• Stay Home and Work

  Workers of the world, go remote!

  During this time of economic crisis and reinvention of global capitalism, one of the things crying out for reinvention is the rigid workplace of the last century. It is amazing in the digital age that most work is still associated with industrial age work rhythms and the symbolic chains that tie workers, knowledge and otherwise, to fixed locations. Flexible workplaces with flexible hours and days are long in coming.

  tags: telecommuting, flexibility, webworkers, worklifebalance, technology, accountability, collaboration, remotework

• 65 Things I Believe About HR

  tags: HR, management, performance, teambuilding, leadership, performancereview, talents

  • I believe employees want to do a good job.
  • I believe people do what they get rewarded to do.
  • I believe a good manager can make up for a lot of crappy policies.
  • I believe crappy policies and crappy managers should be scrapped.
  • I believe you can’t ask for commitment unless you give it first.
  • I believe there are more hidden superstars out there than we think there are.
  • I believe executives get isolated and lose track of what’s going on.
  • I believe the way we do performance management is awful.
  • I believe HR was asleep at the switch at some doomed financial services companies.
  • I believe people will do a lot more when rules are eliminated.
  • I believe anyone who subscribes to Theory X should never be in HR.
  • I believe HR attracts an inordinate number of people who used to be hall monitors.
  • I believe we have too many processes and not enough systems.
  • I believe teambuilding should be an everyday thing, not done at retreats.
  • • I believe in the company making money.
    • I believe in HR helping employees understand how.

• Go All In with Enterprise 2.0

  So how long does it take to become an Enterprise 2.0 success story? I believe it was Thomas Watson (IBM) that answered the question of how long it takes to become great in business. His response was “one second”. It happens when you decide to be great and willing to make the commitments necessary to make it happen.

  tags: enterprise2.0, adoption, commitment, change, changemanagement

  • What do you say to a business customer that comes to you and says “I want to use this in my business to increase innovation, what is the solution set fro accomplishing this?” If you answer involves something along the lines of “Hmmm, err, You start with, hmmm, a wiki page and then add something…” then you have not committed to your Enterprise 2.0 effort.
  • You set targets, objectives, and share the vision to the entire organization. But in Enterprise 2.0, you took the Filed of Dreams idea of just build it and they will come. When it doesn’t happen you scratch your head and then blame the culture.

• Let’s Professionalize Management

  Management practice could be enhanced–and the odds of another systematic business failure could be reduced–if it were taught and treated as a true professional discipline, like medicine or law. As other professions, management can be seen as the diligent application of specialized knowledge for the resolution of complex problems of great social consequence–namely, the organization of people and resources for the production of goods and services that bring about societal prosperity. The idea is not new–it may be as old as business schools–but it has so far fallen by the wayside.

  tags: management, responsiblemanagement, responsability, globalresponsability, Sustainabledevelopment, ethic, leadership

  • Whatever its final form, a professional code for managers must recognize the multiple forms of value created by an enterprise: not only financial returns to investors, but also professional development for employees, value for clients and suppliers, new technologies, efficient use of limited natural resources, etc
  • It must recognize the inherent obligation of managers to balance the interests of various constituencies in ways that create value simultaneously rather than exclusively.
  • Just like any other professional code, managers need to affirm their commitment to the greater good and to not let personal interest get in the way when serving their enterprise and society at large.

• Projet de transformation : de la méthode SVP

  Mais plus encore que la démonstration, les dirigeants devront sensibiliser les employés sur le fait qu’un projet de transformation n’a pas pour seul objectif d’améliorer le profit de l’entreprise, son expansion / ou sa survie sur le marché. Il a également pour objet de créer des avantages intangibles, tels que le développement des compétences et du travail en équipe, la création d’un environnement de travail plus satisfaisant et bien d’autres avantages encore.

  tags: transformation, change, intangible, intangibleassets

  • Les dirigeants devront donc informer les employés sur la date d’arrêt des anciennes méthodes et par conséquent de la mise en œuvre des nouvelles (sans dérogation possible).

• Entreprise 2.0 : définir un ROI pour convaincre

  Il existe certes déjà des outils et des indicateurs traditionnels pour mesurer certaines de ces notions, mais comment rattacher directement une partie de l’amélioration de ces indicateurs aux effets de l’E2.0 ?

