No matter your organization is an elephant : it can dance too !

January 26, 2012 By 2 Comments

Summary : What makes a social business project successful ? To what extent question the existing and transform the culture ? Is success possible when top managers are not much concerned ? If we observe three major cases, there’ something obvious : the project was tied to an organizational change wanted by deeply involved CEOs. They become social business projects afterwards because they eventually used some new tools to support a years old approach. The example of IBM in the 90s shows that there are little limits to what’s possible and that arguments that “our culture doesn’t make it possible”, “that won’t work here” or “we’re too big to change” are not relevant.

Whatever the way we consider the problem, there is no example of an enterprise dramatically changing the way it operates without a strong leader deeply attached to a vision of business. Nothing new there since this has been proven right for decades even before words like enterprise 2.0 or social business became trendy.

Successful projects have a couple of things in common : a visionary CEO who is deeply involved, a goal at is not about social business and the courage to challenge the corporate culture. And those who fail ? Top executives that are not concerned and not very involved, projects aiming at implementing a social network and a moto looking like “don’t be rough with people, we’re not ready for that”.

Let’s have a look at a couple of cases.

Alcatel-Lucent. Whoever knew this enterprise 5 or 6 years ago should have been surprised when their project came under the highlights. If there were a place where such a thing could not have worked this should have been Alcatel-Lucent. Yes but…one day came Ben Verwayyen. We all know the story. First an email adress so employees could directly interact with him. Then an internal blog. Then, as his own approach was beginning to influence people in the organization, the need for a social network. All of this because his vision of business is made of words like transparency, accountability and that’s the way that he things a business should be run.

Danone. When a CEO (Antoine Riboud) states, in the early 80s, that “The most successful companies are those that think jointly technological change, work design and the changes in internal social relationships.” much is said. The rest is about sustaining a strong corporate culture. In th 2000s they started a program called “Networking attitude” to favor interactions, ideas exchange and problem solving. A program that was only about behaviors, management and the human side of the organization at a moment when web 2.0 and social networks did not exist. Technology will come years after and won’t be a break but a way to reinforce the corporate project.

Then IBM. Looking at the success of IBM, not as a vendor selling social business solutions but as a social business itself, is very instructive. But a large part of the lesson is missed if we don’t step back in time to learn from the Louis Gerstner era (1993-2002). I just reread the book he wrote about the time he spent at IBM (he also worked for American Express and Nabisco before), Who said elephants can’t dance. This book is very instructive for the very reason that, at this time, internet was not what it is today…and concepts like social networks or “anything 2.0″  where not even a dream. But, in some ways, Gerstner perfectly set the cornerstones that made social business possible ten years later.

This is a very important lesson for all those who think that “it’s not possible in our company”, “we’re too big to change” or “we don’t have to change…we’re the biggest, we’re the best”.

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Filed Under: Books I read, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Enterprises far beyond enterprise 2.0

January 20, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I amused myself proposing a few tracks on what enterprise 2.0 may be in 2009. But I think pushing the reflection beyond would be worth : enterprise 2.0 is only a side of a much complex reality that is enterprise and will be of any use only in a global framework. Since enterprise, and economy in general, can be defined as the place where more and more numerous interactions melts, believing it can be improved by only cosmetic improvements. Evry initiative that’s not aligned with a macro vision that will take all these considerations into account won’t bring anything worthy.

So, let’s put ourselves in the main player’s place.

• The top management

The less we can say is that top management is very worried. Because of the downturn, CEOs are trying to protect the organization. It’s hard to find more revenue so, in order to preserve the result they want costs to be cut. Or spendings, which is not the same thing. In the other hand they know that if they keep on cutting costs, they will soon be unable to make any cent go in the bank so they try to find how to make work more efficient, to work on costs instead of expenses. And, finally, the idea of business networks comes to the surface. But how to make it happen ?

On the other hand, this crises is about something deeper that worries them a lot. Always promising more has its limits and now it seems that these limits have been reached.  Do they have to stop promising the moon since they know organization’s performance have its limit and trying to balance it with financial performance leads to the situation we now know ? Do we have reached the limits of a system and is this crisis the consequence of a management model failure. Do we have to reinvent the way we do business ?

In brief, an increasing demand for more responsability and sustainability in management, that is not so far from a tendency that brings many companies to think their development together with their human ecosystem’s in order not to ruin their tomorrow’s markets.

Many issues that have a lot in common and that, without forseeing the answers that will be given, will have to be taken into account this year.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Businesses and People : performance according to Antoine Riboud

December 29, 2008 By 1 Comment

A reflection that is not very far my usual discourse since it’s about optimization under resource constaintes. Most of all human resources.

Everybody know that a company’s goal is to make money in order to create value for its shareholders without whom it wouldn’t exist.

As time went by the need for making profit was turned into the need for maximizing it. A vision that made possible the strongest and longest period of growth, more than a decade ago. But it seems that the engine is now jamming with consequences we can all observe in our daily lives.

At a corporate level it implies the will of doing always more and keep with growth rates that are incompatible with the mere logic. A logic that becomes counter productive when it lead to halve strategies and promising linear performances where people end one day or the other by meeting a ceiling. Both leading to cyclic crisis.

Outside of companies, this lead to a period when, for the first time, growth creates poverty, this poverty being a threat for tomorrow’s growth, destroying current markets and making it impossible for new ones to emerge.

In one word, we have the evidence that, in order to continue to grow rich tomorrow, people must may not ask for the impossible today. In other words one don’t run a marathon by linkinng up sprints.

The event co-organized by Danone and HEC which I attended recently gave me the idea or reading again a collection of Antoine Riboud’s speeches and interviews (Antoine Riboud : Un patron dans la cité) [Antoine Riboud was the founder of Danone] [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Antoine Riboud was true

February 3, 2007 By Leave a Comment

antoine riboudFor those who don’t know him, Antoine Riboud was the former CEO of BSN now called Danone. This man always had a clear vision of the future of enterprises. A book has been published about all his texts, conferences, reports and I wanted to point a report he made on 1987 at the request of Jacques Chirac (who was prime minister at this time).

The theme is “Taylorism is dead and now enterprises have to bet on their employee’s intelligence“. Riboud crossed the world to see what was happening in foreign countries, foreign companies to have a clear vision of what was really going on.

He saide (I quote) :

The act of production isn’t efficient and profitable untill it makes the most of the whole productive capital. In this purpose we need their rigour, their imagination, their autonomy. The ability to obey, to repeat, of strenght, everything that’s a mastered routine, is now outdated. The most outstanding enterprises will be those who will jointly take in account technological development, work content and change in social relations in the enterprise”

So, where are we twenty years later ? His analysis never seemed so true. What did companies do ? They have taken into aucount one, two, seldom three of the points he mentionned. But never jointly. Perharps it’s time to realize that this word, “jointly” was the most important of his sentence.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , ,