“Working out loud”: Your personal content strategy

“While collaboration platforms are increasingly attractive to enterprises, most people still don’t know how to use them at work.

After a brief introduction, individuals are quick to understand the concepts: the power of networks, the potential for shaping their reputation, the extraordinary commercial possibilities.

But they struggle with what they should actually do.”

tags: visiblework workingoutloud observablework enterprise2.0 socialbusiness

• The last thing anyone wants is Yet Another Communications Channel.
• it’s important that collaboration and contribution is in line with the work people do every day
•  “Working out loud = Narrating your work + Observable work”  
• narrating your work is “journaling…what you are doing in an open way.” And making your work observable is “creating/modifying/storing your work in places that others can see it, follow it, and contribute to it IN PROCESS
• But modern collaboration platforms combine rich content-handling with Twitter-like activity feeds that make it easy to skim large amounts of content quickly.
• Collaboration platforms make all of that work visible. Every one of those actions can be communicated to your social network without any extra effort
• working out loud leads to succeeding (or failing) more quickly…makes a company more intelligent: quicker to improve, and more resilient in the context of uncertainty

Comment les cadres gagnent du temps avec les réseaux sociaux

“Selon une étude réalisée par le cabinet Millward Brown pour Google et présentée le 15 mai, les cadres estiment que les réseaux sociaux leur permettraient d’améliorer de 20% la productivité dans leur entreprise. “

tags: management socialnetworks socialnetworking productivity

• Le gain de temps se ferait donc en évitant des déplacements pour rencontrer des collègues ou des clients, en envoyant et lisant moins d’emails ou encore en limitant les réunions internes.
• Seul 1/3 reste plus sceptique. “Selon eux, ces activités sont chronophages et pas suffisamment sécurisé“
• Certaines grandes enseignes maîtrisent les notions de communautés“, explique-t-il. “Elles ont bien saisi l’enjeu. Les marques fortes de demain seront les entreprises ‘conversationnelles’“
• Pampers par exemple a très bien compris qu’il ne fallait pas parler de ses produits mais de ce qui intéresse ses clients, à savoir les enfants. T

La mission des DRH dans la e-transformation

“Les DRH ont un rôle clef à jouer dans la transformation numérique des entreprises. Elles doivent positionner les usages et l’acculturation au centre des réflexions et projets numériques.”

tags: humanresources transformation IT changemanagement organization

• La DRH constitue un poste d’observation idéal pour appréhender la nature systémique de l’entreprise, en prenant en compte tout ce qui en fait ses particularités :

   

  • les éléments formalisés, bien-sûr comme la stratégie ou la structure des organisations
  • mais aussi les sous-jacents informels comme l’identité ou la culture (les cultures ?) de l’entreprise.
• La révolution numérique n’aide pas le monde à être moins incertain. Mais une utilisation en pleine conscience des outils, des concepts, des transformations qu’elle apporte permet d’en tirer tout le potentiel.
• La DRH peut être, doit être, au centre de ces réflexions pour que les dispositifs numériques contribuent à faire de nos entreprises des lieux où règnent ensemble épanouissement, engagement, respect, intelligence collective et performance.

Allow Generalists to Emerge

“The hierarchical organization is built on a concept of mass replication. Taylorite in its origins, the idea is to create replicable jobs.

The actual qualities of the incumbent are far less important than that they simply do what the position demands. These, in turn, are collected under managers.

The organization represents the elements of the design: the sub-assemblies of a machine.

Grafted onto this base are the knowledge worker functions. “

tags: knowledgework taylorism knowledgeworkers

• But knowledge work does not work well based on position.

   

   It depends far more on the qualities of the person doing the work, the background they bring to the task.

• What this means is that we can turn the specialists we hired into people who are a little more generalist in nature, capable of working outside their normal domain.
• So perhaps it makes more sense to look at a group like this. Suppose there are 100 people in a department. Create 10 first-level managers. Their roles are not defined as subsets of the work, but by the nature of their reporting employees: the historians here, the functionalists there, etc.

Clarifying the word “collaboration” to reduce confusion and conflict

“It is important to clarify the type of collaboration you are talking about. Although the different types are not black and white, there are fundamental differences. Why is it important to clarify?

It influences the coherence of your whole digital workplace, in particular your entry point strategy.
It will reduce conflict among digital teams and bring understanding of how different pieces fit together to serve the people.
To some extent, it impacts the roles and scopes of members of the digital teams. It partially answers the question of “who is in charge of what”.”

tags: collaboration digitalworkplace communities team

•  

   
  

  Team collaboration - probably the oldest sense of “collaboration”

   

  This refers to designated people working together on a project with deliverables and a timeline. This has long been part of what organizations do.

• Most large organizations have long-established communities of practice for their support functions: finance, IT, communication and HR. Finance is almost always the leader because companies need to consolidate figures across the organization
• Communities around topics of interest are being created. They are voluntary. People join, participate, leave as they wish. Leaders emerge. There are no pre-defined deliverables. These communities are usually closely tied to social networking

How to Boost B2B Sales with Social Media

“Social media, then, can help you become a better B2B sales professional, even helping improve sales. Understand how to use social media to your advantage in the highly competitive sales industry.”

tags: socialmedia sales B2B sociacrm research competition

• Social customer research management, or CRM, refers to a business’ ability to interact with customers using social media. Social CRM is a must for sales professionals. Through social media, you can find out what your customers like about your product or service and what they find is lacking.
• businesses managing social media pages, you can research your clients in just one click. Regular visits to your clients’ social media pages can give you a wealth of knowledge about the business. What are their customers saying? What needs does the business have? How can your business help theirs?
• Just like your business has social media pages, so do your competitors. Some investigative social media searching can help you assess your competition and better understand the market.

Managing Risks Means Managing Arguments

“The words “risk management” usually evokes less subjective, more data-driven pursuits. But data and objectivity can only get you so far. Philosopher Karl Popper famously proposed that to be scientific, a theory had to be falsifiable: that is, it had to make predictions that could be tested and possibly shown to be wrong. Popper spent a lot of time thinking about this definition of science and the burgeoning science of probablility, which he called propensity.”

tags: risk riskmanagement arguments routinework

• To navigate such unquantifiable hazards, then, you need to make judgment calls. And that’s where argument (or discussion, or conversation, if you prefer) comes in. You want diverse, even opposing viewpoints. You want to manage their interactions in a way that allows the quieter, less-senior, less-predictable voices to be heard. You probably do want to accord different weights to the arguments of different people, although deciding how to do so (past track record? clarity of argument?) is hard.
• In any case, it should be clear that you don’t want to just let the loudest voices win.
• Successfully managing most of the biggest risks that businesses and societies face requires successfully managing arguments about what exactly those risks are and how seriously they should be taken.

