How to Hire the Web 2.0 Way

May 12, 2008 at 9:07 am · Filed under Talent Management, Tips + Pointers

Ten years ago, all an employer had to do to hire an extra hand was list an ad in the classifieds and wait for the lines of job applicants to pour in. Although this process is still used by a majority of businesses, there are some slight changes that have allowed employers to streamline the hiring process.

Web 2.0 has changed the workplace considerably, so it’s no surprise that even the hiring process is evolving. There are now new tools and techniques when it comes to hiring, making the process easier and more convenient for both applicants and employers.

Background research. Many employers are using social networks for background research. It wouldn’t be a surprise if an applicant’s Facebook profile would have more weight than what his or her references have to say. This is probably because researching an applicant through social networks is incredibly easy. Also, these profiles tend to give you a more honest look of what your applicant is really like.

Networking. Social networks such as LinkedIn and GuanXi focus on business relationships rather than personal ones. This makes referrals much easier, if you’re looking to hire someone who is just a step away from your trusted business circle. Testimonials and recommendations are also an important feature of these social networks, allowing employers to read the opinions of an applicant’s former colleagues and supervisors.

Unlike personal social networks like MySpace, the profiles on LinkedIn look more like a curriculum vitae. For job applicants, this means that you can instantly update your online resume and send it to others without consuming paper. For employers, the online resume gives them a quick look at the applicant’s history, allowing them to decide beforehand whether this person is worth an interview.

Interviews. One of the local job offers I looked into requested an online interview before a face-to-face one. They had two reasons to do this. First is that they want to be sure that I’m familiar with communication tools they use within the company. Second, it was much easier to arrange due to our conflicting schedules. Online interviews may not be the norm, but they’re certainly more popular, especially for internet-based work.

LinkedIn is such a versatile tool that you can also use it to research the associates and colleagues of your job applicants. What type of people or businesses has he worked with? You can even set an informational interview with them to learn more about an applicant, if you’re interested enough. It’s like these people serve as his unlisted references.

Another noteworthy web 2.0 tool for job interviews is NotchUp, which is still in its beginning stages. Basically, the premise of NotchUp is that sought-after professionals will be paid by companies for an interview. It sounds a little unusual at first, but I can see how it would work. From the business’ perspective, it’s a more affordable alternative to recruiters and online job boards which, frequently, attract less than stellar applicants.

If the success of NotchUp and LinkedIn are indications of what the web can add to the interview process, then other more versatile, more innovative interview tools are out there, simply waiting to be developed or discovered.

Hiring globally. Unlike more traditional hiring processes, you don’t have to limit your search for a new employee locally. This is where the concept of geoarbitrage comes in: you can lessen business costs by hiring from countries that provide the same quality at a lesser price. However, this only works if you have an efficient telecommuting system in place. Off-shoring has been a profitable experience for some, but a disaster for others. Consider your businesses needs before you take this route.

Incorporating Web 2.0 tools into the hiring process eliminates nuisance applicants, time wasters, and expensive advertising methods. Although we’re far from a fully-fledged Web 2.0 hiring system, we’re off to a great start.

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Technology and Management Innovation?

May 6, 2008 at 2:43 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management

Jon Husband’s April 26 post here asked:
 
“Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation?” 

Last year watching the buzz around Enterprise 2.0  in a blog post titled: “Enterprise 2.0 “Tips” Not Enough: wikiNOMICS, Chariots of Fire Velocity & Net Work” I wrote:

“…it occurred to me one could globally replace “KM” in most of the “Enterprise 2.0″ posts and you would see the same exchanges pioneers had striving to implement KM in organizations…”
 

Recently researching an article to be published in  Effective Executive Magazine’s June KM edition, I’ve had the privilege of an exchange with Robert H. Buckman whom Infoworld 2003 called “KM’s
 father figure”.  My interest in Buckman’s work grew reading his March 6 2007 post to the AOK Yahoo Group that included:

“Jerry, thank you for the kind words, but I never did try and manage knowledge. What I really tried to manage and nurture was a culture that would encourage and expand the flow of knowledge. It was because economic value could only be obtained in our environment when knowledge moved across the organization in response to a need.”  ~ Robert H. Buckman

We’ve folded every rich nugget of our recent Bob Buckman exchange into our article but suffice to say his focus remains as per the quote above on creating an organization that supports knowledge flow.  He told us:

“If you look at it from the standpoint of how much effort it takes to achieve and effect knowledge sharing across an organization, you will find that the technology piece is about 5 to 10 percent of the effort, changing the way work is done is the 90 to 95 percent of the effort. You can define the effort as time or as money, it still comes out about the same” ~ Robert H. Buckman

IBM’s just released CEO survey points to technology being a factor in causing change. Still as mentioned by 37% of CEO’s it ranked behind market forces and people skills, both 48%, as leading external change forces. 

 ~ Jenny Ambrozek

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Is This An Argument For or Against More Social Computing Inside the Firewall ?

