middlemanagement flexibilty

• Ask middle managers to help articulate the “why” or business case for work flexibility in your organization, and then let them participate in determining what that flexibility will look like.
• Allow middle managers to freely express the “prices” they fear they will pay, while also helping them to focus on the payoffs of work flexibility.
• Make sure that work flexibility in the organization is built on a partnership model where employees have as much responsibility for the success of it as the managers do.
• Acknowledge that middle managers are people, too, who are increasingly under pressure to deliver more with less. 
• Establish the expectation, at the beginning, that any issues related to work flexibility that cause the group not to meet its goals will be resolved by everyone, not just the manager. 

Enterprise gamification: Will it drive better business performance?

“Summary: Concepts from the gaming industry have become increasingly useful as a way of improving and optimizing how we get work accomplished for our businesses. While many in the enterprise world may not be ready to adopt these ideas yet, gamification increasingly looks to be an effective set of techniques that now has an entire cottage industry forming to make it easier to achieve results.”

tags: gamification crowdsourcing rewards

• In fact, as enterprise platforms — particularly internal social networks — open up to embedded third party applications (such as OpenSocial) and business applications themselves add gaming features, the decision point on whether to apply gamification strategically is approaching for many organizations.
• Namely, if properly situated in business processes, the incorporation of game features in work activities can reward desired behavior, create more intensively participative processes, track group progress, establish feedback loops that reinforce and accelerate sought after business outcomes, and more.
• 
• The reality is that a lot of modern careers, particularly those in the service industry and knowledge work, often consist of repetitive drudgery — filled with seemingly endless routine tasks and rote processes — that can sap the motivation of even the most well-intentioned employee.
• The Wall Street Journal recently explored how a call center was able to reduce wait times up to 15% and increase sales by up to 12% using gamification
• By cost-effectively enlisting peer production and mass collaboration to rapidly creating a large group of players, who are then driven towards the desired objective through an architecture of participation that has gaming features used to improve the rate and length of engagement.
• gamification won’t be high on the adoption list, at least strategically, for a while. However, I do expect plenty of tactical experiments this year at the business function and departmental levels.

Managers Don’t Really Want to Innovate

“Innovation may be an organization’s life blood, but still its success rate in most companies hovers at just 17%. Even innovation leader P&G succeeds less than 50% of the time.

What prevents companies from innovating better? One possibility is that managers don’t really want their people to innovate, no matter what they say otherwise.”

tags: innovation management timemanagement

• Companies like 3M and Google that allow employees to carve off a certain percentage of their paid time for innovation are rare
• Most other firms want their people to stay focused on today’s business — and only work on innovation in their spare time. So in the end, it’s a mixed message: “We want you to innovate, but only after you’ve done your real job.”
• First, managers need immediate results, often reinforced by short-term incentive plans or the regular expectation of earnings improvements
• Managers may also fear that innovation will cannibalize current business.
• Approaches like Six Sigma have helped companies squeeze out inefficiencies, but also tend to reinforce existing processes with an eye towards doing them better. On the other hand, innovation requires messy experiments instead of methodical analysis.
• Additionally, managers are often schooled in slow, continuous improvement.
• Talk about how innovation is avoided. Politely and respectfully ask your manager or senior team about their commitment to innovation
• Work on innovation with colleagues. Instead of working alone, partner with co-workers to achieve an explicit innovation go

Les managers sont séduits mais peu formés aux outils 2.0

”
En veille sur les tendances et les besoins émergents des entreprises, la société Aastra a lancé une enquête en partenariat avec NotezIT, demandant aux cadres dirigeants des entreprises françaises de tous secteurs et toutes tailles confondus «Êtes-vous un collaborateur 2.0 ?». Cette enquête, publiée le 26 avril 2012, montre que si les dirigeants sont séduits, ils sont encore réticents au changement entrainés par ces outils 2.0. “

tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness culture competencies skills ROI management

• Ainsi l’étude d’Aastra montre que les entreprises privilégient l’intégration d’outils 2.0 orientés vers la productivité et la collaboration. En revanche, la notion d’e-réputation, pourtant vitale pour les entreprises, ne semble pas être entrée dans les mœurs ni dans les priorités stratégiques des sociétés.
• En effet l’étude montre une fréquence d’utilisation quotidienne assez élevée pour les services 2.0 tels que les mails personnels (83 %), les services Wikis / blogs (34 %), LinkedIn / Viadeo (31 %) puis Facebook (26 %), MSN, Skype, Gtalk, (23 %), Twitter (21 %), YouTube (20 %).
• on constate une faible implication de la DRH sur ces projets (15 %) ainsi qu’un taux de formation des managers – sur les nouveaux modes de management induits par les services 2.0 – inférieur à 30 %.
• 38 % des sondés évoquent ainsi la difficulté pour l’entreprise de faire évoluer ses habitudes et ses process.
• Le manque de visibilité en termes d’utilité et de RoI sont également pointés du doigt pour 32 % des répondants.

All work can be viewed as service

“Today we manage workers by headcount, jobs, roles, processes, and infrastructure. By viewing all work as a service we can define the service needs, match the service talent, and confirm the value exchange. The process empowers the worker to get the work done the way they want to work.”

tags: work service workasaservice serviceeconomy humanresources management

• 
• Jobs, headcount, and roles do not reflect the real person, their talent, and the actual work and yet this is way people are managed. The result is a costly ineffective model that will become increasingly suboptimal as work itself evolves into cloud-like services. The root cause is the traditional organization model of authority, roles, and headcount resource/financial management.