Improving collaboration, breaking down silos, and innovating better. What does that all mean?

” It was until recently that I started focusing around the business value of Enterprise Social that it hit me. Most people talk in jargon and have very little insight into what the underlying business problems are that they are trying to solve. Don’t get me wrong, they know their business problems, but in most cases haven’t connected the dots between problem and solution. Why? Because it takes a lot of analysis and thought to develop that understanding and most of us lack the time to do it.”

tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness collaboration gtd value businessvalue

• Does it mean that we should all be working with each other on everything? If that’s the case, we need to understand that collaborating usually slows things down because it involves scheduling and interacting aligning expectations and establishing a method for collaborating.
• What I think people expect when they want improved collaboration is to work with each other to get better results and do it faster.

•  

  Faster – Get the work done faster so that we can: Close more deals, get product to market faster, beat the competition, etc.

• Better – Output better quality work so that we can: Improve customer satisfaction, win more business and beat the competition, etc.
• So executing faster and better is important to the business.

How Gamification Kills Classroom Training

“During the course of our lives, learning becomes detached from creating experiences and getting feedback. And so it turns from fun to a dreadful exercise with often devastating results: the knowledge taught is forgotten pretty quickly, with the whole education effort becoming a waste of everyone’s time. In the corporate world this can be costly, and if you don’t know how to use the tools properly or effectively, work becomes more inefficient, expensive and possibly even dangerous.

Which leads me to the following questions:

How can we make training more fun, add rich experience and gain feedback?
How can we enable trainers to add these elements to their materials?
Why is training separate from work rather than embedded into it?”

tags: education work learning training gamification

• Teachers were among the first to realize that a playful approach works wonders when it comes to getting students to be more active in the classroom environment. And it wasn’t just  teachers: parents also saw the merits of gamified learning. Embedding the material in a larger story, giving kids a mission, providing feedback by appending stars and stickers, encouraging kids to collaborate, and many more techniques that we find from game design helped to get kids going, have more fun, be more curious and make the content more memorable.

• Which brings me to a rather heretical question: when it comes to the workplace, why do we even use classrooms at all?

  Why not embed learning into the workplace instead? Why do we ask employees to attend week-long classroom sessions to learn new skills, when most of their new-found knowledge often evaporates by the time they get home? Instead, why not make the workplace itself into the classroom environment and every work interaction a learning experience

• On-boarding via a game exposes you to just the right amount of functionality that you’d expect to have at that time: practically none. But step by step, the system teaches you and gives you more challenges while your skill level rises. Without noticing, the system brings you to a level of mastery by keeping you in the “flow zone”.
• Former Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillet is the most prominent example of someone who attributes part of his career success to the management skills he learned as Guild Master in the MMORPG World of Warcraft.

Une révolution copernicienne dans l’entreprise ?

“En cette rentrée, une interrogation de fond émerge des yoyos économiques et politiques européens et des révolutions arabes aussi improbables que bien réelles. Cette interrogation peut se formuler de la manière suivante : la problématique de l’accès au savoir est totalement bouleversée. 95% de l’information est disponible en accès libre. Elle est disponible de partout et en temps réel. Les outils et la technologie la rendent parfaitement mobile. La vitesse d’échange ne laisse plus forcément le temps du recul et de l’assimilation. La difficulté n’est plus l’obtention de l’information, mais le discernement de l’information utile, voire de l’information vraie.”

tags: information knowledge knowledgemanagement mobility remotework organization

• Le temps de l’information ne correspond plus, comme pendant des millénaires, au temps de la connaissance. Car le temps de la connaissance, immédiatement dépendant du fonctionnement de l’être humain et de sa « nature », ne s’est nullement accéléré
• Mais les conséquences de la distorsion avec la connaissance individuelle et collective lui ont totalement échappé, alors qu’elle impacte aujourd’hui le cœur de l’activité
• En France, même leur impact sur les possibilités d’organisation en télétravail moderne ont été totalement négligées, alors que c’est une des révolutions les plus fondamentales à venir dans la conception même du travail.
• Centrées sur le traditionnel contrat juridique et la subordination, nos entreprises sont passées à coté du contrat professionnel et de l’approche client des collaborateurs !!!
• un salarié équipé d’une connexion nomade travaille 240 heures de plus par an que ceux qui s’en tiennent aux horaires de bureaux.
• Cet outil sépare aujourd’hui l’entreprise de ses salariés, parce que cette entreprise ne s’inscrit pas, dans sa matrice fonctionnelle, dans ce nouveau mode de vie, de vivant, d’organisme… d’organisation d’un autre type
• qui tourne autour de qui ? Quoi autour de quoi ? Les repères traditionnels deviennent obsolètes.

Social Collaboration: A Work In Progress

“The short answer is that no one’s got enterprise collaboration all figured out yet, owing to the dizzying array of platforms (SharePoint, Google Sites, Drupal, Yammer, LotusLive, Salesforce.com Chatter, Jive, Cisco Quad), various Web and video conferencing systems, and of course the legacy email, IM, and other platforms. Add to that the varying personal, cultural, and some even say generational preferences. And I think we still do too much thrusting and not enough teasing out.”

tags: enterprise2.0 socialbusiness collaboration

• So it appears that users are becoming more comfortable with their companies’ social collaboration efforts. But pockets of discontent remain, our extensive reporting and research find. F
• current BrainYard columnist Venkatesh Rao made the case that the enterprise collaboration movement had lapsed into something of a “generational war” between advocates of social media tools and advocates of more structured knowledge management tools.

If You Don’t Have a SOCIAL CEO, You’re Going to be Less Competitive

“The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years. “

tags: ibm study social CEO competitiveness openness empowerment transparency collaborationativity interpersonnalskills flexibility

• CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowerment
• Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness
• While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years
• More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations,
• Championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders
• CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent)
• The trend toward greater collaboration extends beyond the corporation to external partnering relationships.
• Seventy-three percent of CEOs are making significant investments in their organizations’ ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data.