April 28, 2008 at 3:04 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management, Web 2.0

Discuss the issues outlined in the excerpt below.

I’m not going to comment on the general structural issues and dynamics, as they’re reasonably obvious.  Suffice it to say that using wikis and blogs can easily become another form of ongoing 360-degree review process, running continuously.

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The full Globe and Mail newspaper article is here.

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The boss isn’t listening

Managers might think the lines of communication are open, but an unwillingness to listen to tough issues leaves many underlings fearful of speaking frankly. Rebecca Dube reports

‘Hi there boss, I just wanted to let you know things are going great! Really great. In general. Yeah … um, though, there are a few issues. Like, the marketing plan? That you drew up? Is not working. At all."

"Hmmm … I’m pretty busy now. Can we talk later?"

"Um, sure. It’s just that the numbers are sliding really badly, and we’re running out of - "

"Sorry, gotta take this call."

Sound familiar? No one likes bad news. But new research shows that unwillingness to hear tough messages is the biggest blind spot for bosses.

"There is, in general, too much fear in organizations," says Patrick Barwise, emeritus professor of management and marketing at London Business School.

He and a colleague analyzed more than 4,000 U.S. managers’ 360-degree reviews - so called because they incorporate feedback from subordinates and co-workers as well as superiors.

"The gap between managers’ self-evaluations and colleagues’ assessments is widest when it comes to gauging receptiveness to hearing about difficult issues," Dr. Barwise and Sean Meehan, professor of marketing and change management at IMD business school in Switzerland, wrote in April’s issue of the Harvard Business Review.

The biggest disconnect showed up when rating managers’ abilities to "Encourage others to express their views, even contrary ones," and "Listen willingly to concern expressed by others."

In other words, bosses think their "open door policy" is working well, while their underlings feel like they’re talking to a brick wall.

[ Snip … ]

One culprit is lack of time. Listening to a problem and solving it takes longer than nodding along to "everything’s great" updates. Of course, that’s time well spent if it prevents disaster in the long run, but too many companies forget that perspective.

Some companies actively try to foster an environment of openness. Dr. Barwise points to the example of Toyota, where any employee - no matter how junior - is empowered to stop the assembly line if he or she sees a problem.

[ Snip … ]

Ironically, Dr. Barwise thinks that as the world economy increasingly struggles, creating more bad news for business, the tendency for managers to evade hard truths only grows.

"I think it’s getting worse," he says.

Employee - Speaking truth to power

How do you talk so your boss will listen? Some tips:

Pick the right boss. If you work for a Stalin-type, all your lovely communication skills will be for naught. Keep a low profile and work on your résumé instead.

Present factual evidence. Make your case with data, not opinions. It helps if you’re right, too.

Don’t be a gloomy Gus. Discuss flaws in the context of making the company stronger, and focus on the benefits of fixing them.

Don’t sit on it. If you spot a problem, raise it in conversation as soon as possible.

Boss - Can you handle the truth?

If you’re the boss, here are some tips on encouraging honest communication so you find out what you need to know from your employees:

Repetition, repetition, repetition. You can’t declare an "open-door policy" on the first day of work and expect it to sink in. If you want truthful feedback, ask for it regularly.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Sure, you know that, but putting it into practice is hard. If you freak out when you hear about a cost overrun, chances are you won’t hear about the next one.

The truth takes time. If you rush through meetings and give your employees the impression that you never have time for them, they’re less likely to come to you with important concerns.

If your company does 360-degree reviews, pay attention to them.

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Will Enterprise 2.0 Drive Management Innovation ?

April 26, 2008 at 12:48 am · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 2.0, Web Apps

I wrote this post about three months ago for my personal blog.  Today I was talking with a colleague about it, decided to re-read it, and have now gone through and edited it (in an attempt at greater clarity).  I hope it adds to this conversation on the future of work, and I’d also be delighted to learn what anyone may think of it … good, bad or indifferent.

Gary Hamel has called for fundamental management innovation in his recently-published book The Future of Management.  This call to exploration, experimentation and action is aligned with the emergence of the much-debated arena of Enterprise 2.0.

Here’s a key excerpt:

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This may not be a detailed design spec for a 21st-century management system, but I doubt it’s far off. Argue with me if you like, but I’m willing to bet that Management 2.0 is going to look a lot like Web 2.0.

Most of us grew up in a "post-industrial" society. We are now on the verge of a post-managerial society, perhaps even a post-organizational society.

Before you object, let me assure you that this doesn’t imply a future without managers. Just as the coming of the knowledge economy didn’t wipe out heavy industry, so the dawning of a post-managerial society won’t produce a world free of executives and administrators. Yet it does herald a future in which the work of managing will be performed less and less by "managers". To be sure, activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery.