•  We can observe that the service economy has evolved dramatically in the past three years to the point where nearly any company function or project can be executed by a hired service, many of which are on demand

• Augment existing entities with the ability to internally create a marketplace for services that emulate the external marketplace for services without disrupting existing resource and governance management processes. 
• 
• The services model opens up a new layer of management where all workers manage the experience of their customers. The services model does not replace top down decision making. Instead, it improves the decision quality by reducing the number of top down decisions and replacing them with many smaller but important decisions right at the customer level
• 
• 

L’origine de la division du travail

“Profitons de la fête du travail pour parler de sa division.

Jusqu’à très récemment j’étais persuadé que la division du travail datait de Frederick Winslow Taylor. Je me trompais. Officiellement, cette division du travail provient d’une étude de Adam Smith, l’auteur de Recherche sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations et inventeur du fameux concept de “la main invisible du marché”.

Ou tout au moins c’est ce que l’on croyait car la vérité est toute autre. Grâce soit rendue à Vincent Lextrait (Directeur du développement à Amadeus) qui rend à César ce qui lui appartient, ceci dans une remarquable présentation à l’Université du SI en 2011.”

tags: work workdivision adamsmith descartes knowledgeeconomy

• Adam Smith “observe” que la division du travail permet une productivité 500 fois plus élevée. Cette productivité accrue est dûe essentiellement au fait qu’avec la division du travail, l’ouvrier n’a plus besoin de changer d’outil, opération particulièrement coûteuse en terme de temps dans la chaine de production. L’idée est donc “d’attacher” l’ouvrier à son outil pour optimiser la performance de la chaine de production.
• Notre esprit analytique et rationaliste fait de nous les rois des systèmes complexes. En conséquence de quoi, la division du travail en général et le Taylorisme en particulier résonnent d’un écho particulier chez nous.

• l’économie de la connaissance, grâce à informatique, le changement d’outil prend une fraction de seconde : c’est un CTL-ALT sur le clavier.

   

  Attention, il ne s’agit pas là d’un changement de contexte, d’une interruption d’un fil de pensée nécessitant une vingtaine de minutes pour être à nouveau “in the zone” comme le dit Jason Fried. Non, nous parlons là d’un changement d’outil pour assurer la continuité dans la procédure de réalisation d’une tâche donnée sur laquelle nous sommes concentrés.

• En limitant à un périmètre très restreint le champ d’intervention du travailleur spécialisé, la division du travail en supprime non seulement les éléments cognitifs mais aussi la perspective générale.  

Projets complexes: Enchanter ses clients: une utopie?

“En général, quand je parle dans mon entourage professionnel de méthodes agiles et de dépasser la notion de satisfaction du client pour l’enchanter (“delight”), cela ne déclenche pas immédiatement un enthousiasme délirant. Pourtant, si l’on est actif dans un métier où le marché est très concurrentiel et l’innovation permanente essentielle pour la survie, alors il est intéressant de se pencher sur ces nouvelles manières de voir le métier du management, et en particulier le Management radical de Stephen Denning, que j’aimerais présenter en quelques lignes ici, en complément d’un billet de François Beauregard.”

tags: customersatisfaction customerenchantment enchantment agilemethods agility radicalmanagement management selforganization

• 
• • Le nouveau but de l’organisation est de générer une expérience (enthousiasmer le client) – plutôt que de produire des biens ou faire de l’argent pour les actionnaires
  • Le nouveau but du management est de faciliter et soutenir l’auto-organisation des équipes – plutôt que de contrôler
  • La coordination se fait de manière dynamique, par des itérations gérées par le client – plutôt que de la bureaucratie hiérarchique
  • La communication est interactive: des conversations entre adultes – plutôt que commander et contrôler.
• A l’évidence, cela nécessite une remise en question du rôle du management qui se verra nouvellement dans un rôle de soutien et support – plutôt que de contrôle et de pouvoir, et s’orientera vers les gens – plutôt que sur les processus et les chiffres.

Social Task Management and Social Project Management. Friends or Foes?

“Social task management is getting a lot of press lately, and a number of vendors are adding the capability to their products. Unfortunately, there is some confusion about the difference between social task management and social project management. Hopefully this short post can help to clarify the differences.”

tags: socialprojectmanagement socialtaskmanagement project tasks process

• In short, social task management provides users to define a “to do list on steroids”, share/assign the list with others, and some provide the ability to define an ad hoc “workflow” to the tasks.
• In contrast, social project management is the leveraging of the social network of an organization to deliver rigorous project more effectively and efficiently. (See here, and this series)
• Project management has never been about task management. Tasks are usually far more granular than the items that would appear as activities and deliverables on a work breakdown structure
• The second “problem” with the embedding of “social” task management into every silo software solution is that the social component becomes restricted to those who have access to the software, and who participate in the work process into which it is embedded
• However, social project management and social task management serve complementary purposes, and can be used together when task management is enabled at the social platform level (rather than in siloed applications

Demystifying social media

“As the marketing power of social media grows, it no longer makes sense to treat it as an experiment. Here’s how senior leaders can harness social media to shape consumer decision making in predictable ways.”

tags: socialmedia marketing sales customerrelationship crisis crisismanagement brand brandawareness

• 
• In short, today’s chief executive can no longer treat social media as a side activity run solely by managers in marketing or public relations. It’s much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help CEOs and other top executives evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance-management systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence
• The fact that social media can influence customers at every stage of the journey doesn’t mean that it should. Depending on the company and industry, some touch points are more important to competitive advantage than others.

PepsiCo encourage ses employés à devenir des ambassadeurs de la marque sur les réseaux sociaux.