  Il ne s’agit pas d’une mission impossible, car certaines études remontent des indicateurs de ce type. Par exemple, Intranet Statistics nous donne les informations suivantes :

  tags: enterprise2.0, ROI

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Travail collaboratif et gestion des talents

  Cette présentation de Knowledge infusion insiste avant tout sur les changements de pratiques et de cultures liés à la mise en place d’une entreprise 2.0, que ce soit pour les SI, le business model ou la gestion des ressources humaines. Cette démarche en réseau impact aussi la relation client. On va trouver une ouverture plus importante de la part de l’entreprise. Ainsi les clients vont proposer des solutions, des innovations et accompagner ces évolutions. Ce qui réduit grandement les coûts de R&D, marketing, service après-vente…

  tags: talentmanagement, enterprise2.0, humanresources, networks, hierarchy

• Dear Enterprise 2.0,

  You seem to have nailed the technical aspects down but you’re missing or ignoring the most important aspects of this change. My business imperatives are simple: globalization, information management, innovation, speed, ROI, cost transformation, and survival. So when you come to my leader’s office, please be prepared to answer a few questions:

  * How can I integrate these tools within my environment and address my imperatives?
  * What do I need to do for my people? Training? Education? Transformation?
  * What services can be added to the tools to serve my business needs?
  * What solutions can you bring to table to have an immediate impact to my productivity?
  * How do I convince my business managers to replace their current processes with you?
  * How can I measure success and how will I know that I am heading down the right path?
  * What patterns, templates, and success stories do you have to show me?

  I have an enterprise full of people that claim to understand Web 2.0. What I need from you is the implication of 2.0 to my business model. My door is wide open and I am waiting for you,

  tags: enterprise2.0, implementation, management, information, ROI, innovation, web2.0

• 10 DOs and DONTs of organizational change

  I drew on the core ideas in our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report and framework (as above). Enterprise 2.0 is ultimately far more about organizational change than technology, though it happens to be driven by web technologies. As such much of my focus today is on how to change organizations, to literally create the next version of the enterprise. Far more details on how to put the ideas below into practice are in the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report.

  My list got an extremely positive response from the audience, so I thought I’d share it here.

  tags: enterprise2.0, implementation, vision, bestpractices, pilots, change, changemanagement, organizationalchange

• Back to Basics in HR

  It’s time to get back to the basics. If you aren’t questioning every rule and your role as overprotective and overbearing HR parent, then you’re doing it wrong. Let the kids do what they know how to do. Take away the silly rules and you’ll find out they know how to do it right themselves already.

  tags: humanressources, rules, organization

• We are more than our job title describes, so let’s get social!

  “We like to think that people in our [firm] are more than their job title describes, we all have many talents, and we all have many needs to draw on each others talent. This is what we call ’social productivity.”

  tags: talent, talentmanagement, socialproductivity, jobdescription, humanresources, productivity, Enterprise2.0

  • “What proportion of your talent, ideas and experience are used in your job?
    What percentage of your intellectual capital do you use?
    The survey results came back with the response that 70 percent of staff felt that only 15 to 20 percent of their intellectual capital was being used.
  • The rear view mirror no longer reflects the future. Workers need to be able to assess new situations, learn in real time, and improvise solutions.
  • n our practice we are seeing the current economy accelerate profound changes in the fundamental structure and operating principles of organizations. These changes are challenging people to behave in different ways . . . requiring new capabilities.
  • Social computing is a coping mechanism and enterprise 2.0 is what one day may eventually result.
  • Many of us are transitioning away from job to roles based on work for some portion of our organization. This is an important paradigm shift for leaders – ownership for talent is shared. Talent needs to be flexibly deployed against the areas of highest value for the organization.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• The ROI of enterprise 2.0 learning — Informal Learning Blog

  “You can’t manage what you don’t measure” is nonsense. The vast majority of what senior executives manage is immeasurable. They make judgment calls; they play hunches. How else do you select the right people for key jobs? How else do you choose your partners? How else do you divine the future? Organizations pay senior executives handsomely to buy their ability to make wise choices in the absence of simple measurements.

  tags: Enterprise2.0, ROI, management, measurement, intangible, intangiblesmanagement, socialsoftware

• Applications of usability principles on a social network

  Social networks differ from regular websites in 3 fundamental ways:

  1. Activities and content are fully (or at least mostly) driven by the users.
  2. Users are expected to do things on the website – interact, post, vote, etc.
  3. Users are expected to come back to the website periodically and continue to do things.

  As a result of this, social networks should – I say should because not every social network does this – put greater emphasis on usability over, say, a corporate website. Don’t get me wrong, usability is important everywhere you go on the web, but the nature of a social network’s operation makes usability especially important.

  tags: socialnetworks, usability

• Improving and innovating performance management

  Supporting my points about design and engagement in my previous post, the group noted that “the ‘ideal’ system and process still will have to be designed, and accepted”. These are some of the suggestions for improving performance management made within the article:

  * Cascading goals vertically but probably horizontally as well
  * Not using a forced distribution
  * Being based on the organisation’s needs and, where possible, on each employees’ strengths
  * Being employee driven
  * Being fast and frequent
  * Involving the entire community
  * Being web based
  * Being unique – not copying another organisation’s process.

  tags: performance, performancemanagement, humanresources, humanresources2.0

• It’s the economy, stupid.

  tags: no_tag

  • Indeed, like SOA, E2.0 derives the bulk of its value as a function of its success in doing just that. For that reason, and again like SOA, it is supremely sensitive to the vagaries of the true enterprise economy. Sensitive in a way, and to a degree, that a meme with a smaller scope (”let’s do CRM for the sales guys” defines a very small subset of the overall enterprise economy) is not. This is the truth that underlies all of the various discussions of “top down vs. bottom up”, “executive sponsorship” and whatnot.
  • If you think that ROI is a matter of getting some numbers into an Excel spreadsheet, then you are probably building a house on a foundation of economic quicksand. It will likely sink, and that would be unfortunate.