While Management 2.0 won’t completely supplant Management 1.0, the two versions aren’t entirely compatible. There are going to be conflicts. Indeed, I think the most bruising contests in the new millenium won’t be fought along the lines that separate one competitor or business ecosystem from another, but will be fought along the lines that separate those who wish to preserve the privileges and power of the bureaucratic class from those who hope to build less structured and less tightly managed organizations. Richard Florida sees the same battle shaping up. In The Rise of the Creative Class, he puts it bluntly: "The biggest issue at stake in this emerging age is the ongoing tension between creativity and organization." This is, perhaps, the most critical and intractable management trade-off of all, and therefore, the one most worthy of inspired innovation.

It will take more than advances in technology to issue in the post-managerial age. As I noted earlier, management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.

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It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of consumer-based social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into  web services though the use of APIs … are finding their ways into the workplace.  Why wouldn’t they ?  After all they are the means by which we are discovering how human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment.  People have always  been creating and building up "...  knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things."

The 2.0 label is said to denote a more interactive, less static environment.  Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable, able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and (thus) static form, to an era characterized by a continuous  flow of information.  Because these flows feed the activities of organizations large and small, they necessarily demand to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs — what we call knowledge work.

What today we call Enterprise 2.0 can also be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process and the analysis and control of operational activities.  These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception.  Thus, as Hamel asserts,  it’s useful if not essential to cast a critical eye on the assumptions about static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific (and relatively static) constellations on an organization chart.  See all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail

I believe that we need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.  I am not arguing that we need to replace hierarchy holus-bolus … rather, I am suggesting that the combined capabilities of information systems and social computing, and two decades of widespread experience with team and organizational development processes permits centralization (read hierarchy) where and when necessary, and networked configurations where and when necessary … both centralization and decentralization.

That both centralization and decentralization of information flows in the hands of knowledge workers can operate simultaneously and effectively is, I think, a significant state change, and should be used to inform the basic assumptions about the design of knowledge work.

As for the management innovation called for by Hamel … it is my belief that the organizational development principles that have been developed over the past 30 - 50 years represent a large and pretty coherent body of work that stretches from Participative Work Design through QWL, quality circles, socio-technical systems approaches, self-directed and self-managing teams, GE-style "workouts", inclusive and participative large-scale strategic change methods and dialogue-and-consensus building models and approaches to "management" (visioning, objective setting, responsibility assignment, resource allocation, implementation, measurement, etc.) like Future Search and Open Space. 

The various elements of these approaches and methodologies have been pushed or pulled into place over the last several decades as software and integrated information systems have brought constant flows of information to the process of designing, developing and delivering products and services.  This in turn has led to fragmentation of efforts ay productivity as well as potentially making it easier, faster and more effective to create flows that are integrated and focused.  The trick is to be able to do both and choose which is necessary why and when.

Also, now we more and more often live and work in networks as well as hierarchies.  The principles cited in the paragrapsh above have developed over the past several decades to soften, mitigate or work around the more rigid and less effective aspects of hierarchical work and organizational design. The daily and copious flows of information both internally and from customers and markets essentially dictate, now, that much knowledge work takes shape as projects or as time-limited initiative.  These require collaboration and the horizontal discovery and use of knowledge when and where it is needed or can best be put to use. 

The architectural challenge is to design and implement both work processes and the ways humans interact (with both the work and each other) intelligently whilst allowing for change(s) as needed.  That means understanding much better the structure and dynamics of networks and the new influence of greater transparency when addressing issues such as decisions about what is to be centralized or decentralized, who is to be involved and why (competencies, availability, fit with team, and so on), what is  individual or group activity, and how accountability, reporting and tracking activities supervised,

Many examples of these factors and influences have appeared on the shelves as the management, leadership and organizational behaviour sections of bookstores have expanded rapidly during the past two decades.  The experimentation with inclusive, participative and somewhat democratic developmental processes mirrors some of the core dynamics in the more consumer driven and public involvement in use of the Web. 

 As similar tools, services and dynamics begin to penetrate our workplaces, I expect we will seek methods, practices and philosophies that track closely in parallel with the process of  enquiry, exploration, sensemaking, negotiation and implementation set out by Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge approaches to intractable issues and organizational complexity.

I think there is an important coherence to much of what has been being developed over the past two decades or so.  To reiterate, as this OD framework has developed much of it was aimed, bit by bit, at mitigating the harsher effects of having to lead and manage hierarchically under old models while striving to discover and use what actually works.  Dave Pollard, a well-known knowledge management expert, calls these "workarounds", and  has often suggested that most traditional management methods are becoming less and less useful but are still in place as the proxies for status and power.  He and I both believe that generally  people want to do good and effective work and so keep at it,  constantly developing and using work-arounds.  This is OD at its most basic … discovering what works best when people need to cooperate and collaborate to get things done and meet objectives, and then working at "learning" it, integrating it into the way things are done around here.

OD principles "understand" and play nice with Web 2.0 participative and collaborative dynamics.

I think OD has suffered from being seen as "soft" and a "nice-to-have-time-to-do", especially in the chaotic and ambiguous environment of the first decade of the 21st century.  While it is a maxim in the OD field that "the soft stuff is the hard stuff", this can be and often is brushed aside or put down by the hard-nosed management hard-asses, the "I want to measure everything and tolerate no slack" crowd. 

