Big Ideas for Social Influence Marketing

May 25, 2009 at 11:22 pm · Filed under Change Management, Collaboration, Collective intelligence, Culture, Management, Web 2.0, social media, social networks, social tools

At the Razorfish 9th Annual Client Summit, I presented five big ideas for social influence marketing. These were ideas that I felt would matter in the next two years. The audience for the presentation was 600 senior marketers but the ideas I emphasized have relevance to all decision makers within an organization. Here’s the presentation with the five ideas. Let me know what you think.

Future Exploration Network Report … “Enterprise Social Network Strategy”

April 17, 2009 at 5:45 pm · Filed under Change Management, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Networks + Networking

Reinventing Management in the 21st Century

March 15, 2009 at 11:02 pm · Filed under Change Management, Collaboration, Culture

Last year a group of renowned scholars and business leaders got together to discuss the future of management. Organized by Gary Hamel of the Harvard Business School, the two day event was designed to think the fundamental principles, processes and practices of management that will drive success in the future. The group identified shared beliefs and after much contentious deliberation also “moonshots of management.”

The shared beliefs included the notion that management is one of humankind’s most important social technologies, a recognition that current management models are seriously out of date and third that management must be reorganized to become more adaptable, innovative and inspiring places to work. Of the 25 moonshots of management, a few stood out for me which I’m discussing here. You can find the complete list on Gary Hamel’s blog.

1) To ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose both in theory and in practice. It must be oriented towards the achievement of significant and noble goals. This makes obvious sense as management is always a means and never an end unto itself. However, a critical question is whether managers are incentivized to genuinely think in terms of significant and noble goals and measure themselves against these higher purposes. Would you say that of AIG for example? Does the stock market reward companies that do? I’m not so sure.

2) Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship into management systems. This is defined as the need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups. I would argue that by defining it that way, the embedding is not going far enough. The management systems need to be an amebic translation of the communities from which they rise and in turn serve. Thanks to communication technologies those stakeholder groups aren’t static and nor are their perceptions of the organizations. The community is a lot closer to the organization than ever before.

3) De-structure and disaggregate the organization. This one is explained as the need to become more adaptable and innovative by disaggregating larger entities into smaller, more malleable units. I respectfully disagree with this notion, With the advent of advanced web based communication technologies, the social media revolution and the flow of ideas between organizations and into them, the size of the organization matters less. It is more important to allow for the natural flow of information, the organic creation, evolution and dissolution of social networks and for emergent, situational mechanisms to support this malleability. It is not a question of big versus small.

4) Create a democracy of information is another interesting one and is explained as developing holographic information systems that equip every employee to act in the interest of the entire organization. This is important and I would argue necessary to simply hold onto the most talented employees. However, I would argue that the point is not to develop a new information system rather than to provide access to the information or the “company APIs” so that employees can create their own information systems, leverage third party ones as they choose and then act in the best interest of the entire organization. A little more letting go is needed here.

5) Depoliticize decision-making which is defined as allowing decision making processes to be free of positional biases and done in a manner that taps into the collective wisdom of the entire organization. Here’s another one that I’d say is a touch naive. You cannot depolitize decision-making as long as you have the company as an organizing unit with corporate hierarchies in place. To try to depolitize is unrealistic. It is better to start by encouraging employees to declare their politics and recognize how their own decision making is influenced by their positional biases. Tapping into the collective wisdom is important but it too can only be successful when the biases are revealed.

So how doe these five points relate to technology and workplace productivity? Because a lot of these issues are contested, negotiated and enacted within the digital environments of large organizations. Whether the decision making is taking place in a collaborative workspace, information is being shared via a wiki, organizational units are being formed or ideas are being harnessed on an intranet, these all happen digitally through the electronic culture of an organization. These thoughts are also posted at Going Social Now.

Wanted: Enlightened Management

March 13, 2009 at 9:07 am · Filed under Change Management, Culture, Security

Policing employees to ensure network security is tough enough for IT, but when the risk is way up on top, it compounds the whole situation. Company executives usually hold the most sensitive data in an organization, and according to an article on New Scientist, they are also the most vulnerable to threats. One of the reasons for this is that it’s difficult to get them to adhere to IT policies, such as the prohibition of unauthorized software. As Pentagon expert Glenn Zimmerman put it, “But woe betide the lowly IT director that would inconvenience the CEO with such restrictions.”

Yael Shahar, a cyberwar analyst from Israel, suggested that IT personnel should hack these executive’s computers from within the network, if only to prove a point (desperate times call for desperate measures?). While this may, in theory, open the bosses’ eyes on how vulnerable their systems are, I highly doubt there are many would-be “white hat hackers” who would risk their jobs in this fashion, given the state of the economy. Although, with prior notice and other arrangements, it may actually work. In the end, an IT department’s best friend is an enlightened management.

