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The consulting dilemma - to challenge or collude?
"One of the themes that resonated most was a general disillusionment with much of the mainstream approach to consulting work - and with the assumptions on which this is based. Organizations are complex. And yet, managers continue to be seduced by simplistic, step-wise approaches, which appear to offer ease of implementation and certainty of outcome."
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Are we creating real value if we collude with those managers and consultants who seek to deny or ignore the complex dynamics of organizations, and who cling to illusions of certainty, predictability and control?
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Would we add more value by challenging the assumptions on which these taken-for-granted aspects of management orthodoxy are based?
Social Media And Management
"In order to determine whether management should understand and use social media one must consider the role of management."
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In his book Out Of The Crisis (1986) W. Edwards Deming said “We are living in prison, under the tyranny of the prevailing style of interaction between people, between teams, between divisions.” We must replace the idea that we need competition between people with cooperation. Present practices squeeze intrinsic motivation, self esteem and dignity out of people over their life time. The forces of destruction such as forced distribution of grades, merit systems, competition between people and groups, incentive pay, numerical goals, explanation of variances, and treating every group as a profit center. People are born with such as intrinsic motivation, self esteem, dignity, cooperation, and joy in learning.”
Maximizing Business Value from Enterprise 2.0 through Fun & Motivation
"I am a strong believer that organizations, should focus and facilitate the use of these tools in order to maximize organizational benefits. To drive value, I've often referred to the engagement factors and in this post I wanted to focus on ons of the factors, "Motivation".
How do we address motivation? Do we adopt the "build it and they will come" approach? No. But what about Wikipedia? it seems like complete "self-organization" has made it successful. But consider that only 1% of the people who visit Wikipedia actually contribute content. That's alright with a population set of the world, but 1% of your company may not be enough and if you have specific objectives you may need to motivate others to participate"
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In fact, bigger incentives causes worse results for cognitive tasks.
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Fun, as a design principle shouldn't be overlooked as it impacts the application design from look and feel, through context, content and process. It also should be addressed when designing events leveraging social computing technologies
A Day with Gary Hamel
"The day after the lights went down on the World Business Forum, the lights went up on an all day seminar with Gary Hamel across the street at the Time Life Building. It was great to be able to get down to the next level of detail below the talk that Gary gave at the World Business Forum"
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"While we are in here bullsh**ting about strategy, something is happening out there."
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- Capable of transcending the inherent tradeoffs?
- Coordination without centralization
- Scale without inflexibility
- Leadership without formal heirarchy
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Le modèle collaboratif de l'Open Source appliqué à l’entreprise : à quand "l’Open Entreprise" ?
"En cela, le mouvement Open Source rejoint le credo déjà partagé par un grand nombre : nous quittons le monde de l’organisation hiérarchique – command and control - pour entrer dans un nouveau monde plus foisonnant, plus créatif, plus riche humainement. En cela aussi, le mouvement Open Source décline à sa manière les mots : participatif, collaboratif, 2 ou 3.0, communautés, crowdsourcing... "
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La proposition de valeur
organisationnelle de l'Open Source est d’avoir su répondre à la croissance du couple
complexité-temps (toujours plus complexe, plus rapidement), par une intelligence
répartie dans l’organisation. -
La proposition de valeur d’une organisation collaborative à un
dirigeant devient : "dans un monde toujours plus complexe et rapide, pour ne
rien perdre en pouvoir, je répartie la responsabilité".
When Does Anonymous Idea Posting Make Sense?
"Solid advice for any type of social software is that the greater the transparency, the greater the benefit. This means a bias toward making information available to all, not a few. It also means associating contributions to specific individuals. Visibility of contributors gives context, improves the quality of discussions and makes it easier to find individuals with ideas and knowledge on specific subjects.
But there are occasions when it makes sense to allow individuals to contribute ideas without revealing their identity, which Spigit's platform does allow. In these cases, the ideas and related information are visible to anyone who has eligibility to see them. However, participants in the innovation community won't know who submitted the ideas. There are two reasons companies would enable anonymous posting:
1. Employees are concerned about retribution for their ideas
2. Employee identity may influence the feedback others provide"
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Fundamentally, this is a cultural issue. Something in the environment has sent the message that execution more than participative innovation is valued. The foundations of that culture need to be addressed.