Clearly we need both objectives, metrics and well-defined processes AND enough slack and support to help people learn, adapt and work around ineffective or obsolete policies, practices and processes.  I am increasingly of the opinion that there is a coherent and pertinent model available for working effectively in Enterprise 2.0.  However it is not seen today as the dominant "management" model. 

The dynamics generated by today’s networked knowledge workers using lightweight, easy-to-use social computing tools and web services welded together with existing integrated information systems are similar in reach, scope and pace to the the challenges explored by the field of organizational development … only with more regular frequency and greater intensity.

Taken together as a coherent management framework, perhaps the fundamental principles of organizational development and learning  represent the beginnings of the innovation in management Gary Hamel is suggesting we need.  Another of the great management thinkers, Stan Davis, suggested as much twenty years ago at the end of Chapter 3 in his 1987 book Future Perfect:

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"Electronic information systems enable parts of the whole organization to communicate directly with each other, where the hierarchy wouldn’t otherwise permit it. What the hierarchy proscribes, the network facilitates: each part in simultaneous contact with all other parts and with the company (see expanded definition above)as a whole. The organization can be centralized and decentralized simultaneously: the decentralizing mechanism in the structure, and the coordinating mechanism in the systems.

Networks will not replace or supplement hierarchies; rather the two will be encompassed within a broader conception that embraces both."

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Tags: hierarchy, Enterprise 2.0, wirearchy, organizational development, management innovation

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100 Year M.B.A Birthday. Is it a “Right Brain” World & Age of the M.F.A.?

April 8, 2008 at 9:20 pm · Filed under Talent Management

Did anyone else see the April 6 New York Times piece promoting “Whole New Mind” author Dan Pink’s argument that the “M.F. A. is becoming the new M.B.A.?”  Titled “Let Computers Compute. It’s the Age of the Right Brain” it makes the case that:

“… now that computers can emulate many of the sequential skills of the brain’s left hemisphere - the part that sees the individual trees in a forest - ….. it’s time for our imaginative right brain, which sees the entire forest all at once, to take center stage.”    

 The NY Times quotes General Motors’  Robert  A. Lutz in support. On being hired to “whip the product development into shape” Lutz  told “The New York Times” about his new approach:

 “It’s more right brain. It’s more creative” … “I see us as being in the art business” he said, “art, entertainment and mobile sculpture, which, coincidentally, also happens to provide transportation.”    

The NY Times writer argues:

“When a car company like G.M. is in the the art business, every company in any other industry is, too.”    

March 8 The Financial Times marked 100 years since Harvard began a masters of business administration program.  Eight, all men, finished with another 25 class members failing to do so.  The thrust of the FT piece title “Masters and misgivings” is whether the 100 year old coveted MBA qualification has proven it’s full worth. The article explores aspects from student perceptions through reasons companies like Google hire MBA’s, to public criticism of MBA programs and the challenges business schools face adapting to serve internet generation students. I’m curious to hear from TheAppGap contributors and readers on this topic.  Does the MBA remain an essential qualification for business leadership in the future, and or, do you see a shift to more focus on “right brain” talents and recruiting MFA’s? ~ Jenny Ambrozek

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Tell me how we’re connected?

April 2, 2008 at 4:35 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, KM, Reviews, Talent Management, social networks

I had a recent conversation with Kate Ehrlich on the topic of expertise location, following on my reading of a blog, “Googlizing Knowledge Management at IBM” by AppGap colleague Bill Ives. Kate has been publishing research in this area for quite some time, and was part of the SmallBlue team whose work became IBM’s Atlas. Bill’s blog also mentioned the IBM Human Capital Study and IBM’s related consulting services. The key point of the study (for me) was the emphasis that companies who rated themselves “Very capable” of adapting to changing business conditions placed on the following capabilities:

• Predicting required skills and their future availability over the next three to five years
• Identifying and locating individuals with specific expertise
• Fostering an environment that allows people to collaborate across organizational boundaries

Let’s look at these last two. Not only is it important to identify people with specific expertise, but it’s also important to foster an environment in which people can collaborate. The ability to collaborate has a lot to do with the capability for connection and the ease with which that connection may be made.

What this means to me is that when I search for something, inside or outside a company, I want to find the best “stuff” but I also want to know which people are the major contributors to the best stuff, and furthermore I want to know how I am connected to them. That’s what Atlas, Metasight, and the newly launched SONAR platform from Trampoline Systems is designed to do. (Trampoline’s product suite includes Metascope, software for social network analysis, and Flightdeck, an “organisational intelligence tool”. I’ll blog further about each of these anon.)