As we’ve seen many times in the past, trouble arises when people in power think they’re above the law – or, in this case, their own company policies. One comment said it best: “I doubt seriously that there will ever be a technological solution to a sociological problem. The problem is with people, not their tools.”

How Come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?

February 23, 2009 at 4:04 pm · Filed under Change Management, Distributed Work, Management, Web Commuting

I am very pleased that Capital Magazine, based in Dubai, has just published the second installment of an article that Charlie Grantham and I wrote about organizational resistance to Distributed Work - and what to do about it.

The article, “How Come Distributed Work is Still the Next Big Thing?“, appears in the February issue. It’s available online, though free registration is required.

This version of the article is actually a revision and update to a three-part series that ran in our own Future of Work Agenda newsletter a couple of years ago - available as downloadable pdf reprints here (Part One), here (Part Two), and here (Part Three).

We’re pleased at the continuing attention this issue is getting. It can’t be said often enough: there are very real - and completely understandable - reasons why so many organizations resist adopting distributed/flexible work arrangements. But there’s also a highly compelling business case for moving into the “work anywhere” world of the 21st century.

Why do you think resistance to an obviously more productive and more attractive way of working is so prevalent?

Nine Tensions Tensing

January 2, 2009 at 9:20 am · Filed under Change Management, Management, Networks + Networking, Tips + Pointers

Stewarding and working with networks has some science (the science of the structure of networks), but it is mostly art. Because a human network consists of a set of relationships, it is in constant change. This is the very nature of networks. On the fifth day, I summarized the broad areas of purpose that can be ascribed to networks. Today, I offer nine sets of tensions, each a continuum, that are always at work in networks, whether they are made explicit or not. Distinguishing them, and bringing them to the foreground in network design or diagnostic is a critical task of net work.

Briefly:

1. What is the balance between the value of the network to the network and the personal value that individuals receive by being part of it?
2. Has the network been structured in a top-down way, with rules of communication and decision making, or are the network’s properties (structure, governance) emergent, flexible, and responsive to environmental context?
3. Is the membership of the network closed, or is it open to anyone to participate?
4. Does the network horde and and generate knowledge internal to the network or does it actively solicit and include external views, ideas, and opinions?
5. Is the purpose of the network and the value it creates focused on outcomes and results, or do members participate for the promise of the discovery and dialogue?
6. Are the interactions among members of the network oriented toward transactions that are task-based, or do the interactions principally support exchange and creation of knowledge?
7. Is the value produced by the network primarily tangible or intangible? Is there a balance between tangible and intangible, and does there need to be balance?
8. Are the norms of the interactions, outcomes, membership rules, and governance structure codified, or have these evolved through the life of the network such that they are known and passed down as tacit knowledge?
9. Where does the network live? Does it exist only when members are together face-to-face, or only through online participation?

Managing and balancing these tensions is the work of not just the network leader, but of all members. Discomfort in a network may indicate that one of these tensions has passed the boundary set for it, and that balance needs to be restored.

Recounting:

• Eight Principles
• Seven Leaders Lessons
• Six myths of networks
  
• Five purposes
• Four design facets
• Three network tools
• Two network sources
• One network lens

Fighting Internal Spam that Hurts Productivity

November 20, 2008 at 8:21 pm · Filed under Change Management, Collaboration, Intranets, KM

Apparently, President Obama will not be allowed to have his blackberry with him. It is a security risk and he wouldn’t be in compliance with the Presidential Records Act if he carried it around. Imagine that. An efficient use of technology is a security risk. But then it got me thinking. Do organizations depend too much on email? Has email become a lazy way to communicate and collaborate? With all the copying and blind copying going on in emails, is it serving as more of a distraction than a productivity enhancer? 

A recent IDG report highlighted that there will be 40 trillion inbox clogging spam e-mail messages this year resulting in smart companies building separate email system - email systems that are detached from the Internet.On the surface, it may seem excessive to build a private email system to avoid spam. But the strategy does have merits. Its not that employees won’t be able to email the outside world (many of them need to just to do their jobs) but rather it’ll separate external email from internal communications.

Now lets see if we can take this thought process a little further. What if employees were limited to say a hundred emails a day. And if they went over that limit they were charged 25 cents per email sent. What would that do to the organization? Would it mean more meetings? More stopping by each other’s desks? Better and more efficient uses of the corporate intranet? A reduction in knowledge sharing? Increased productivity as employees would be spending less time cleaning up their inboxes? 

It is hard to know but it might be one way to fight what I’m going to call “internal spam” just as private email systems fight public spam. This doesn’t get much attention but I’m willing to bet it hampers productivity and fuels laziness.