“PepsiCo vient tout juste de recevoir le titre de la meilleure entreprise où il fait bon vivre en France. L’occasion de faire un zoom sur une initiative très 2.0 de ce grand groupe.
PepsiCo permet à ses employés depuis peu de diffuser de l’information interne de l’entreprise sur les réseaux sociaux publics.
Ce type d’initiative, qui vise à faire des employés, des ambassadeurs de la marque, devrait être placé dans un contexte plus large de relations publiques …”

tags: casestudies pepsico communication ambassadors employees

•  

  L’entreprise à donc dans un premier temps, réalisée un programme éducatif sur les bonnes manières d’utiliser les réseaux sociaux. PepsiCo a par la suite mis en place un dispositif indiquant par un icône si le contenu peut être partagé avec le grand public.

• A l’heure où l’on assiste à une démultiplication des réseaux sociaux interne, cette initiative peut faire réfléchir les marques à une utilisation mixte « réseaux sociaux internes-externes » de leurs salariés.

How The Enterprise 2.0 Managerial Model Was Born

“New technological eras invariably create new managerial eras. Enterprise 2.0 is no different. In this three-part series, I will argue that E 2.0 organizational technology leads to a management model I will call “Management For Opportunity,” a model that exposes managers to market risks in unprecedented ways. This model is contrary to the popular emerging idea that managers (especially the much hated middle managers) will become entirely obsolete.

But to get to this vision, we need to situate E 2.0 management and technology ideas within the evolutionary history of corporations. “

tags: management management2.0

• Let’s start by trying to characterize the job of the manager in the E 2.0 world. I assert that this job is to manage for opportunity (MFO), which is fundamentally a risk management role that requires E 2.0 tools to fulfill. It’s the newest layer of the functional organization of the evolving managerial mind
• 

Seven Categories to Replace BPM

“The biggest problem with the term BPM is that so many people saw it as meaning so many different things. This causes unnecessary arguments between experts, like the blind men arguing over the shape of an elephant. We can clarify this debate by naming the subcategories of BPM.”

tags: bpm acm processes workflow

• 1. Management of Business Processes (MoBP)
• 2. Business Process Analysis (BPA)
• 3. Process Driven Server Integration (PDSI)
• 4. Social Content Management Systems (SCM)
• 5. Human Process Management Systems (HPM)
• 6. Production Case Management Systems (PCM)
• 7. Adaptive Case Management Systems (ACM)
• (8) Page Flow
• (9) Workflow
• While the term “BPM” will certainly enjoy another decade of life in casual use, I think it is time for the leaders in the field to start being a little more specific about what they really mean.

“If the news is that important, it will find me.”

“Rather than going to professional portals, people were increasingly relying on their social networks to deliver relevant and highly personalized information.

So why do you still have a home page at work? And what should you have instead?”

tags: internalcommunication communication socialnetworks virality

• A student put it even more simply: “If the news is that important, it will find me.”
• Traditionally, the internal communications staff would write up an article after the event, post it on their intranet portal, and send an email to employees with a summary and a link.
• This time, though, those same communications people selected more junior staff (outside of communications) to attend the conference and serve as roaming reporters

•  

  Now, without email and without searching, people at all levels from around the world were following the conference by following real people

• The graduates were particularly active, asking questions and contributing content. But senior people at the event also used the social platform, soliciting ideas and feedback, adding comments to other conversations.
• Far from being dead, the internal communications function at that conference became much more valuable. They went from producing impersonal content with few readers and zero feedback to using social tools and practices to engage a larger audience in more meaningful ways.

Is Continuous Innovation Too Risky?

“An idea that is pervasive in corporations in both America and Europe and prevalent in business schools, management journals and textbooks is that the goal of a firm is to maximize shareholder value. It’s prevalent even though leads to unsound management practices. Jack Welch, considered by many to be a leading practitioner of the idea, recognized in 2009 that shareholder value is a result, not a strategy. Worst of all, maximizing shareholder value creates the risk of disruptive innovation.”

tags: value shareholders shareholdervalue profit innovation continuousinnovation management organization changemanagement casestudies salesforce

• They [Apple] can do it because Apple hasn’t optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority.
• As a result, the transition from shareholder value to customer delight, as well as to the radical management principles needed to support the transition, is now inevitable.
• Some of the company principles currently being written (including shareholder profit and customer delight) that I advocate, is very management 2.0. But the executive team say “I hear what you say – and in principle, I agree, but…”. This is perceived to be way too risky to communicate to the investor.”
• With energetic implementation, with very strong support from the top, as at Salesforce, it would take a medium-sized firm at least a year to get through the transition. With less energetic implementation, the transition might take a number of years.
• This open communication feedback loop allowed a large number of people to participate in the design of the new process and engage actively in the solution.
• The management instead opted for a “big-bang” rollout, moving all teams to the new process at the same time. It was a difficult decision. The key factor driving it was a wish to avoid organizational dissonance and a desire for decisive action.
• The cross-functional team did its work in an iterative fashion and focused daily on whatever was needed to make the implementation successful. It created a global schedule for the entire process, provided coaching and guidance, identified and removed systemic impediments to change, monitored success, and evangelized the new way of working throughout the organization.

Les nouvelles évidences numériques de la Génération Y au lycée

“Green SI a rencontré la fameuse génération Y et s’est intéressé à ses usages de l’informatique et de la téléphonie.
Oh, il ne s’agit pas d’une étude complète sur un échantillon représentatif, mais juste de l’interview d’un seul jeune. Mais un jeune qui a inséré seul le numérique en classe quand l’Education Nationale cherche toujours par quel bout prendre le sujet. Il nous livre en miroir une foule de questions sur notre approche du numérique et nos propres usages. “

tags: generationy millenials digitalnatives education

Why Social Business Can Lead to Reinventing the Company Model

“I feel I should explain why in my previous article I suggested that we need to relook at the model of the firm in the light of Social Business and how this ends with a need to reevaluate the Porter Value Chain model for the competitive enterprise. The current meme floating among thought-leaders is that for social to have an impact in business, it needs to become part of the regular workflow of employees, customers and other participants”

tags: socialbusiness valuechain workflow businessproccess

• Social business activity needs to occur in the flow of people’s work rather than be a separate, additional task for them to do.
• The next natural step is question why we are doing the tasks in the first place and if it really makes sense in the way people engage in social business. In other words, rather than shaping social interactions to the task, you reshape the task itself to be more social.
• We can then consider if the change needs to be at a granular process step or if it should really affect the larger process overall.
• The next stage of awareness is the realization that changes within a particular business function is what continues to keep the organization in disconnected silos of responsibility.