SONAR is user-centric. My dashboard shows my profile (which I can modify) and the themes that occur in the documents I write, the blogs and wikis I post to, and in my emails. A natural language processing (NLP) engine extracts themes from content in the intranet and attaches these to individual profiles. So when I search, I get a list of relevant themes and get to pick which one is most applicable to what I am looking for. When I’m satisfied with that, SONAR shows me (on my dashboard), brief profiles of the people in my organization who are most associated with that theme. Then, I can click on “Explore” and see how all the people tagged with that theme are related. I can also see if any of these people share other interests or themes with me.

Now I can figure out, when I see the work associated with what I am looking for, how various people who might be assumed to be able to help me, are related (to each other and to me). This is a new form of metadata, the metadata of relationships that is so intriguing to me. Our modern lives can feel very fragmented, especially in organizations where people are working on multiple projects and multiple teams at the same time. Each project, team, meeting, has a context that needs to be discoverable and made known. Visual thinking is very important (as in Shiv’s post of a few days ago) but visual prompts and cues such as we are not starting to see in software can also inspire new thought.

I was very excited when Trampoline’s CEO Charles Armstrong contacted me a few weeks ago to tell me about these great developments; I had last seen him over a year ago and the scope of these products had not yet been fully envisioned. I must disclose that I am keen enough to get my hands on these products that I might enter into some business arrangement with Trampoline or a partner.

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They Are Your Future Employees

March 12, 2008 at 4:10 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management, Web Apps

UPDATE:  The post by my blog colleague Jim Ware directly below motivated me to first look for, and once I found it, decide to re-post this item here on the AppGap blog.  The first time I posted it  I mistakenly used the date from the original post (September 26, 2006) and so the item posted to the AppGap blog back in the archives rather than on the front page.

I sincerely hope no one gets too cross with me for doing so, and if they do, I am sure I will hear about it.

But I thought that it might offer some additional interesting perspective to the issue Jim has posted about directly below.

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They Are Your Future Employees … and they will be coming soon to a workplace near you.

An article published (paywall) in the September 19, 2006 Financial Times by Lee Rainie, director of the  Pew Internet & American Life Project, described these new arrivals who will soon invade the labour market - youngsters who today are 15 - 18 years old. 

Meet the digital natives.

The title itself  (They are the future; And they’re coming soon to a workplace near you. The next generation of your staff is challenging the accepted ways of doing things in the business world) is evocative of the rest of the article (Lee Rainie explains who they are and why they are different - and what employers need to think about to attract the best.).

From the first paragraph on, the scene is set with an extract from a study carried out by Marc Prensky:

As consultant Marc Prensky calculates it, the life arc of a typical 21-year-old entering the workforce today has, on average, included 5,000 hours of video game playing, exchange of 250,000 e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages, 10,000 hours of mobile phone use. To that you can add 3,500 hours of time online.

Our work at the Pew Internet Project shows that an American teen is more likely than its parents to own a digital music player such as an iPod, to have posted writing, pictures or video on the internet, to have created a blog or profile on a social networking website such as MySpace, to have downloaded digital content - songs, games, movies or software, and to have snapped a photo or video with a phone.

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Prensky also puts into perspective the age of this new generation of workers, notably in terms of their relationship with and to the Web.

“Today’s younger workers are not ‘little us-es’,” argues Mr Prensky, an educator, gaming expert, and author of Don’t Bother Me, Mom - I’m Learning. “Their preference is for sharing, staying connected, instantaneity, multi-tasking, assembling random information into patterns, and using technology in new ways. Their challenge to the established way of doing things in the business world has already started.”

Those challenges often flow from young workers’ embrace of technologies that have grown up with them. Today’s 21-year-old was born in 1985 - 10 years after the first consumer computers went on sale. When this young worker entered public school in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee wrote a computer program called the World Wide Web. Our worker’s college career saw the rise of blogs, Wikipedia, MySpace, Del.icio.us, Skype, podcasts, and YouTube.

And so, the reality is that these young "emigres" at home in the digital world are thrusting their way into a workplace where the royalty still consists of immigrants and illiterates, in terms of the demands of the digital world.  There’s a clash in perspective, to say the least. 

Now, this 21-year-old and his peers are showing up in human resources offices as digital natives in a world dominated by digital immigrants - elders who often feel less at ease with new technologies. Here are five realities of the digital natives’ lives that must be understood by their new employers:

The 5 realities that employers today must understand and integrate into their practices before seriously thinking about employing this new generation :

*Reality 1: They are video gamers with different expectations about how to learn, work, and pursue careers.

A host of experts has affirmed that today’s young workers have internalised the new realities of work. “Job entrants now do not expect lifetime employment from a single employer,” argues Edward Lawler, co-author of the forthcoming book, The New American Workplace. “To them, the word ‘career’ is plural.”

These attitudes clearly reflect the larger realities of the changing nature of work. Yet there is also some evidence that the ethos of video gaming plays a role. John Beck and Mitchell Wade argue in Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever that games are the “training programs” for young workers (especially males) that help shape the way they behave in a world full of data-streams, where analysis and decisions come at twitch speed, where failure at first is the norm, where the game player is the hero, and where learning takes place informally.