Predictable Time Off: The Team Solution To Overcoming Constant Work Connection

“Advice on how to cope in this “always connected” age is plentiful: How to prioritize work better, manage your time more effectively across different domains of your life, survive email overload and even remedy your smartphone addiction. The trouble is that there is only so much that you can do alone: You can decide to turn off, but that does not mean everyone else will too.”

tags: smartphones mobility connectivity work worklifebalance interruption PTO predictabletimeoff timeoff

• The trouble is that it is nearly impossible to mandate open dialogue, and even if it emerges, any gains in efficiency that follow will be reinvested in the organization–not your personal life.
• Four years after our first “Predictable Time Off” (PTO) experiment–afternoons or evenings totally disconnected from work and wireless devices, agreed-upon email blackout times, or uninterrupted work blocks that allow for greater focus, for example–72 percent of people involved said they were satisfied with their job vs. 49 percent of their colleagues who were not doing PTO; 54 percent of PTO participants were satisfied with their work-life balance vs. 38 percent; and 51 percent said they were excited to go to work in the morning, vs. 27 percent.
• • Every team member strives to achieve an agreed upon unit of predictable time off each week–the PTO Goal. This PTO goal should be of personal value to those on the team, creating a deep-seated motivation to participate. The goal should also be aspirational, as well as achievable, so as to engage people in the process and drive them to challenge assumptions and rethink ways of working in their efforts to achieve this goal
• • The team gathers weekly to discuss how well each member is meeting the PTO goal and to talk about the team’s work process more generally. These weekly discussions should focus on what happened during the past week and how it could have been different.
• Team leaders show support for team members’ engagement in the process. The only time I have seen teams that have undertaken PTO fail to outperform teams that are not involved is when the team’s leader is outright resistant.

Le poste de travail collaboratif en mode agile – Partie 1

“Le 16 Mai je suis intervenu à la conférence Webcom à Montréal pour aborder l’évolution du poste de travail en entreprise, tirée par les outils collaboratifs et le développement de l’entreprise 2.0. Un débat intéressant dont je reprends ici en deux parties, les principales idées de ruptures qui ont été discutées.”

tags: digitalworkplace intranet IT interoperability security email agility

• Pour faire simple, le soufflé du réseau social interne retombera vite s’il ne permet que de parler de la pêche à la mouche et n’améliore pas l’efficacité de chacun et celle des processus.
• Et c’est tout l’enjeu de l’entreprise 2.0 de développer et mobiliser le capital social, humain et informationnel de l’entreprise.
• Le poste de travail fixe est un outil dépassé
   Ce bon vieux poste de travail dont la définition d’origine est “le lieu dans lequel un employé dispose des ressources lui permettant d’effectuer son travail“. Une définition obsolète dans un monde post-industriel quand on considère la mobilité qui fait voler en éclat la notion de lieu et demande une continuité des données entre les terminaux si on en utilise plusieurs.
• Le cycle projet et les méthodes doivent laisser la place aux usages et aux services, mis en ligne de façon incrémentale
   L’immuable cycle projet qui commence par une expression de besoin et se termine par une mise en production a déjà été revisité par le SaaS. Quand la solution est déjà en production lors de son achat, cela change un peu les choses
• Ce cycle projet est donc peu adapté au collaboratif, qui lui demande des méthodes plus agiles, plus itératives. Quand on regarde les succès grand public, l’outil a précédé les besoins. Les usages ont été découverts par quelques utilisateurs et sont devenus des services offerts à tous.
• LA solution d’entreprise est peut-être une illusion qui doit laisser la place à la diversité et à l’interopérabilité
• Cherchons donc a segmenter les usages et les utilisateurs au lieu de toujours globaliser les besoi
• La sécurité qui vise à protéger les accès va vite trouver ses limites dans un monde de partage.
   La sécurité des données est complémentaire à celle des accès et doit devenir plus intelligente en repérant les comportements suspects
• La sécurité doit être repensée mais au lieu de ça elle est utilisée comme une raison pour empêcher l’entreprise de collabore
• L’email est intrusif. Ce sont les autres qui choisissent les destinataires, le nombre et même la priorité!
• C’est aussi un destructeur massif de connaissances car a chaque départ de salariés, sa boîte mail disparaît avec lui

•  

  Pour revenir au poste de travail collaboratif, imaginons-le comme un terminal d’accès aux ressources et espaces partagés par les collaborateurs

Entreprise 2.0 : quel intranet demain ?

tags: intranet intranet2.0 digitaworkplace

SAP Plays Social Collaboration Game By Own Rules

“SAP hasn’t necessarily set up its StreamWork product as a competitor to Jive’s social collaboration software. SAP is actually a customer of Jive, albeit for the software that powers the SAP community website rather than for internal collaboration. However, in terms of getting work done inside an organization, SAP says it is playing a whole different game.”

tags: SAP socialsoftware enterprisesocialsoftware CRM successfactors streamwork

• Six years after the rise of the Enterprise 2.0 concept, organizations are still struggling to achieve the kind of “natural adoption” that social business advocates keep telling us is right around the corner,
• Although applications for CRM or supply chain and procurement are widely employed, they don’t necessarily cover the entire process they aim to facilitate.
• the next generation of useful social collaboration” different is that it will fit better “in the context of work,
• The best the other players can say is that they have an API,
• providing “better BI” when employees have a social mechanism for commenting on reports or questioning the validity of numbers–rather than “jamming a microblogging feature into an app.
• Patel said he would not consider StreamWork a workflow product because it does not try to confine collaboration to a predefined, structured process.
• compared with traditional workflows, StreamWork collaboration is user-defined
• StreamWork also is an open platform that can provide feeds into other social collaboration products. The StreamWork user interface can also embed other applications within a collaboration process
• Yet StreamWork will ultimately gain the upper hand by positioning itself at the center of business processes

As BYOD Becomes Inevitable, Complexities Come Into Focus

“Organizations that allow employees to use their personal devices for work purposes reap the benefits of a more engaged workforce, particularly among the younger generation. But many of those same organizations are trying to simplify and consolidate the systems they’re running in order to save money on infrastructure and software that helps manage mobile devices, and supporting BYOD creates additional, often unseen costs.”