Using Facebook to Predict Success on the Job

“A new study finds that profiles, status updates and comments on Facebook are valuable in predicting employee performance on the job, at least as they relate to personality characteristics. The potential liability that accompanies the use of social media in recruiting and hiring continues to be an issue, however. “

tags: humanresources recruitment facebook

•  

  The academic study appears to be the first-ever venture into compiling statistical data to prove that information on Facebook can yield valuable personality and job-performance information — not just clues as to whether someone parties too hard or has alarming philosophies or alliances.

• Bottom line, “there is now evidence that [social media] could be useful” as a job-performance predictor for recruiters and hiring managers,
• However, “the characteristics could be relevant as indicators of ‘hard work,’ ‘team play,’ etc., that are hypothetically predictive of performance,” he says.
• “From the HR and management perspective, you need to be real mindful that, while those Facebook posts may be giving you a look at the true person behind the resume … you could be violating a discrimination clause by looking

Gamification Boosts Employee Health Behavior, Blue Shield Argues

“Blue Shield of California finds social apps and rewards engage its employees in wellness programs, sees potential for its insurance customers.”

tags: gamification humanresources wellness wellbeing casestudies blueshield socialmedia rewards socialnetworks insurance health

• A major West Coast health plan has jumped on the social gaming/networking trend in fitness and wellness applications. Blue Shield of California is already offering one such program to its employees and will soon provide two more.
• Recent research had shown the power of social connectedness in improving health outcomes, and mobile health apps were suddenly catching on among consumers
• Blue Shield’s first move was to try an application called Shape Up Shield that focuses on increasing physical activity. “This is an eight-week-long, social-media-fueled challenge that uses an online platform to let employees form teams, post comments in forums, set team and personal fitness goals, and give virtual ‘high fives’ for encouragement,” a Blue Shield spokesman said. “In 2011, over 1,800 Shape Up Shield participants walked, hiked and ran 600 million steps,” about 300,000 miles.
• One reason for the high participation rate is the incentives offered to employees. Wellness program participants are paying $3 million a year less in their share of insurance premiums, and they’re getting a total of 2,500 “health days” off from work.

New Employees Race To Make An Impact As Short Term Results Dominate Management Thinking

“Key findings from the report found that:

Performance is the number one measure of recruitment success

New staff under pressure to make greatest impact in their first year

Employers target recruits who make good decisions, bring creativity and build good relationships with bosses and peers “

tags: shortterm newjoiners management humanresources decision

• Futurestep found that the most successful new professional and managerial hires demonstrate three ‘golden keys to success’:

  1. Decision quality – Makes accurate and good decisions

  2. Action oriented – Is quick to take initiative

  3. Customer focus – Is dedicated to meeting customers’ needs and expectations

• But businesses’ focus on the short term means many organizations risk overlooking the valuable contributions this employee group makes over the longer term.
• The study highlights a risk that employers may lose interest in new staff after twelve months, overlooking the fact that if they continue to develop and measure the impact of talented individuals, they can contribute to the long term strategic success of the business.

Here are 100 companies and organization that have published their Employee Social Media Policies or Guidelines online :

tags: socialmedia policies guidelines

Design Principles for Complex, Unpredictable, People Oriented Systems

“An IBM Global CEO Study conducted in 2010 concluded that complexity was the primary challenge emerging out of its conversations with 1,500 CEOs and senior government officials. “CEOs told us they operate in a world that is substantially more volatile, uncertain and complex. Many shared the view that incremental changes are no longer sufficient in a world that is operating in fundamentally different ways.” “

tags: management adaptability unpredictability complexity organizationaldesign organization creativity innovation services serviceeconomy

• These same CEOs cited creativity as the most important leadership quality they look for over the next five years.
• Business and business schools are supposed to be all about applying hard, that is, quantitative, analytical approaches to management.  What then do we mean by bringing seemingly soft topics like design and creativity to business and why is it so important in today’s world?
• Analytical approaches work well when you have a pretty good understanding of the product you are developing or when you are dealing with a well defined problem
• But, they do not work so well when dealing with highly complex systems with fast changing, interacting components, where it is much less clear what is going on in the present, let alone how things will evolve into the future.  We need different principles and processes to address this class of highly complex problems, many based on disruptive innovations which we have not encountered before
• In truth, design has spread like gas to almost all facets of human activity, from science and education to politics and policymaking.  For a simple reason: one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change
• What do we mean by applying design principles to complex, unpredictable, people oriented systems and problems? 
• The first is flexibility and adaptability.  If you look at complex systems as a kind of spectrum, with natural biological systems – e.g., living organisms, ecosystems and evolution – at one end and physically engineered systems – e.g., bridges, airplanes and microprocessors – at the other, socio-technical systems fall someplace in between
• But the mechanisms to increase robustness will in turn make the system considerably more complex.
• This balancing act between complexity and robustness is never done.
• Quality of experience is the second major design principle I’d like to discuss.  The industrial sector of the economy is oriented toward the production of physical goods.  Product excellence and competitive costs are its key design objectives
• But, socio-technical systems are oriented toward people and services.  While product excellence and competitive costs are also important to services, they are not enough. 
• While advances in technology are now enabling us to bring major innovations to services, most of the really hard issues are not technical at all.  They are human
• The bulk of research and innovation in services has to take place in the marketplace, where the people who consume the services are.  The marketplace is truly the research lab for innovation in services, the place where new service ideas have to be developed, prototyped and tested.
• Finally, let me talk about the central role of marketing and communications as a design principle, arguably the least understood such principle.
• You have to engage your audience in a conversation about the future you are after.  You have to gain their trust by clearly telling them what’s in your mind, your aspirations, your questions, your doubts, your frustrations, what you know and what you don’t know. 
• Advances in technology, – faster, more powerful, less expensive, – are concrete and visible.  Design is subtle, more subjective, more open to human interpretation.  But, as our increasingly advanced technologies enable us to build larger, more capable, more complex systems, the role of design becomes ever more important.  It