For companies, this puts a premium on designing engaging work that allows workers to make a clear contribution and be rewarded for the same. If “organisation man” has become “gaming man”, then the importance of worker morale is elevated - as is the value of basing work on completed tasks, rather than other measures of work effort such as hours on the job.

“Give them projects to complete and then stand out of the way,” argues James Ware, who helps run Future of Work, an organisation for facilities, IT and human resources professionals based in Prescott, Arizona. “These kids quit when they are frustrated trying to finish a quest that will ‘get them to the next level’.”

*Reality 2: They are technologically literate, but that does not necessarily make them media literate.

Our research has found consistently that the dominant metaphor for the internet in users’ minds is a vast encyclopedia, especially among younger users, who have grown up relying on it to complete school assignments, perhaps too often clipping and pasting from websites into term papers.

Sandra Gisin, who oversees knowledge and information management at reinsurance giant Swiss Re, says her colleagues marvel at the speed with which younger workers communicate and gather information. But she has had bad experiences with younger workers accepting uncritically the top results from a Google search: she says the firm will begin training programmes next year to teach workers how to evaluate information and to stress that “not all the best information is free”.

Dow Jones news organisations have similar worries. They have created programmes for journalism educators and reporters-in-training to drive home the point that journalists should not rely on a web source without checking its origin and confirming the information in other ways. “We drive home the point that it’s not good enough to say, ‘I read it on the internet’, without taking other steps to verify it,” notes Clare Hart, president of Dow Jones Enterprises.

At the same time, younger workers’ comfort with online tools can be a boon to marketing departments. Ms Hart, 45, says younger workers on the staff “convinced us baby boomers” to put more information from Dow Jones conference presentations online and to create podcasts of the best of them. Since then, e-mail offering podcasts is opened about 20 per cent more frequently than traditional marketing e-mail.

*Reality 3: They are content creators and that shapes their notions about privacy and property.

More than half of American teenagers have created and shared content online. They think of the internet as a place where they can express their passions, play out their identities, and gather up the raw material they use for their creations.

So, why shouldn’t a young employee think it clever and fun to post on his blog pictures of Apple computers being delivered to the loading bay at Microsoft headquarters? That is what Michael Hanscom, a temporary employee for a Microsoft vendor, did and was fired for violating the company’s non-disclosure rules.

In the many-to-many broadcast environment of the internet, the prospects for data haemorrhage from companies have grown exponentially. Clearly, companies need to create policies about how internal bloggers should treat company information, what kinds of intellectual property need to be protected, and basic norms of behavior that should guide people who want to create online material.

*Reality 4: They are product and people rankers and that informs their notions of propriety.

This is the wisdom-of-crowds generation that grew up rating peers’ physical attributes (amihotornot.com), pop culture creations (Amazon metacritic.com reviews), teachers’ style and grading practices (ratemyprofessors.com), and products (epinions.com). No surprise, then, that there are websites drawing decent traffic for people to rate their bosses, their clients, and their customers. The tone of online commentary is often racy and retaliatory.

So, organisations might ponder a new clause or two in the policy manual about online etiquette inside and outside the workplace. “Most companies have policies in place against harassment based on things like sex, race, and ethnicity,” says Lynn Karoly, an economist at the RAND Corporation who has studied the 21st century

workplace. “But we should probably create new categories of policies to handle unacceptable online behaviours where liability might emerge.”

*Reality 5: They are multi-taskers often living in a state of “continuous partial attention”, where the boundary between work and leisure is quite permeable.

The ubiquity of gadgets and media allows younger workers to toggle back and forth quickly between tasks for work and chatter with their friends. Many marvel at their capacity to juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. An even sharper insight comes from Linda Stone, a technology consultant, who has noted that many technophiles function in a condition she refers to as “continuous partial attention”, where they are scanning all available data sources for optimum inputs.

Those who operate in such a state are not as productive as those who stay on task. They also do not make distinctions between the zones of work and leisure, consumer and producer, education and entertainment. “Their worlds bleed together,” argues Charles Grantham, another principal at the Future of Work. “It is pretty useless to try to draw borders around different spheres for them. It’s better to let them shift among them at their choosing as long as the work gets done.”

Again, companies would be wise to spell out their tolerance levels for the amount of personal activity workers are allowed and their expectations about the availability of workers outside the office and after hours.

Many companies see no option but to embrace the world of digital natives. Agilent Technologies, a top global measurement company, began early this year to distribute iPod Nanos to new employees hired from US college campuses. The Nanos were preloaded with podcasts describing each of the benefits offered by the company, such as the 401(k) retirement plan and options for health insurance. “The college kids loved getting the benefit overviews preloaded on the iPod, while our older workers often preferred to read about these things on our website,” notes human resources manager Cathy Taylor. “There are different generational learning styles.”