tags: iT byod costs

• There are several advantages to adopting BYOD policies, most important of which is making the company a more attractive place to work
• . Now, instead of having to manage a single device–for instance, establishing security policies like strong password protection, uploading the appropriate applications based on the user’s role in the company, or developing applications based on a single operating system–IT departments have to manage several different platforms for Apple iPads and iPhones or Microsoft and Android based devices. Even Google’s Android operating system has differences from one device manufacturer to another.
• The cost of the device is peanuts,” says Matt Brown, an analyst with Forrester Research. In addition to the management costs, “what’s really going to kill these companies is the data plans.
• YOD “is adding more things into the environment that you didn’t have before, and you’re not eliminating anything
• 84% of employees considered Generation Y say they choose their work devices without considering corporate policy

How Employers Can Make Us Stop Multitasking

“Schwartz argues that it’s up to individuals and managers to avoid the multitasking trap. But I look at it a different way: ultimately, it’s up to institutions to make sure employees are focused. Businesses and government agencies that are serious about improving productivity need to tackle this as an organizational initiative.”

tags: productivity multitasking

• Multitasking workers keep others waiting for their output.
• When managers multitask, even small decisions can take days
• Every task seems equally urgent. As a result, truly critical issues and genuine bottlenecks can’t be identified, and the organization wastes its resources solving the wrong problems.
• Reduce the number of open projects by 25% to 50%.
• Don’t start on a project without adequate preparation.
• Establish a clear rule for task-level priorities.

La génération Y existe-t-elle vraiment ?

“Génération Y, concept marketing ou réalité sociologique ? Peut-on réellement cataloguer une génération dans son ensemble, en mettant dans la même case un jeune fraîchement diplômé d’une grande école et un autre à faible qualification ? La validité du concept, propagé par des cabinets de consultants qui estiment qu’il existerait un comportement typique de cette génération au travail, est discutée.”

tags: generationy sociology humanresources babyboomers

• L’appartenance générationnelle n’influence pas le niveau de fidélité du salarié de l’entreprise, qu’on soit de la génération Y, X ou baby boomers. Aucune revue scientifique digne de ce nom n’a publié d’article établissant ce lien.
• a génération Y n’existe pas. “C’est un concept marketing fabriqué par les consultants, explique le professeur en gestion des ressources humaines. Si on interroge les différentes générations sur leurs attentes au travail, la manière dont ils envisagent leur carrière, le rôle de l’entreprise ou encore la façon de se comporter au travail, on ne voit pas apparaître de différences.”
• Cette génération s’est fait déposséder de toute capacité d’autonomie. Les baby boomers ont fait un hold-up moral, intellectuel et économique. Le modèle de société qu’on a imposé aux Y, par sa structure même, n’est pas très séduisant et si j’avais leur âge, je ne me comporterais pas vraiment différemment”.

La génération Y existe-t-elle vraiment ?

Génération Y, concept marketing ou réalité sociologique ? Peut-on réellement cataloguer une génération dans son ensemble, en mettant dans la même case un jeune fraîchement diplômé d’une grande école et un autre à faible qualification ? La validité du concept, propagé par des cabinets de consultants qui estiment qu’il existerait un comportement typique de cette génération au travail, est discutée.

tags: generationy humanresources babyboomers

Creating the conditions for Social Business (update)

“Creating the conditions for a successful Social Business requires a strategic approach that focuses on establishing clear business objectives and strategies, understanding cultural considerations, developing frameworks and managing processes that adapt to the changing needs of the organisation, defining systems of governance, and enabling emerging collaborative tools that integrate with existing workflows.”

tags: collaboration socialbusiness enterprise2.0 governance emergentcollaboration workflows compliance

The invisible manager

“An invisible manager is a person who holds the position as manager and who works behind the scenes to make sure the actors get what they need to perform at their best; autonomy, access to the relevant resources, good working conditions, recognition, space to think and act. Invisible managers help to find and recruit talented people.”

tags: management leadership

• many managers are not leaders; it is because they haven’t been assigned as managers primarily because of their leadership skills, but because they comply well with the existing management model.
• The leaders are often elsewhere, trying to stay away from management because they are afraid of getting stuck in status qu
• Leaders are driven by passion, while managers are usually driven by other things such as monetary rewards and climbing in the hierarchy.
•  So, a manager does not always have to be a leader. It is important for anyone who thinks about entering a management position to realize this.
•  Managers who are not leaders but who try to act like leaders are just drawing attention to themselves as persons rather than the work that has to be done and the challenges which have to be dealt with.

Social Networking and the Future of Business

“Imagine the power of social networks once they will be part of daily business and not mainly being used by consumers only. In spite of Facebook’s remarkable success so far, the truth is that we have thus far witnessed just the earliest beginnings of social networking’s power to fuel the real economy. Social networking will revolutionise business interactions, just as the Internet revolutionised retailing more than a decade ago. And the result will be a game-changing surge in innovation and productivity and a big leap forward in job creation and new growth opportunities.”

tags: socialnetworks socialbusiness enterprise20 intelligence realtime sentimentanalysis

• On an everyday basis, we envision an intelligent network of businesses – what I like to call the ‘Intelligent Business Web’. The Intelligent Business Web will be most important to small and medium sized businesses because it allows them to tap into the collective knowledge of their cohorts.
• Today we can optimise entire value chains for minimum cost and consumption of scarce resources and in the future this will be common.
• Our customer relationship management software offerings already monitor online sentiment. Similar business applications will soon be everywhere, changing the way business is conducted on every continent and in every industry.
• but if we leverage social networking for business processes and real-time information flow, we can change the world.

Social intranets, user adoption and cocktail parties: Tips for dealing with barriers to adoption

“I recently read that intranets (think also online workspaces, online communities etc…) are like cocktail parties. You arrive and case the room to see who else is there and where the action is. You decide pretty quickly whether you’ll be staying awhile, and will be in for a great night. Or, if it’s a quiet affair – missing the big personalities, the ambience and the buzz – you’ll stay for just a drink or two before heading off to find the action elsewhere.

This analogy worked for me. These days you need only look at an intranet homepage to decide if it’s the ‘stick around and enjoy’ version of the cocktail party. Or not. Is there a home page activity stream full of comments from a wide range of people on what matters most? Can the activity stream be personalised, to feature what matters most to you? Are the news articles, event listings, and communities fresh and brimming with comments, ‘likes’ and other signs of strong participation? Is there a people directory, where a quick search will unveil expertise, past projects and current clients of colleagues across the entire organisation?”