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In this scenario, anonymous posting is a bridge to a more transparent culture. It is a temporary feature to be turned off when the core work environment changes.
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Missing Voices: Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak Up At Work
"So why aren’t employees speaking up? And when they do, what are they saying, and to whom? And what’s the danger to the company when it’s not listening to employee voices?
Burris sought to answer these questions in an ongoing study in which he and his colleagues are surveying more than 3,000 employees at 11 different credit unions around the country about their experience in speaking up at work."
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“There’s lots of research that shows when employees don’t feel involved in the workplace, they tend to withdraw. They don’t engage in all the extra activities that aren’t required for the job, such as helping a coworker, staying late or taking on extra responsibilities. It’s not the formal, required part of the job, but it’s certainly necessary for the organization to succeed.”
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Many employees say they don’t speak up to their boss because of fear of repercussions. But are workers just being paranoid? Burris’ research says no.
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Top-down and Bottom-up Project Management: Leveraging the Advantages of the Two Approaches
Significant changes are taking place in management and especially project management today. We hear that organizations, like the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young switched from the so-called top-down management style to bottom-up management. Others, including some of the world’s biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, implemented bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments. The popularity of the bottom-up approach to management is growing. In spite of this fact, the discussions about the two major approaches are still hot. Why have organizations become so anxious about changing their management style? If we compare the two management approaches, the answer to this question will be clear.
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. Team members are invited to participate in every step of the management process. The decision on a course of action is taken by the whole team. Bottom-up style allows managers to communicate goals and value, e.g. through milestone planning. Then team members are encouraged to develop personal to-do lists with the steps necessary to reach the milestones on their own.
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These methods include are Enterprise 2.0 technologies – wikis, blogs, social networks, collaboration tools, etc. They come into organizations and change the original way of executing projects. They turn traditional project management into Project Management 2.0 and bring new patterns of collaboration, which are based on collective intelligence. Collective intelligence is a collection of valuable knowledge from different fields that each project team member is an expert in. This knowledge is now successfully collected and shared shared in a flexible, collaborative environment brought by second-generation project management software. The project manager is the one to conduct the work of his team and choose the right direction for the project development, based on the information received from the individual employees.
To Multitask Effectively, Focus on Value, Not Volume
In organizations however, the implication is much more pernicious because individual performance, for better or worse, is multiplied and amplified many times over. If dozens of people are reducing their effectiveness by multitasking, then the organization runs the risk of being tied up in knots.
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Despite starting the research on 100 college students with the hypothesis that multitaskers had some special abilities, the study found that multitaskers were actually quite ineffective at managing information, maintaining attention, and getting results. Compared to study participants who did things one task at a time, they were mediocre.
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let me suggest that the alternative to multitasking is not single-tasking. In this day and age, that would be too slow. Rather the answer is to shift our mindsets from a focus on volume to a focus on value
Management by Community
Gary Hamel described an innovative management approach that has stuck with me. W.L. Gore management has a hands-off approach to managing employees. Each employee is free to say ‘no’ to any request by a colleague. That’s right. Refuse to do something a colleague asks.
Damn, that sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? No more of those annoying requests that drive you insane.
But doesn’t it also sound like a recipe for anarchy? I mean, companies need employees to get specific things done, on a timely basis. It’s what make companies “go”. You get people refusing to do work, things will grind to a standstill.
All true, if the story stopped there.
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The biggest difference is the primacy given to the peer feedback. It is the crucial input on performance reviews.
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- You want a record of the work you have done, so others will see it and be able to find it
- You need evidence of the work you are doing when you inevitably have to say ‘no’ to someone
One outcome of management by community is that the visibility of one’s work becomes more important than ever. Two reasons for this:
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informal coalitions: Self-organization and emergence: #2 – Organizational dynamics v organization design and development
The particular focus here is on the points I made in response to John Tropea’s interesting vision of what he calls a “role-based” organization. In this, individuals would have greater discretion to organize their own roles and relationships to suit their particular talents and interests
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Despite retaining these beliefs, I would not equate this approach with the idea of “self-organization” in the sense that I now talk about it
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However, the critical thing to emphasize here is that it is the conversational interactions that are self-organizing. And it is through the self-organizing interplay of these ‘local’ conversations across the organization and beyond that ‘global’ outcomes emerge.