Still, the ethic of podcasting information is now spreading through the company and some of those older workers have caught the bug, too. For a recent retirement party, staff from Agilent’s far-flung offices collaborated on a podcast for the retiree. “You Raise Me Up” by Andrea Bocelli was dubbed over the voiced well-wishes and the podcast was played over a WebEx teleconference. “It was a first for a virtual retirement party,” enthuses Taylor. “We’ll be doing it again.”

Tags: Web 2.0, digital natives, digital immigrants, Prensky, Pew, workplace of the (near) future

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What If … the Org Chart Had Links and Tags, Instead of Reporting Relationships ?

March 5, 2008 at 6:15 pm · Filed under Artisan Economy, Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, KM, Talent Management, Web 3.0, Web Apps

Of course it’s silly .. but this post by Hugh Macleod titled “Buckets” got me thinking …

If nature was designed like today’s business and software, water would trickle down the valley in buckets, from bucket to bucket.

More specifically:

We have wireless in coffee shops, Skyping on transatlantic flights, Blackberries, smartphones and laptops wherever we go - why not let (server based) systems do the delivery of work-orders, run the events, do the transactions and capture the data? Why not have the flows defined with loops and warts and all ready to be refined daily as the organisations learns and grows?

“Anataxonomy” and “Flow”, combine those two principles and use the wonders of technology accordingly.

So what does this mean? Sure, we’re already getting used to the idea of big commercial Open-Source software companies like Spikesource. But what about non-software? Open-Source Exxon’s? Open-Source General Motors’s?

This is when “Flow” starts getting REALLY important.

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Smart knowledgeable people who have studied deeply the issue of why hierarchy seems such a durable concept tell us to get used to it … they say that there are good reasons why hierarchies thrive, even in the face of increasing flows of information and spreading forms of networked semi-transparency.

But hierarchies don’t have to remain static … and this is one of the big deficiencies in current models and with the existing tools of organizational design. Think about it. How often are there reorganizations, changes to departmental structures, downsizing, mergers or acquisitions - and the org chart gets tossed up in the air like a set of pick-up sticks. In the case of larger organizations, the “pick-up sticks” always come down in highly-organized, very neat looking boxes with straight lines that essentially state … “this is the right design .. this time we’ve got it” !

Until the next change.

Really, organizational structures are basically a rolling flow of change. Why the assumption of stability, of more-or-less static structure ? In my opinion, it’s just that many executive and management types don’t really like the feelings of messiness and control based only on engagement and willingness that accompany the conditions of continuous change.

So … what if work meant that at different times and for different projects, you could get *tagged* with different tags for different skills, and *linked* with other relevant of pertinent skill and personality *tags*, and so on ? Then, these new-style indicators (of capability) could be combined with availability / scheduling optimization software, and you’d have the basic format for a new form of organization chart.

Hierarchies could be developed at a specific time, for as long as may be necessary, and may involve different people or peoples depending upon the situation, the problems and the desired or hoped-for outcomes. So too for teams and purpose-focused networks of skills, abilities, competencies, willingness and availability.

If you stop and think about it for a moment, you can almost *feel* that this would probably seem more natural and more probably effective. But, we have a large legacy system in place.

Hmmm …

Back in the mid-1980’s there was a brief eruption of self-managing teams and what was called socio-technical work systems, where some of these types of issues were addressed - except that then the concepts of *knowledge work*, and mechanisms for manipulating information flows, like tags and hyperlinks, were only really fringe ideas.

Not anymore … but the org charts and the performance management and compensation practices are still (generally) what were used 30 and 20 and 10 years ago.

How much longer will yesteryear’s tools continue to suffice ?

This is basically the question Gary Hamel addresses in his recent book The Future of Management.

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The Web is a near-ideal mechanism in which to culture new strains of social organization. From Craigslist to MySpace to FaceBook to Second Life to eHarmony, from instant messaging to podcasting, blogging, video chat and virtual worlds, the Internet is radically changing the ways in which people find romance, manage friendships, share insights, learn, build communities, and more.

For the moment, though, most of this joyous and frenzied experimentation is taking place outside the plush-carpeted hallways of the corporate old guard.

I find this ironic.

While no company would put up with a 1940’s-era phone system, or forgo the efficiency-enhancing benefits of modern IT, that’s exactly what companies are doing when they fail to exploit the Web’s potential to transform the way work of management is accomplished. Most managers still see the Internet as a productivity tool, or as a way of delivering 24/7 customer service. Some understand its power to upend old business models. but few have faced up to fact that sooner or later, the web is going to turn our smoke-stack management model on its head.

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Gaming and the Workplace of the Future

March 3, 2008 at 7:34 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Distributed Work, Enterprise 2.0, Talent Management, Web 2.0

I have from time to time blogged about my long-held belief that the "gaming idiom" will increasingly find its way into workplace social computing applications.  I suspect that this is reasonably closely related to what Stowe Boyd terms "flow" as it relates to Enterprise 2.0 dynamics and the applications that will be used to work "in flow".

If I’ve got Stowe’s take more or less right, and if there’s something to my belief that gaming principles will figure more prominently in future workplace applications, then we’re in good company, namely Ray Kurzweil.