• Preparing for community release

  When we are ready to officially release an email will go out to nearly 8,000 people, but before that time comes we want to be ready.
  To tell you the truth I can’t wait till that time, as we can move on to the next phase of “community consulting”, that is, supporting and facilitating leaders of each community.
  In fact I think we have piloted too many communities that we can support and guide, as we are too busy developing, so it’s important we jump on this soon before the water gets cold for some people.

  tags: communities, communitymanagement, facilitation

• The philosophy of the meta-currency project

  And we call those systems currencies, i.e. trade currencies, reputation currencies, loyalty currencies, performance metric currencies, etc. In each case the flows they interact with, or the ways they interact with flows may be in different realms of social manifestation, just as sound, light and water waves all have wave properties in different realms of physical manifestation. But what we have found, is that once we recognize this common pattern, we experience a paradigm shift: we change our focus from the information tokens, to the flows themselves. We begin to actually be able to see these flows, and see how the flows are what create wealth, and how the information tokens just help us interact with the flows.

  Thus, the goal of the meta-currency project is to create a new expressive capacity, a “flow mechanics” that amplifies our ability to see and shape the flows that underlie healthy social systems. This is much like how “wave mechanics” is an expressive capacity that gave us amplifies our ability to build physical systems.

  tags: metacurrency, currency, openmoney, socialmoney, flows

• The big company and the cloud

  While granting that “clouds are very cost-effective” for small and medium-sized companies, McKinsey argues that a large company would spend considerably more today if it were to shut down its data center and run all its applications out of a utility-computing cloud.

  tags: cloudcomputing, mckinsey, costs, Saas, utility

  • Nevertheless, the McKinsey analysis is a valuable one, not least because it underscores how early we are in the development of the utility-computing grid – and why we shouldn’t expect large companies to begin shutting down their data centers any time soon.
  • The real opportunity that the cloud offers large companies today is as a supplement or complement to their in-house operations rather than as a complete replacement

• Don’t Look for ROI on Enterprise 2.0 – Look for Value!

  And so on. Note, we aren’t building a business case in the financial sense. This is not an ROI exercise – its a business value and outcomes exercise. And this is the type of analysis that needs to be done to shift from the laissez faire “if we build it” to a more thoughtful, targeted approach.

  tags: enterprise2.0, value, valuecreation, ROI

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Beyond the Big Bang: Strategy as Habit

  Instead of strategy as Big Bang, what about strategy as Habit? ALL organizations require strategic thinking to succeed, but few organizations actually face the dramatic moment — ever, or certainly very often. If that is true, then the sweet spot for strategy is something more routine, more “everyman”, more evolutionary, more of a living process. Strategy as Habit has 2 components, in keeping with the 2 primary definitions of the word “habit”: (1) a regular practice and (2) a long, loose garment worn by a member of a religious order. (In case you’ve forgotten that second definition: picture here). Strategic thinking is a recurrent, involuntary action. Our strategy is both a content statement and a style statement, both of which define and identify our team. Strategy is participative. Strategy has structure without being overly constrictive.

  tags: strategy, staff, mckinsey, 7S, socialenterprise, people, peoplecentrism, structure, skills, sharedvalues, values, style, systems, humanresources, talentmanagement, talent

  • When we adjust the original diagram a bit, you start to see that the secret to strategy success — both IMPLEMENTATION and EVOLUTION — is fundamentally the staff.
  • The founding strategy may not start with the people, but its implementation and all subsequent strategy evolutions are hugely influenced by the people. They are the ones, after all, who design the business systems, develop their skills, train each other, shape shared values daily, and project the culture’s style to thousands of customers every day.  They watch competitors on the street, and they listen to prospects who’ve declined proposals.  In all but the smallest organizations, the CEO’s ability to drive the details of strategy execution in all these areas around the company is practically nil. 

• Le surf perso, c’est bon pour la boîte

  Les salariés passent en moyenne 66 minutes par jour sur Internet pour des raisons personnelles, au grand dam de leurs employeurs. Mais d’après un chercheur australien, cela ne ferait que renforcer leur productivité.

  tags: internet, work, workplace, productivity

• Largest ever organizational network analysis shows how social networks drive performance

  1. Structural diversity and centrality of social networks are positively correlated with performance for both individual consultant and project teams.

  2. Strong ties to powerful individuals, such as access to executives, is positively correlated with work performance, however having many weak ties to management is negatively correlated with work performance.

  3. A team with strong ties to the management can be beneficial for work performance, having many managers working on the same project exhibits an inverted U-shape relationship with performance.

  4. Participating in projects with the appropriate social capital can boost consultants‘ work performance in addition to their own social capital.

  tags: socialnetworks, value, management, relationship

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.