Many challenges and lots of progress to make for HR according to IBM

October 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

IBM recently issued a study after having gathered insights from more than 700 Chief Human resources officers, titled “Working Beyond Borders”.. I let  you peruse this long and interesting document but here’s in a few lines some of my takes from it.

Let’s start with te conclusion. As we could expect, it confirms what many people have been knowing for years : in today’s economic context and makets, HR’s main challenge is to develop work “beyond the borders”. What does it mean ?

  • ability to work out of the enterprise silos and collaborate acrosse functions, departments, countries.
  • ability to work out of the enterprise boundaries with partners, clients
  • ability to work out of one’s own competence boundaries : mobilize expertises one don’t have and acquire new ones in a flexible and responsive way.
  • ability to mobilize out of one’s comfort and authority zone what implies to develop new forms of leadership.

These are creativity, agility and flexibility challenges that CHROs want to address in many ways

  • Develop creative leaders that will tackl challenges and opportunities in a new way that’s more adapted to our times. Kind of “intrapreneurs” able to react in an innovative way and engage people around them.
  • Develop speed and flexibility by simplifying processes and making employees more responsive.
  • Capitalize on collective intelligence by finding new ways to connect people

Even more interesting, one of the many illustrations of the study

It’s the evidence that while there are domains where CHROs find themselves efficient, some remain where about which they acknowledge not being effective although they will be critical in the future : fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing, developing leaders and developing workforce skills.

Now that that’s everybody know in what direction to head…the only thing to do is to work on that. The road seems very long but the amount of opportunities is more than worthy.

One more point to conclude :

I think there’s nothing to add. Just do it…

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

Grasp all, lose all : when “liking” is too easy to be true

June 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

Either internal or external, social media approaches rely on some well-known principles. Among them are serendipity and wisdom of crowd. Both these principles rely on the emission of social signals that allow, in the one case, people tobe driven from an information they were looking for to one they didn’t know it existed and, in the other case, to collect opinions, votes, ideas from a given community or network in order to make decisions.

At the very beginning of social networks, things were simple : bloggers used to write about what they liked and were driving (unconsciously or lot) both serendipity and wisdom of crowd. Then came twitter. No need to write a long article, to argue, to invest too much time : everything has to fit in 140 chars. Upside : emitting a signal became very easy. Downside : less arguments, explainations. And the “retweet” that makes it easy to forward any third part information to one’s network makes it even easier. That’s the “one-click signal”, without any qualitative contribution by the emitter.

Because of that we can witness an impressive proliferation of signals, what is a good thing because the “base” that drives us, our choices, browsing is wider. But the dark side is not far : the simpler the act of emitting is, the less engaging it is. Guess how many people retweet a link without reading it, for the only reason that the title looks interesting. Or, maybe, just because of a gregarious instinct : “I don’t want to be the one who’ll not RT an information that everyone is retweeting”.

At this point, a first paradoxical observation has to be made : solutions used to widen the base, what is supposed to increase the reliability of signals, makes signals less engaging even though what makes a signal valuable is the fact someones decide to produce it and invests time to do so what is an engagement indicator. Before, publishing something was the consequence of a desire to inform, to share. Today it may only be dictated by a follow-the-crowd attitude. I don’t mean this kind of attitude wasn’t existing before…only that proportion may have changed with time…

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Filed Under: Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , ,

Personal branding is not about self promotion but collective intelligence

September 17, 2009 By Leave a Comment

It’s incredible to see how the subject became fashionable in a few months (anyway in France) and how many experts suddenly emerged on the subjec. As  Vincent Berthelot [fr] I was rather taken aback about what it was all about but, at the end, I came to a quick conclusion:

- if everyone is transparent and shows what he/she really is, it can be a good thing.

- in the same way, personal branding must come with an ongoing improvement approach : “how to improve in order to be what I want to show”. By the way, it’s the same for any corporate/product branding logic.

- if we want the system to work, everyone has to respect the rules, what means admit than X or Y is better than me and should receive more attention than me. I don’t think it’s possible, for the only reason that human are human and the human nature is what it is…most of all when a job or a contract are at stake.

- hence the unavoidable drift toward a classical self-marketing approach, driven by the bottom but that “honnest” people will have to follow not be had by less competent but more crafty people.

- and, as a conclusion, as said in this famous slideshow, “If your product sucks, social media won’t fix it”. It also applies to people.

That’s how I sup up my neophytic thoughts on the subject. But, thanks to a long talk with Olivier Zara [fr] a few month ago I understand there’s a huge potential here, provided people can make the difference between gimmick practices that will discredit the concept and the “good practices” that will be collectively beneficial. I’m not only talking about the general public web but also about things that may take place within organizations.

In fact, it’s, one more time, a matter of switching from a push logic to a pull one.

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

Web 2.0 : a more realistic systemic approach

October 7, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This could have passed unnoticed. In a post about Dell an the fact their online shop was more 2.0 than their ideagora Ideastorm, Tim O’Reilly made his definition of web 2.0 seriously evolve from the original one.

For your information, here his the “original” defintion as it can be found on wikipedia today.

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.

A visionnary definition that was victim of the too many interpretations it allowed and gave rise to techno-centric trends. If the web’s flexibility made it possible to get out of that, adapting the definition to the enterprise’s world, aka enterprise 2.0, which was something like “using blog and wikis within the enterprise” did more harm than good to the E2.0 concept, even if Andrew McAfee refind the termis of its definition from the use of web 2.0 tools within the enterprise to the use of emergent social tools within the enterprise and with clients and partners as I noticed in Montreal in may.