And I note here that David Weinberger recently noted during his FASTForward08 conference keynote speech that he thinks "Ray Kurzweil is insane" (seriously), with respect to Kurzweil’s strongly-asserted belief that humans will one day upload their brains and consciousness into computers. 

I agree with David … I think this notion is nuts, and that there are some fundamental aspects and elements to human consciousness that will forever evade computing capabilities (and no, I am not expert enough to articulate why I believe that or point to any science or deep philosophical constructs that will support clearly my beliefs).

However … aside from the incipient insanity, I think Ray Kurzweil is a very smart guy, and I am more than willing to consider his points about gaming and how the idiom (I can never think of a better word) will penetrate a wide range of human activities.

Via the Toronto Globe & Mail

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Kurzweil sees a future in games

BLAINE KYLLO

Ray Kurzweil thinks the future of our society hinges on video games.

The 60-year-old futurist, best knows for his hypothesis of technological singularity, told a crowd of 2,000 video game developers last week at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco that he thinks games are on the cutting edge.

“Games are a harbinger of everything,” said Mr. Kurzweil min his keynote address. “In twenty years, games will have taken over the world and everything will be virtual reality.”

Crazy? Well, maybe coming from someone else.

Mr. Kurzweil is what you’d call a big thinker. Although his academic foundation is modest – he has a bachelor of science from MIT – he has 15 honorary doctorates and scores of awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and MIT inventor of the year.

Through his numerous companies he’s invented flatbed scanners, developed optical character and speech recognition software, created reading devices for the blind and invented music synthesizers that could replicate grand pianos and orchestras . He’s the author of five books in which he makes dramatic predictions about the future. In 1990’s The Age of Intelligent Machines, he said a computer would beat the world’s chess champion by 1998. It happened in 1997 when IBM’s Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov.

Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions are predicated on one fairly simple idea: while most trends are considered to be linear, information technology follows an exponential pattern. Exponential growth refers to regular doubling over time, while linear growth refers to a regular increase by a constant amount over time. Early on, explained Kurzweil, an exponential growth rate resembles a linear curve, which is why so many have been fooled. But at a certain point, exponential growth becomes explosive.

[ Snip … ]

In terms of both processor size and power, Kurzweil said that since the ‘70s there has been a billionfold increase in computational performance, and he expects to see a similar increase by 2020. This refers to Moore’s Law, proposed by Caltech professor and Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, which stipulates that the number of transistors that can be place on a circuit doubles every two years.

But what does all this have to do with video games?

Well, since games are an information technology, created with and played on powerful computers, plenty. In terms of computational power, Kurzweil thinks we’ll have the potential to do anything. The question, he said, is whether we’ll have the software to do the same.

[ Snip … ]

But we’re already seeing changes in the gaming industry, and Kurzweil suggested that the rate of change is such that anyone working on a project that will take more than six months needs to be aware of this fact. “Pong was crude,” he said. “That was 1972.”

By 2010, Kurzweil said, computers will begin to disappear. “They will disappear into our clothing and bodies,” he explained. Big screens will be replaced with personal monitors built into eyeglasses and even contact lenses. He expects “full-immersion” games early in the next decade which will take place in true virtual reality. The problem, said Kurzweil, is that we need to figure out how to make sure people in virtual worlds don’t forget that they are also interacting with the real world, something that is already a problem with some Wii games. We’ll have to “enforce reality,” maybe “by having a window to the real world in the virtual reality world.”

A more eloquent solution to that problem will come about by 2029, said Kurzweil, when nanotechnology will be able to shut down the signals our brain receives from the real environment to enable us to respond only to signals from the virtual reality of our choice. This will be possible because of what Kurzweil called “an intimate merger.” Computers will have human-level intelligence and the reverse engineering of the human brain will be complete. Game characters, said Kurzweil, will benefit from our having “complete models of all regions of the human brain and the means to simulate human intelligence.”

“A kid can become a virtual Ben Franklin,” said Kurzweil. “Everyone will be able to expand their intelligence by virtue of using such devices.”

In a backstage interview after his presentation, Kurzweil said he thinks the descriptor “video games” is limiting “because it makes it sound like as if its an unimportant part of life … But it’s been growing and taking over more and more aspects of human interaction and learning and creativity.”

“Play is how we principally learn and create,” said Kurzweil.

The continuing growth of computers is already leading to a democratization of gaming, he said. The price of gaming systems means that more people have them and they are more powerful than the supercomputers of the sixties. “The tools of production are also being democratized,” he said. Creating a new game that can be played by multiple players around the world can be done with a $1,000 laptop.

Massively multiplayer experiences, in games or in virtual worlds, harness the ability to interact. The “dynamic, self-organizing, decentralizing communication” harnessed by the gaming industry will “create new, emerging forms of intelligence.”

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Tags: Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity, Stowe Boyd, flow, FASTForward08, video games, gaming, future work

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