E20C Workshop: E20 & OE

tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness organization organization2.0 organizationaldesign

Nous on fait la Révolution ! Et vous ?

“On aura beau s’évertuer à créer ou à animer une communauté autour d’un objectif, d’un produit ou d’un service particulier ; c’est limite peine perdue si on n’essaie pas de savoir à qui l’on s’adresse. Il est de fait hautement nécessaire de savoir cibler la communauté dans sa psychologie, sa culture et surtout à travers son histoire.

Prenez par exemple deux types de communautés que nous connaissons à priori assez bien : une communauté française et une communauté américaine.”

tags: france USA communities

Using social media for onboarding

“Last year, I looked at new hire practices and found some interesting methods:

Ensuring new hires understand the shadow or informal part of the organization through the use of tools such as network maps (Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company, author of The Wisdom of Teams).

Pairing with another worker or even tripling with two experienced workers and getting to work immediately, in order to reduce formal training (Menlo Innovations)”

tags: humanresources onboarding mentoring

• Two actions that can begin even before a formal offer is made:

   

   
  1. Providing access to an online knowledge base.
  2. Connecting to an internal social network to connect online & ask questions.

• Good practices can be summed up with three key lessons, I later wrote in new hire emergent practices:

   

   
  1. Connect People
  2. Connect with Social Media (less hierarchical than other forms of communication).
  3. Start the process as early as possible
• Allow Community to be the cornerstone of the onboarding process.
• Use the tools you have already for social learning. Focus on building community for onboarding.
• As new hires come across work “exceptions”, they will need to leverage a community of peers to deal with these types of problems for which training does not prepare them.
• You should get new hires to share their learning and narrate their work via blogs (one blog, multi-user) by just making it a part of the work process.

Here is the next revolution in records and records management?

“What is happening is that records management is about to move beyond compliance. The dream of information management and knowledge management is to unleash or extract the value or a tangible financial return. To do this, there has to be a way to value the information and records. The change is about finding a way to “value” their records so that they can be treated like an asset and managed appropriately.”

tags: records systemsofrecord value gamification privacy

Inclusive Social Business – IBM Social Business Insights Blog

“Because a social business is fundamentally about enabling new levels of interaction among people, it’s important to understand the demographics of potential users and tie it into some real numbers. As of October 31, 2011, the global population was 7 billion1 . This includes an incredibly diverse variety of individuals with vastly differing abilities:”

tags: socialbusiness accessibility abilities inclusiveness

• More than 1 billion people have disabilities²; a number that will continue to increase because of advances in healthcare and longer life expectancies. Disabilities are often divided into four categories: visual, hearing, mobility, and cognitive. (We’ll talk about these more in a future blog post.)
• More than 600 million people are over the age of 60³.
• which means that up to 6.5 billion don’t. In the U.S. alone, over 55 million citizens speak a language other than English in their homes⁵.
• ·         People with no or low literacy: 793 million worldwide⁶
• If your tools, websites, applications, and collateral aren’t accessible, you are, by default, excluding a significant percentage of your potential collaboration pool – which isn’t good business any way you look at it. Inclusive social business should value every voice and every idea.

•   

  If you’re becoming a social business, the key question to ask yourself is: Are you making the most of the wealth of knowledge and expertise you can tap by including all potential collaborators?

Management Secrets: Core Beliefs of Great Bosses | Inc.com

A few years back, I interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. I learned that the “best of the best” tend to share the following eight core beliefs.

tags: communities ecosystem management leadership motivation empowerment

• A few years back, I interviewed some of the most successful CEOs in the world in order to discover their management secrets. I learned that the “best of the best” tend to share the following eight core beliefs.
• 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.

Why management rocks, and leadership sucks

“The past 24 hours I had a fierce conversation on leadership and management, and I love how just everyone joined in on Twitter; especially those that disagree with me because they teach me most in the shortest amount of time

I started it with

Every one wants to be a leader, but no one wants to be led #leadership
– Martijn Linssen (@MartijnLinssen) April 22, 2012″

tags: management leadership

• Managers and leaders are made from different stuff. They can be both, but that’s an exception rather than rule
• Managers seem to take the more task / activity orientation towards them, leaders get involved in conceptual / strategic matters
• In general, or let’s say popular opinion, if you’re bad “at it” you get to be called a manager, otherwise a leader – and vice versa
• managers treat you like a bonzai tree
• Leaders stimulate you to reach the very best in your Real Self
• Leaders are needed most where people interaction is highest, beit among employees or in between customers and employees
• Can’t have leaders in assembly lines, you need managers there. 
• Can’t have leaders for your old employees who only have 5 year more to go until pension, already counting down since 10 years before that. 
• Can’t have leaders be nice and kind and inspiring when you need to lay off people, cut to the bone on the verge of surviva
• I think we like leaders because to us they represent the good, the nice, and the lovely. I think we overdo all this leadership worshipping on our road to Social euphoria, and make asses of ourselves when we play the evangalyst role trying to assess their value for a company