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Top 10 Gary Hamel Insights
I had the good fortune to hear Gary Hamel of London Business School's Management Innovation Lab speak on the first day of the Spigit Innovation Summit on August 13, 2009.
Here are the top ten insights that I captured from Gary Hamel's speech:
Gary Hamel: Adaptability is the Key to Survival in the Post-Establishment Age
The point Gary Hamel drives home is that our business and economic environment has irrevocably shifted toward higher volatility and accelerated change. The sundering of companies from healthy industry positions to crisis mode in relatively short order demonstrates the need for updating management philosophies.
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Adaptability is a critical strategy. It means that companies pivot as they learn new information about their markets, competitors and changes in customer behaviors. As noted in a recent Wall Street Journal article noted, companies can try more ideas faster and less expensively than ever:
Netflix: « Plus l’entreprise grandit en taille, plus nous donnons de liberté à nos employés »
Quand une organisation croît en taille, constate Netflix, son fonctionnement devient plus complexe. La direction tend souvent à réagir de la même façon: plus l’organisation grandit, plus elle resserre le contrôle sur ses employés, via Netflixslide des procédures sans cesse plus strictes. Le but: éviter le chaos.
En optant pour cette voie, le management pave toutefois le chemin d’une nouvelle difficulté. Les talents fuient les procédures rigides qui laissent peu de place à la créativité. Soit ils se détournent de l’entreprise. Soit ils passent en mode passif et ne s’investissent plus qu’un minimum.
Sur le court terme, le resserrement des processus peut avoir un impact positif sur le résultat. L’effet, toutefois, n’est pas de longue durée. L’organisation génère des foyers d’inertie. Les employés, valorisés par rapport à l’application des processus actuels, résistent au changement.
Or, l’environnement économique est mouvant. De nouvelles technologies et de nouveaux concurrents apparaissent sans cesse. L’entreprise ne parvient plus à s’adapter assez vite aux nouvelles circonstances de marché.
How to Design a Flat Organization
Take the case of French company FAVI, an autoparts supplier manufacturing copper alloy components. CEO Jean-Francois Zobrist eliminated the personnel department immediately upon taking the helm of the company in 1983. But that wasn’t all he got rid of. Says Zobrist: “I came in the day after I became CEO, and gathered the people. I told them tomorrow when you come to work, you do not work for me or for a boss. You work for your customer. I don’t pay you. They do. Every customer has its own factory now. You do what is needed for the customer.” And with that single stroke, he eliminated the central control: personnel, product development, purchasing…all gone.
Croire en ses outils web augmente leur efficacité
Ce n'est pas la qualité intrinsèque des outils collaboratifs en entreprise qui prime, c'est l’utilité que leur attribuent leurs utilisateurs. Voilà ce que démontre une étude menée l’université de Tel Aviv, et consacrée à la confiance que les collaborateurs mettent dans l'efficacité de leur matériel. Selon l'étude, il est du coup inutile de chercher à tout prix à renouveler le matériel technique ou les plates-formes de partage existantes. Il vaut mieux renforcer la confiance que leurs usagers leur accordent.
The Manager Who Thought He Could Create a Community
Now, you might ask yourself, how in the world can a man create a community? Aren't communities made of people? Aren't they voluntary? Don't they form when people gather together and interact with one another voluntarily based on something they have in common and actually recognize themselves as members of a persistent group? Yes, of course.
Leaders: Listen to Your Salespeople!
Your best salespeople possess vast knowledge about how to connect with and motivate people - and perhaps take the company to the next level. But they rarely get to share their knowledge with senior managers. As a practitioner and student of business-to-business selling for more than half a century, Clif Reichard has learned to translate sales knowledge into leadership knowledge. This post is one in an occasional series.
Why Your Employees Act Like Employees
People follow their leader's example. Have you looked in the mirror lately? Do you use a respectful tone when interacting with your employees and customers? Does your summer wardrobe look more like cruise wear than business attire? Take a close look at yourself, before passing judgment on others.
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