• 1.       With all my existing subscriptions, feeds and activity steams to track, an internal network is just yet another channel to monitor.  Too much!
• With the right filters in place, your homepage intranet activity stream should evolve into your best activity stream, providing you with the most relevant and important insights more effectively than ever.
•  What’s best – to spot the small fires and act quickly to put them out, or to wait until they gather momentum and become a raging blazing?  Let’s hope you have a management team, or are part of a management team, who understand the benefits of giving everyone a voice, listening and providing an authentic, timely response.
• sometimes the greatest benefit comes not from the number or readers, likes or retweets, but from the self-reflection exercise.
• .   Rather than reluctant conscription by their boss into a committee, they have chosen to participate out of genuine interest and enthusiasm for the topic.  Communities can take on a very different buzz when interested members self-elect participation, and share a sense of responsibility for community success

How Savvy Marketers Harness Social Data for Product Development

”

Online, we often talk about listening to our customers on social channels to help make content decisions in marketing. Moving to a fully integrated marketing picture for enterprise, using social media to compliment traditional market and product development research only makes sense. The very nature of uncontrolled conversations empowers customers to communicate and yield unthought-of insights and new product directions.

However, most companies are still at the basic point of simply making Facebook and Twitter work, much less mastering content for marketing or social web-wide conversations. In fact, last autumn’s Global CMO Study from IBM confirmed that most enterprises just aren’t there yet.”

tags: socialdata productdevelopment productdesign design listening data marketing customerinsight

• • While 82% of CMOs plan to increase social media use during the next three to five years, only 26% are currently tracking blogs, 42% are tracking third-party reviews, and 48% are tracking consumer reviews to help shape their marketing strategies.
  • 56% of CMOs view social media as a key engagement channel, but they still struggle with capturing valuable customer insight from the unstructured data that customers and potential customers produce.
• The process can be broken into two main areas: 1) building listening stations and dashboards on relevant topics, and 2) sifting through the data to find actionable intelligence.
• Dell’s work with Ideastorm as a crowdsourced marketing intelligence center is legendary, leading to almost 500 implemented products. Going further, as one of the first social enterprises, Dell’s Social Media Listening & Command Center does more than just seek out Dell conversations to comment on. It also drives relevant reporting throughout the enterprise for strategy and product marketing decisions.
• The first critical step in harnessing larger market intelligence is expanding those listening stations to include more topics to drive strategic and product marketing intelligence.
• Dell actively listens to its competitors’ conversation and how they impact larger macro issues.
• A company needs to learn not only how to listen, but also which data points to act on.
• While social data trends can be fascinating, if they are off-topic, they probably are irrelevant. It’s important not to become distracted by shiny objects and to stay on mission. 
• Dell provides a series of daily, weekly, and monthly reports based on its social intelligence. Reports cover specific topical or announcement daily reports looking at the size, sentiment, locations, who was leading the conversations, etc. 

•  

  “We find our listening and tracking of information on the web is often a ‘leading indicator’ of a product issue that requires our product teams’ attention, such as the need for a new driver or software fix on some hardware issues that emerge over time

Moving from tactical social media experiments to social business transformation

“The elephant in the social media room at the moment is that most corporate social media initiatives to date have been tactical experiments. Of those, few have generated meaningful business results. Sure, people have built up Facebook Fans and Twitter followers or they have launched the odd viral video on YouTube. They have claimed these as a success, but in reality these metrics should never be the end goal. “

tags: socialmedia socialbusiness transformation businessmodel culture mindset technology operations businessoperatingmodel

• A relatively small number of companies have pushed things further and achieved real, transformational results
• Most large enterprise clients I meet acknowledge that the age of social media experimentation is now coming to an end. They want practical advice as to how to move from social media experimentation to social business transformation.
• Business model – the ability to digitize products and distribute them at mass scale or to a micro niche (both enabled by social networks) can radically challenge an existing business model.
• Culture & mindset – one thing that is clear from the failure of many social media experience is that applying an inside-out mindset to social can backfire spectacularly.
• Technology – The pace of change within social technology is so fast that it places huge pressure on the traditional IT operating model.
• Business Operating Model – perhaps the toughest and most under-appreciated challenge of social is to the business-operating model. They way people are incentivized, reporting lines, business objectives, ways of working can be placed under intense pressure by social.

The Payoffs and Penalties of Holding Meetings

“Although it’s widely recognized that getting the most out of team members’ expertise requires interaction and the coordination of tasks and tools, research that links meetings to organizational performance is scarce. The authors of this paper sought to address that gap by discovering which types of communication and behavior led to productive meetings and which dragged the sessions down. The difference, they said, turns on how well a meeting stays focused on defining problems and their solutions and how well it avoids turning into a gripe session that proves demoralizing.”

tags: meetings collaboration performance effectiveness

• Overall, teams succeeded (and their companies had higher productivity) when they used problem-focused statements during the meetings
• Teams also got high marks when they used proactive communication — when members expressed interest in taking responsibility for the changes ahead or planned concrete actions.
• By contrast, unstructured meetings negatively affected team members’ satisfaction, group productivity, and organizational performance

To Investigate Culture, Ask the Right Questions

“Be sure to understand the role you’d have, what you could accomplish, and what you’d learn. A strong culture will set people up for success, and you need to be sure that’s in place. In discussing your role, you’ll also get insight into how the place works.

Then, ask questions that point the discussion to how the organization works. General questions — “What’s the culture like?” or “Are people treated well?” — seldom work. I’ve come up with specific sample questions you can ask as you’re interviewing for a job or talking with others who know the institution. They’re grouped into six topic areas. “

tags: culture purpose teamwork colleagues communication performance productivity

• 1. Purpose. Seek an institution whose purpose you could find inspiring
• 2. Teamwork. Consider how people work together, especially if you prefer to work in a highly collaborative environment or more independently
• 3. Colleagues. Who you’ll be working with and how they interact with each other is an important aspect of culture.
• Communication. How people communicate with others — and how they expect you to communicate with them — will affect your day-to-day life
• 5. Performance. Before taking a job, you need to know how fair or demanding performance management is and how supervisors will be looking at your work.
• 6. Productivity. A good match of process and policy against your preferences will significantly affect your productivity.