Les défauts du management à la française vus de l’étranger « Vupar

• Les baromètres que nous réalisons dans les groupes internationaux d’origine française révèlent que les salariés allemands ou anglo-saxons sont très critiques à l’égard des modes de management hexagonaux. Ils sont désarçonnés par le manque de concertation et reprochent aux managers français de ne pas se soucier suffisamment du terrain
• la distance psychologique entre le top management et les salariés est plus grande en France qu’ailleurs
• La plupart d’entre eux ont le sentiment d’être payés pour savoir. Ils font partie d’une caste qui progresse en s’éloignant du terrain
• Ils réfléchissent seuls et pensent ne pas avoir le droit à l’erreur, alors qu’aux États-Unis les managers cherchent à impliquer le maximum de monde dans la recherche de solutions
• En France, les dirigeants interrogés mettent en avant la liberté dont ils bénéficient pour prendre des décisions et choisir leur équipe, explique Philippe Cavat, directeur général de DDI France. Quand les managers britanniques évoquent plus volontiers leur participation au développement des collaborateurs qui ont du talent ou leur capacité d’influence
• Les objectifs ne sont pas clairs et le feed back est souvent inexistant. Nous sommes dans une culture de l’implicite
• Le système éducatif français est conçu pour faire émerger une élite, affirme-t-il. Mais, du coup, il engendre chez les élèves un fort individualisme et des difficultés à travailler en groupe.
• En France, nous avons le culte du chef qui sait tout. La culture de l’ingénieur prédomine. Les cadres sont trop souvent choisis pour leur connaissance du métier. Ils sont plus à l’aise devant un problème technique que face à un souci relationnel ou managérial

Les défauts du management à la française vus de l’étranger

“Autoritaire, nombriliste, mauvais communicant et pas franchement intéressé par les aspects concrets de l’activité de ses collaborateurs. C’est le portrait peu flatteur du manager français qui se dégage des récentes enquêtes internationales. Toute la hiérarchie en prend pour son grade. Les cadres dirigeants comme les managers des niveaux intermédiaires ou de proximité. Les salariés interrogés par TNS Sofres en 2007 sont, par exemple, deux fois moins nombreux en France qu’aux États-Unis à penser que leur direction est à leur écoute. Seulement 45 % des Français estiment que leurs efforts sont reconnus, 37 % qu’ils sont récompensés. Contre, respectivement, 75 % et 70 % des Américains. Les Français sont également moins nombreux à estimer que les circuits de décision de leur entreprise sont clairs.

tags: management france autocracy elits elitism leadership

Measuring the Forces of Long Term Change

“But, while the dramatic advances in digital technologies have been well measured and quantified, their impact on firms, economies and individuals has been more anecdotal. We talk about how this digital revolution has been transforming just about every aspect of business, society and our personal lives, bringing us both near-magical products and services as well as their accompanying creative destruction and pain. But, how can we quantify this revolution beyond its technological foundations?”

tags: change economy economiesofscale productivity laborproductivity knowledgeeconomy industrialeconomy ROA

•  

  But, while the dramatic advances in digital technologies have been well measured and quantified, their impact on firms, economies and individuals has been more anecdotal

• The economic performance of US companies has been steadily declining over the past decades, as measured by Return on Assets (ROA), a general indicator of a company’s profitability.  It is now 75 percent lower than the levels in 1965.
• At the same time, labor productivity – the goods and services that a worker produces in a given amount of time, -  has continued to rise and is now more than double what it was in 1965, as you would expect given the technology advances during this period. 
• The balance of power has been shifting from companies to increasingly well-informed consumers and well-educated workers.

En fait c’est quoi la gouvernance de l’information ?

“Définir de façon précise et universelle ce que l’on entend par gouvernance de l’information prendrait des mois car chaque personne est susceptible d’avoir une perception très personnelle, très intime de ce terme. Nous avons donc décidé de prendre une voie plus simple, qui s’inscrit d’ailleurs dans l’ADN même de ce qu’on appelle la gouvernance de l’information :”

tags: governance informationgovernance information change culture

• La gouvernance de l’information est une discipline « simplement » complexe, une approche analytique mènerait à une consommation d’énergie faramineuse. Un raisonnement systémique permettrait de suivre les phases de changement humaines, et de travailler par couches de plus en plus fine.
• L’information est à considérer comme étant indépendamment un document papier, un document numérique, un élément ou ensemble d’une base de données, un flux transactionnel, une vidéo, une bande sonore, une photo, un commentaire, un email, une note donnée à un article, un échange de messagerie instantanée, etc. Tout ce qui a une valeur pour au moins un membre de l’organisation à un moment donné.
• Une démarche globale de gouvernance de l’information provoque très souvent un changement. Or tout changement s’accompagne d’une remise en cause. Et toute remise en cause consiste en partie à « détruire » une perception, ou une idée préconçue. Accepter une remise en cause est le premier pas vers une meilleure maîtrise de l’information.
• Elle ne se résume pas à un concept marketing ou de vente. Elle n’est pas exclusivement orientée documents ou données. Et elle n’est pas exclusivement pensée en termes de gestion de risque. En réalité, elle couvre l’ensemble du cycle de vie de l’information, favorise la création de valeur et diminue les risques. la gouvernance de l’information est une discipline.
• la gouvernance de l’information est une transformation culturelle de l’organisation, où l’influence joue un grand rôle. L’apport de services doit être particulièrement adapté aux processus opérationnels existant dans l’organisation et la valeur ajoutée de la démarche tient dans la capacité à rester global, tout en restituant une vue rare et originale de l’organisation étudiée.

INFOGRAPHIC: How Office Workers Waste Time in Meetings About Meetings | The Undercover Recruiter

tags: meetings timewaste productivity

Why Meetings Kill Productivity

“How often have you sat through a meeting and said to yourself, “what a waste of time, I could be doing something better!” If your answer is yes, you are not alone. Meetings take up an ever-increasing amount of employee’s, and particularly manager’s time. My experience in working with executives and managers is that 40-50 percent of their time is taken up with meetings, that either they call, or have to attend. Which leaves precious little time left to actually get work done.”

tags: meetings productivity timewaste management organization

• A variation of Parkinson’s Law applied to meetings goes something like this: “Meeting activities expand to fill the time available.”
• John Kenneth Galbraith once said, “meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything.”
• The study concluded that the average worker actually worked only three days per week or about 1.5 hours per day. The study identified that the rest of the working time was “wasted,” with unproductive meetings heading the list.
• argues most meetings are mediocre and not necessary, “not about coordination but about a bureaucratic excuse-making and the kabuki dance of company politics. We’re now addicted to meetings that insulate us from the work we ought to be doing.
• He outlines three types of meetings: convenience, formality and social in which a false sense of urgency is created.

• He presents 7 principles for good meetings if they need to be held. Of these principles, the most striking are:

  1. Meet only to support a decision that has already been made; do not use the meetings to make decisions;
  2. The meeting should always produce a committed action plan;
  3. A meeting should never be held for informational purposes.

The difference between a community manager and a social media manager

“In the past, I used to think that community management and social media management are one and the same thing. It wasn’t until I actually started working as a community manager and then later as a social media manager, did I realize that there is actually a difference between these two titles even though the lines do sometimes blur.”

tags: communitymanagement communities communitymanager socialmedia socialmediamanagement socialmediamanager

• A social media manager specifically manages the social media accounts for a company. They help all the departments fulfill their own missions
• a social media manager has a helicopter view of social media as a whole in a strategic role:
• a community manager to be a user interface with a face.
• I foresee Community Management becoming more internal, while the traditional community management role evolves into dedicated consumer/customer support and the Social Media one becomes wholly marketing/advertising/product awareness focused.

TIBCO Upgrades tibbr with GEO and Other New Capabilities

“TIBCO launched tibbr, a heavy duty and secure social platform a year ago and is approaching 1M users at companies like Macy’s, KPMG, and shipping giant OOCL. Now they are adding a number of new features. There are five guiding principles in this effort. First, you need to be able to have users get started right away and it needs to be easy to use. The consumer Web has set this expectation and reduced budgets demand it. Gone are the days of six month IT projects and extensive employee training programs. Here is a sample user’s view of tibbr.”

tags: tibbr tibco geolocalisation enterprisesocialsoftware socialsoftware context filtering

• First, you need to be able to have users get started right away and it needs to be easy to use
• Second, tibbr provides the option for cloud technology or on-premise installations
• Third, context has become king more than content. They have introduced subject filters to their activity streams so you take out the fire hose effect
• Fifth, you need to make IT happy. So they have focused on such issues as compliance and risk management.
• Tibbr GEO is turns physical places into data hubs that can immediately stream important insights relevant to that specific place. Instead of checking in to a location, the location checks into you – and brings you the relevant information, helping you discover important insights and work faster wherever you are. 
• tibbr GEO gives companies the ability to tag important places, whether in the enterprise or as part of the extended enterprise. As tibbr users approach these places, they’re automatically presented relevant in-stream information. The airline industry is a good example.

Talent Management Challenges In Small and Medium-Sized Organizations

“The Kapta team has been conducting detailed interviews with Human Resources leaders and managers in our target market: organizations with fewer than 500 employees. We have interviewed over 100 HR vice presidents, directors, and managers in the following locations: Colorado, California, New York, Massachusetts, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Globally, we have spoken with HR professionals in the UK, Germany, Egypt, Austria, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Africa, Israel and India. “

tags: humanresources talentmanagement talent socialperformancemanagement performancemanagement performance

Social intranet user adoption: how to encourage usage in your organization

“Earlier this month I gave a couple of webinars on encouraging user adoption of your social intranet. As long as we’ve been building intranet software and as long as we’ve been going to conferences, the theme of adoption is always present. And for good reason.

This blog post covers some of the ideas about adoption, what it is, why it matters, and how to encourage it.”

tags: socialintranet intranet2.0 adoption change changemanagement usage communication collaboration

• “Driving adoption”, by the way, is one of my least favourite expressions. It sounds like driving cattle. Or herding cattle.
• Usage is contextual – it depends entirely on your organization’s goals and the intranet’s purpose.
• As we go through some of the possible types of things your users could be doing on your intranet, you can think about which purpose these align with.
• Now we have a good handle on adoption (a measure of usage over time)
• In a system of record, you’re transacting with records (data). In a system of engagement, you’re interacting with people.Therefore, there’s a social dynamic. That’s why we call it a social intranet after all.
• We believe that understanding the value of your intranet is directly related to how you frame the problem of your intranet in the first place. And we believe that your social intranet is a manifestation of your company’s communication and collaboration network.
• So really simplified, increased users in your system is okay, but increased usage is better. And usage, as we already talked about, will have different value both individually for your users and for the organization as a whole.
• And what’s interesting about the two types is that extrinsic motivation and intrinsic motivation both have their place in the world, one isn’t right and the other is wrong – you just need to know when to use them. Incentives (or appeals to extrinsic motivation) can be really effective. If you’re incentivizing the right task.
• Well, I’m going to suggest that while you may have wanted to “drive adoption” what you are actually trying to do is stimulate the diffusion of innovation – that innovation being your social intranet and all of its associated interactions inside your organization.
• Factor 1: Relative advantage
   How improved is the innovation over the previous generation/competition?
• Factor 2: Compatibility
   How does the innovation get assimilated into the individuals life?