5 Ways Process Is Killing Your Productivity

“In a study of U.S. and European companies, The Boston Consulting Group found that “over the past fifteen years, the amount of procedures, vertical layers, interface structures, coordination bodies, and decision approvals needed…has increased by anywhere from 50 percent to 350 percent.” What’s more, in the most complicated organizations, “managers spend 40 percent of their time writing reports and 30 percent to 60 percent of it in coordination meetings.” No wonder people feel like they can never get any real work done.”

tags: procedures process productivity

• Why do we love process so much? It offers a way to measure progress and productivity, which makes people feel more efficient and accountable.
• Smart processes encapsulate bundles of organizational knowledge. And that’s a good thing.
• Empowering with permission–but without action:It’s not empowering when people are given more responsibility, yet must still obtain an unreasonable number of approvals and sign-offs to get anything done
• Leaders focused on process instead of people: In an effort to standardize and sanitize everything we do, nothing at work is personal anymore.
• Overdependence on meetings: “Collaborative” and “inclusive” are corporate buzzwords, but productive teamwork does not require meetings for every single action or decision
• Lack of (clear) vision: Great companies need a grand vision and important goals. Too often, companies have vision or mission statements laden with jargon but devoid of meaning.
• Management acts as judge, not jury: If the purpose of a meeting is to think, create, or build, management has to stop tearing people down when they propose new ideas or question the status quo

Jobs-to-be-done’s place in a customer-centric organization

“I asked it, as I had a conversation in recent days with a fellow from a large corporate. Customer-centricity was recently adopted as an internal mantra, but the manifestation of that was…wait for it…sentiment analysis.

It’s a start, right? But is it really a difference-maker?

I’ve written recently about jobs-to-be-done. As in, what customers hire your product to do. Those jobs have a tendency to (i) be hidden from you; and (ii) change over time. Knowing, and acting on, jobs-to-be-done (JTBD acronymized) is probably one of the most customer-centric things a company can do. You’re getting deep into what someone is buying your product for.”

tags: customercentricity jobstobedone gamificiation service customerservice marketanalysis focusgroups

• Customers love talking about their jobs-to-be-done. Seriously.  I usually schedule an inital hour to talk about them, and every single company has wanted to continue to the conversation for another hour
• 
• Those are the current factors influencing the product/service development process.
• Market Analysis
• Customer Service Tickets:
• Customer Surveys
• Focus Groups:

• Most are a triangulation to understanding what customers want. Now some are quite useful in a customer-centric sense: usage vectors, customer service tickets, surveys. But they’re also piecemeal.

   

  They represent the hope that you’ve got a bead on customer needs and wants.

7 Examples: Put Gamification To Work

tags: gamification work feedbacks participation engagement

Are Your Employees Drivers or Victims of Process Innovations?

“To stay competitive, organizations need to continually find opportunities for innovation in key processes such as customer service and product development, and adoption of a new process almost always requires the implementation of new information technology. In his 1990 classic HBR article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Michael Hammer argued that IT must drive radical process innovation.

Unfortunately, this creates two problems. First, as Hammer argued, these large investments in new IT systems tend to deliver disappointing results, largely because companies tend to use technology to mechanize old ways of doing business. That is, they leave the existing processes intact and use computers simply to speed them up, rather than redesign them from scratch. “

tags: innovation process IT change changemanagement

• Second, they don’t take enough advantage of the innovative abilities of their people themselves. Employees often feel victimized rather than energized by the changes.
• The best way to solve both of these problems — and make innovation efforts stick — is not to impose a new process or technology system, but rather have front-line employees drive the change.
• They say their projects are more successful when they follow the sequence of people, then process, then technology. “If you automate too quickly, you don’t find out what the front-line people need,” they explained to me recently. “We stay with manual workflows longer than others. Until you have a clear idea of what people need, you may automate workarounds and waste
• “In the case of a workflow management software project, we bought the tool and told people to use it,” Bogaerts and Schuyer said. “It was technology first, then process, then people, and it didn’t work very well.”
• Yet organizations that implement an enterprise system (ERP, CRM, SCM, etc.) frequently underestimate the costs of front-line resistance. The
• when workers identify improvements in their jobs, a new computer system appears as an opportunity to eliminate waste and better serve customers, not as a threat.

Les défis du management au 21ème siècle

“Lorsque je suis passé du statut de développeur d’application logicielle à celui de responsable d’équipe, il s’est passé une chose étrange.

D’un seul coup, mes camarades n’étaient plus des professionnels passionnés par leur sujet qui en parlent et qui en parlent et qui en parlent encore. Ce n’était plus des professionnels qui s’intéressent à leur discipline et qui étudient sans relâche les nouvelles innovations, découvertes ou bonnes pratiques, dans un soucis d’amélioration et d’apprentissage.

Non. Il s’agissait de Managers, comme si le seul intitulé, par je ne sais quel enchantement, leur infusait le savoir nécessaire pour accomplir leur mission”

tags: management drucker knowledgeworkers productivity continuouslearning P2Plearning

• “La contribution la plus importante (…) du management au 20ème siècle aura été de multiplier par 50 la production du travailleur manuel dans les industries manufacturières.”

   

  Je vous laisse deviner comment il en déduit l’objectif du management au 21ème siècle, objectif,

• 1. Quelle est la tâche ? La définition même de la tâche à accomplir reste à définir. Il s’agit d’un point important : être capable de définir le problème et la tâche à accomplir pour le résoudre s’avère être une de ces compétences majeures retenues par Andrew McAfee pour les travailleurs du savoir de demain.
• 2. La responsabilité de la productivité du travailleur du savoir lui appartient. Il doit se gérer lui même et jouir de l’autonomie.
• 3. Son travail exige non seulement un apprentissage continu mais aussi qu’il enseigne aux autres.
• 4. L’innovation continue doit faire partie du travail, de la tâche et de la responsabilité du travailleur du savoir.

•  

  5. La productivité du travailleur du savoir n’est pas question de quantité mais de qualité.

• 6. Le travailleur du savoir doit être considéré comme un actif et pas comme un coût. Il doit vouloir travailler (un peu à la comme pour une activité bénévole) de préférence à toute autre possibilité qu’il s’offre à lui.

Le poste de travail collaboratif en mode agile dans l’E2.0

“Le poste de travail collaboratif en mode agile dans l’E2.0 “

tags: digitalworkplace workplace socialbusiness enterprise2.0 collaboration

Les générations Y d’aujourd’hui seront les RH de demain : faire coïncider attentes et enjeux (1/2)

“J’ai eu l’occasion dernièrement de participer à une conférence à l’IAE de Lille, sur le thème « Génération Y : comment dynamiser l’emploi des jeunes dans le Nord pas de Calais ?».