• Factor 3: Complexity/Simplicity

   

  How easy or difficult is it to use?

• Factor 4: Trialability

   

  How easy is it to experiment with as you adopt it?

• Factor 5: Observability

   

  How visible is the usage to others? Who’s using it? What influence do they have?

• Last, but certainly not least, think about your users as customers and adopt a marketing approach. Put on your marketing hat, as uncomfortable as that hat might be for some of you.
• It’s not uncommon to have a mixture of mandatory and voluntary task dynamics at play with your social intranet. Make sure you’re paying attention to what’s a mandatory task and what’s a voluntary task.
• For the mandatory ones, you are hopefully working with more algorithmic tasks – you can incent these and perhaps rely on good old fashioned carrot and sticks to get people onto the intranet.
• For the voluntary ones, you’re dealing with more heuristic tasks and you can’t “drive adoption” like you can drive cattle. You may not have the ability to incent people, they will have to be internally motivated.

• Here’s your 8 (or so) big questions to re-think social intranet user adoption:
   

   

   
  1. How do you quantify your intranet’s adoption (usage/time as a % of total)?
  2. What kind of usage (think tasks, activities: verbs, not nouns) are you trying to gain?
  3. How does that usage align with 5 purposes (and more broadly speaking, your org’s strategy)?
  4. Which of your tasks are mandatory & algorithmic? What extrinsic rewards might apply?
  5. Which of your tasks are voluntary & heuristic?
  6. For each of the voluntary & heuristic tasks, how will you address their:
  7. relative advantage; to be better than previous intranets & competing systems?
  8. compatibility; to work with the way people work?
  9. simplicity/complexity; to be easy to use?
  10. trialability; to be easy to try and learn?
  11. observability; to be visible to others and spread throughout your org?
  12. What’s your plan to make this happen, who’s responsible, and when is it getting done?
  13. How will you know when you’re done? (see Question 1 – how do you quantify success?)
  14. And repeat…

Returning to a New World of Ever-Present Work

“Award-winning columnist and author of Distracted, Maggie Jackson offers her insights about “The @ Work State of Mind Project”—a joint effort of gyro and Forbes Insights. Surveying 543 business decision-makers, we found that boundaries of time and space that once defined the workplace no longer exist. “

tags: humanresources workplace worklifebalance attention attentionmanagement time multitasking

• Does this blurring of boundaries signify an easy return to a pre-industrial past, when we lived over the store or on the farm? Are we sliding seamlessly back into integrated lives? No. For most of human history, work and home were blended due to the restriction of experience. Geographic distance and the rhythms of sun and season limited the circumference of our work and home lives. Trade, like war, ceased at sunset. Entire lives centered on the same corner of earth.
• Today we multitask in nanoseconds on a global scale, moving restlessly in thought and body across the planet. Forty percent of offices lie vacant on any given day, according to Deloitte.
• Long weeks within a single community are unusual; a full day within a single neighborhood is becoming rare,
• Throughout the day, the average worker switches tasks on average every three minutes
• the @Work study reveals that among today’s decision-makers, a sense of accomplishment correlates with an ability to separate work and personal life. Without at least a few borderlines, we cannot find terra firma in an unshackled world.
• A constant negotiation of attention is our foremost challenge
• we are often slow, prone to error and intellectually half-asleep when we multitask.
• Now liberated from the confines of space and time, will we be remembered by future generations as the people who forgot the art of the limit?

DE “L’APPRENDRE” A “L’APPRENDRE A APPRENDRE” : existe-t-il des lois d’apprentissage ?

“«Comment m’y prendre pour qu’ils s’approprient cette nouvelle notion, ce nouveau geste professionnel, de la manière la plus efficiente possible ?»… questionnement incessant du formateur, de l’intervenant, dans la préparation de sa formation.

Comment fait-on pour apprendre ? Comment intégrer ce “comment apprendre” pour “apprendre à apprendre” ?

Quelques pistes, synthèse de synthèses de réflexions… pour faire suite à un échange récent avec un jeune étudiant en sciences de l’éducation.”

tags: learning education problemsolving continuouslearning knowledge

• Dernièrement, les recherches se focalisent sur les manières d’apprendre par le biais des nouvelles technologies et notamment  sur le fait que beaucoup -enfants en premier lieu – pensent apprendre en balayant une succession d’informations sur le net : les dernières recherches tendent notamment à démontrer que “ce  multitâche non contrôlé” est une illusion et que notre cerveau atteint ses limites en termes d’intégration et de captations des informations :
• D’autres recherches se sont par la suite orientées sur les distinctions entre les mécanismes d’apprentissage chez l’enfant  à opposer aux mécanismes d’apprentissage chez l’adulte. Sont ainsi distinguées “PEDAGOGIE” (pour l’enfant) et “ANDRAGOGIE” (pour l’adulte)
• Il convient toutefois de relativiser le mot “loi” en tel domaine, car en formation, rien ne vaut mieux que l’adaptation au plus  près de l’approche de l’apprenant : une formation, un mode d’apprentissage ne peuvent s’appliquer de manière universelle, telle une lo
• Les “lois” de l’apprentissage constituent alors davantage les fondements d’un “apprendre à apprendre” qui ne prendront  véritablement de sens que lorsque leurs applications seront personnalisées, pour replacer l’apprenant au coeur de ses mécanismes d’apprentissage propres

• ON APPREND : 

   

  •   en déstructurant-restructurant ses connaissances 
  •   en agissant 
  •   en résolvant des problèmes en petits groupes 
  •   en échangeant au sein d’un groupe 
  •   en ayant un projet d’apprentissage 
  •   en prenant du plaisir dans un climat de confiance 
  •   en maîtrisant ses propres stratégies d’apprentissage