Particularité de cette intervention, c’est que celle ci était organisée par les étudiants en Master 2 GRH.

C’est à dire par et pour les futurs acteurs RH de demain, appartenant aujourd’hui à la génération Y.

Bref : une conférence sur la génération Y, pour la génération Y… mais pas que par la génération Y.

En effet, sur les 5 intervenants, 2 avaient moins de 30 ans, et 1 était là pour témoigner en tant que tel.”

tags: humanresources management generationy

• Or, le saviez vous, en moyenne, un manager de proximité ne passe que 20 à 30% de son temps à  manager effectivement. Le reste de son temps se partage entre gestion administrative, compte d’exploitation, opérationnel, reporting. 

   

    Et en temps de crise, vu qu’il faut aussi rassurer la hiérarchie, ce reporting se transforme en reporting de  reporting : on fait des tableaux pour synthétiser les autres tableaux, ou pour compléter ceux existants.

• On les dit zappeurs et pas impliqué. Du coup, difficile de les responsabiliser sur des sujets en  profondeur. 

   

    Eux (la génération Y) se disent impliqués, mais managés par des personnes à qui, lorsque elles sont arrivées  dans l’entreprise, on a demandé d’appliquer les stratégies d’entreprise sans réfléchir.

• le mode projet se développe de plus en plus, et répond à une volonté d’être acteur du projet.

• Total: quand un Y vient avec un problème, le responsable propose la solution, voir prend en charge la  solution. 

   

    Ce n’est pas à proprement parler de l’écoute et de l’accompagnement.

• J’ai souvent entendu des DRH, Directeurs, voire Responsables de  Formation, demander ce type d’intervention  pour leurs managers de proximité. 

   

    Et c’est très bien. 

   

    J’aime particulièrement cette question qui tombe à ce moment là : « Qu’êtes vous prêt à changer dans votre  mode de management pour leur permettre de développer ces nouvelles compétences ? » 

   

    « Euhhhhh….. on va les accompagner, poser des objectifs. » 

   

    Une entreprise qui demande à ses managers de proximité de changer de comportements sans changer elle même, c’est  mettre un emplâtre sur une jambe de bois. 

   

    Remarquez, ça ouvre un marché ensuite : celui des risques psychosociaux, lorsqu’on constate qu’ils ont du  mal à gérer le stress, ou qu’ils le font redescendre sur leurs salariés.

• Nos futurs RH seront des Y : quels sont les enjeux qui seront les leurs let quels sont leurs atouts pour  faire réussir leurs entreprises de demain ?

Employees First, Customers Second: Why It Really Works in the Market

“When I worked for IBM, the customer was always right. In today’s column I interview Vineet Nayer, CEO of HCL Technologies, one of the largest I.T. outsourcing firms in the world. Vineet argues that how it got to be one of the world’s largest IT firms is by putting employees first and customers second. Sounds radical, but when he explains, it makes sense.”

tags: customerrelationship vineetnayar casestudies hcl management accountability

• The question is “what is the core business of any corporation?” and the answer is to create different shared value for its customers.
• The answer to that question is the business of managers and management should be to enthuse and encourage employees so that they can create a different shared value: enhance employees first and customers second.
• the question is any company that says “customer first” does not know how to deliver that promise. All I am saying is by employees first you can actually deliver your promise of customers first.
• The first thing that you need to do is create an environment of trust where the employees believe what you are saying and are willing to follow you wherever you are going
• The second is you need to make all the enabling functions, H.R., finance, and all these functions, the office of the CEO which all have enormous power with them, accountable to the employees as much as the employees are accountable to them
• The third is to make the management and managers as equally accountable to the employees as the employees are and one of initiatives we took was my 360 Degree is done by 80,000 employees across the world and the results are published on the web

If Customers Ask for More Choice, Don’t Listen

“In his provocative book The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz’s warns that giving consumers more product choices actually lowers their purchase satisfaction. Schwartz reasons that having too many options makes us fear missing out, which causes anxiety, analysis paralysis and regret.”

tags: customer customersatisfaction brands decision cognitiveoverload informationoverload

• consumers are actually overwhelmed, unable to effectively process the flood of product information and choices.
• These are the behaviors of overwhelmed shoppers who struggle to process information and unnecessarily agonize over otherwise trivial purchases. The problem is cognitive overload — the result of excess demands on our cognitive powers that lead to poor decision-making.
• The harder consumers find it to make purchase decisions, the more likely they are to overthink the decision and repeatedly change their minds or give up on the purchase altogether.
• The antidote for overloaded consumers isn’t more options at the store shelf, it’s decision simplicity.

The chemistry of enthusiasm

“Organizations have been trying for years to cultivate employee engagement. Like JetBlue, they persist in their efforts for good reason. One of the most powerful factors that spur customers to become advocates for a company is employees’ positive behavior and attitude. Bain consumer surveys show that the overall experience of dealing with a company often matters much more to customers than price or brand or—in industries with a big service component, such as home insurance and retail banking— even product features alone.”

tags: engagement customers advocacy service NPS management humanresources employeesengagement feedback metrics customerexperience

• One reason for this superior performance is that engaged employees direct their energy toward the right tasks and outcomes
• And when the true source of job satisfaction, happiness and recognition derives from enriching customers’ experiences, good things happen.
• 
• These trailblazers manage to instill an extraordinary sense of purpose and autonomy, as well as strong affiliation with the company and its offerings. They take a systematic approach, focusing on a few key areas.
• It’s intuitive that customer advocacy closely correlates with employee engagement.
• To make progress with the Net Promoter system, it’s critical to build customer feedback into daily operations and then “close the loop”
• 
• Such questions helped Belgacom, a telecommunications provider in Belgium, reduce the excessive flow of customer inquiries to its call center. Workshops with employees generated many hypotheses about what prompted the calls, and the company used customer feedback loops to winnow the hypotheses to a handful that merited attention.
• Feedback should not dwell exclusively on problems. Hearing a customer’s descriptions of how an employee’s actions had a positive effect can be a powerful reinforcement of desired behaviors and reminder of the employee’s purpose.
• Performance metrics can be powerful incentives for behavior. Rate employees along metrics of time or cost, and they will respond in kind, even if that degrades the customer experience.
• Masters of engagement change their processes to give employees greater decision-making autonomy because people on the front lines have a great influence over the quality of the customer experience.
• Many companies don’t take the trouble to understand which are their linchpin roles—as distinct from high-performing or high-potential people. These are roles that have a big influence on the customer experience or that provide critical support or coaching to employees who shape the customer’s response.

The human resources walled city

“HR/HCM is historically the mature ’social’ center of businesses and can either lead digital transformation or be subsumed into a supporting collaborative role”

tags: humanresources humancapitalmanagement collaboration performancereview talent

• Despite the slick exterior image many companies create for themselves, the internal reality is typically a patchwork quilt of technologies layered over the years since the dawn of enterprise computing by a succession of inhabitants to serve specific business needs, both departmentally and across the organization
• Many of these technologies are clearly modeled on outdated work concepts and processes, but the entire organization hangs together around tenured ideas in the collective mind of the organization
• f there is any area that desperately needs a social model, it is HCM. People-centric systems should promote connection, communication, and collaboration. That is the core of the social enterprise.
• Performance management systems are universally hated. Why? Because they create work for every employee in the company, while serving only to meet HR-driven compliance processes. Somewhere along the way in building these systems, we focused the core design on the wrong problem
• Nevertheless if there is an area within businesses which could historically always have been termed ’social’ it is Human Resources/HCM. (interestingly the term ‘human relations‘ predates HR/HCM).
• More broadly ‘Enterprise 2.0′ sprang up to challenge the rigidity of older forms of database powered computing and to more closely map to the way humans interact, and was and is far more about people than tools.
• HR’s limitations are often the weakest foundations of the entire crumbling social business edifice, and ripe for overhaul.
• Old paradigms mapped to modern technologies tend to create information log jams, which are one of the differentiators for quality -or otherwise – of business performance.
• What is happening at an increasing velocity is evolutionary change, and the human resources executive function needs to stay ahead of this wave to become the nucleus – or risk being subsumed into a new wave of chaotic fragmentation across multiple silos.

The future of customer support: Outsourcing is so last year

“”Unsourcing”, as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers’ problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company’s own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.”

tags: customerservice customersupport outsourcing communities peers customers costsavings gamification lithium

• Gartner, the research company, estimates that using communities to solve support issues can reduce costs by up to 50%
• To motivate members to participate, Lithium, a software company that provided TomTom’s and Best Buy’s systems, turns the whole thing into a game.
• Some of the issues frustrate customers most, such as billing errors, have to be dealt with by someone with access to confidential customer data.
• Moreover, Gartner warns that unsuccessful deployments risk a tidal wave of criticism on social networks. It expects customer satisfaction to fall in 70% of organisations shifting support functions over to users in the next two years.

Le réseau social d’entreprise : nouvelles questions

“En fonction des choix effectués, le RSE sera ou non partiellement ouvert au public, c’est-à-dire à des personnes qui ne sont pas des salariés de l’entreprise, des consultants ou les clients par exemple, ou encore interconnecté avec des réseaux sociaux plus classiques ouverts au public, en flux entrant (un twit est publié sur le RSE) ou sortant (un éditorial du Président est publié sur la page facebook de l’entreprise, un groupe de promotion des produits est animé en externe par un salarié). Plusieurs RSE pourront coexister au sein de l’entreprise ou du groupe (le RSE fournisseur, client, des spécialistes d’un thème donné…).

Sans pour autant éclipser les anciennes problématiques – la règlementation des usages et des comportements par une charte, la nécessaire consultation des IRP dans les entreprises de plus de cinquante salariés, la question des propos abusifs, notamment – de nouvelles questions surgissent, parmi lesquelles notamment :”

tags: enterprisesocialnetworks socialnetwork legal

• Parmi les clauses essentielles, une attention particulière devra être donnée à la question de la sécurité et de la confidentialité des données, à la clause de réversibilité des prestations, ou encore aux niveaux de service et aux moyens de les contrôler. Si l’on souhaite faire interagir le RSE avec d’autres RSE ou des réseaux sociaux ouverts au public, il faudra le prévoir au cours de la négociation du contrat avec le prestataire, car il n’existe aujourd’hui aucun véritable standard logiciel.
• Il conviendra également de définir des règles de conservation/suppression des profils et données associées, pertinentes au regard du RSE considéré. Un profil de sous-traitant associé à un seul projet ne peut pas être traité comme celui d’un salarié ayant 10 ans d’ancienneté et un statut de représentant du personnel.
• des formalités CNIL liées à la mise en place du RSE pourront se révéler nécessaire. La durée de conservation des données associées au profil devra être encadrée, notamment lorsque qu’un collaborateur quitte l’entreprise, de même que la conservation de ses contributions, éventuellement anonymisées, dans le système d’information.
• Une charte éditoriale, intégrée ou non à la charte informatique, qui prévoira les comportements, la modération et les sanctions, devra être acceptée par les utilisateurs en fonction de leur implication dans le RSE (utilisateur salarié, utilisateur temporaire, utilisateur externe, administrateur, community manager, modérateur).
• Par ailleurs, le contenu collaboratif ne va-t-il pas se transformer en moyen de se faire bien voir par l’employeur au détriment du ROI attendu par celui-ci ?

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.
• . By using the Lev-Schwartz model, which calculates today’s value of future compensation to employees of varying ages and experience levels, managers and investors can now track a variety of measures related to Infosys’ human resources, such as “return on human resource value” and “value of human resources per employee.” Infosys’s annual report also includes a “comprehensive intangible assets score sheet” that can be used as a decision-making tool to determine how successful the firm has been at investing in its people from year to year.
• A key factor in the shift toward viewing people as an asset is recognizing that an employee’s value can appreciate with training, engagement, and teamwork — all investments that are essential for 21st century firms
• Currently, there are no apparent leading U.S. or European companies performing this calculation — or at least not communicating it to their staff or investors. This powerful, transparent reporting on all the assets of a company has the potential to be a catalyst for developing a set of best practices that will provide a reliable methodology for the measurement and valuation of intangibles.
• The massive shift towards people as assets to be invested in can ripple through the management systems, goals and aspirations of the firm.
• Accounting standards will need to ultimately adapt this.  The American Accounting Association analyzed this back in the 1970s, and needs to rekindle this approach.  A new Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) is undertaking a new approach and educating the SEC as well.

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