In brief, O’Reilly introduced a major evolution of its vision. Even if I often find discussions about definitions more funny than useful, what this one implies deserves that we have a closer look at it.

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Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Great : Jean-François Noubel on collective intelligence at the Global HR Forum

June 29, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A little bit lenghty but it’s really worth !

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Knowledge & Information management, Management & HR, strategy, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Does education cause a lack of collaboration ?

December 27, 2006 By Leave a Comment

images-31.jpegWhen we’re young we’re taught a lot of “good principles” we keep deep in our mind as we grow old. We consider them as undisputable and they really affect the way we act with other peoples in our adult life. The fact is at the time we’re in search of collective efficiency, those principles quickly become freezing elements.For example :

• One only succeed alone : if you’re a good professional you must succeed by your own. We believe in this so much that we prefer not to do anything or make it imperfectly rather than to say “I need other’s people skills, I need their help to make it right”.

• Never copy ! Remember when you were at school… Copying is good because it allows you to use your time to improve existing things rather thant re-inventing them. Without copy innovation is harldy possible. Cheating is bad. Not copying.

• Don’t help others ! Not only we were not suppose to copy from our neighbour, but it was reprehensible to let him copy from us. The consequence was we were nearly building around our exercices to be sure the teatcher would be sure we didn’t give others people any opportunity to copy from us. Years later it’s not easy to understand we have to collaborate and share…

• Don’t talk with people you don’t know ! so we hesisate to share and exchange with people who are in the same company, in the same team, with whom we share the same projects and objectives.

• Don’t talk about you ! So be sure nobody will notice your expertise and will offer you to collaborate in the more challenging projects.

The purpose was to set well-manered people. The result of all that is that the educationnal systems build autistic people at the time we need professionnals who are easy with collaboration and interaction. And it’s so hard to make people change when they’ve been fed with such principles for years.

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , ,

Management 2.0 (3): (potential) Definition

September 29, 2006 By Leave a Comment

management20Let’s try to build a defintion, starting from that and that. It’s a kind of “definition in progress” so your feedback is very welcome. So how to define the management 2.0 concept?

” Implementation of managerial practices favorising the emission of any kind of information or knowledge by any king of actot to any kind of recipient, implementation of collaborative practices, the whole being dedicated to build a collective intelligence and practices supported by all the staff’s potentals, taken individually in purpose to gather them in an intelligent entity of wich they are actors without being merged in it.
Those practices adoption supposes to implement an information system that would be people-centric enough to support them. This IS would be as well consequency and support of these practices.

The key factor of success of these both side of the approach is to work as well on people (management practices and individual behaviors) and on the IS which flexibily would allow him to fully support humain behaviors and adapt itself to the organization challenges”.

Hum…very “heavy but I think everything’s in. And above all, what’s the big stake: working on people and systems together and make the IS (mainly the intranet) become people-centric.

Any questions? Something to add? Think you can improve it?…I’m waiting for your comments.

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

Organizational learning (2) and KM lawyers

September 7, 2006 By Leave a Comment

intelligenceThis is the second part of my post about organizational learning. It will end with a little case study about KM in law companies.

In the second part of the process (double loop learning), the company is able to change its routines, process, strategy according to what is learned from experience. It made me think about a few things.

What about the learning process?

Organization will learn from experience…and so what? How can we say some experience is more important, more valuable than another? Who will decide of the changes that have to be made consequently.

All feed back comes from operational people. All decision come from managers. What’s important is to know how information goes from operationals to the management. If there are too many filters the process may be unusefull for the only reason that one never dares talking his superior about things that go wrong. Censorship and autocensorship are learning process’ most important enemies.

In the same way, considering decisions are to be made taking in account collective experience and feedback, how are people associated in decision making?

A double loop learning process supposes that, according to me, experience is collected, people share it and discuss in ordre to know what’s important, management aknowledge something may change and all concerned people help management to make the better decision because they are closer to the market, they are those who know the best the impact of decisions.

Which tools can help to make such a process easy and valuable.

I’m convinced that what the report on intranet’s best practices calls collaborative driven intranet would be an efficient support. A real Intranet 2.0 based on sharing and discussion. Something like blueKiwi for example as it’s the first real integrated  intranet 2.0 I’ve ever seen.
About KM Lawyers

I found a very interesting article in a french economic newspaper called “la tribune”. It was about KM in law companies where top level lawyers are monitoring law actuality to build company’s doctrine.

I didn’t knew about this special kind of lawyers and it seems to me it’s a perfect example of collaborative process in the way of managing collective intelligence.

I’m sure that such people would like to use an intranet that not only allow them to share but also to discuss, comment and co-build their doctrine. This should be a typical case of a relevant use of an intranet 2.0, considering the context, the needs and the writing culture of the occupation.

Filed Under: Innovation, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Organizational learning (1): concept and questionning

August 9, 2006 By Leave a Comment

intelligenceOrganization learning (OL) was defined in 1978 by Argyris and Schon as the “correction and detection of errors”. So a learning organization is a company that take benefit of its experience to improve its practices.Argyris and Schon identified three kinds of organization learning:

- Single loop learning: based on errors’ detection and correction in order to fulfill the same purposes as before. The firm keeps the sames goals and strategy

- Double loop learning: single loop learning + modification of process, routines, strategy and objectives.

- Deutero learning: the firm is learning how to deal with single and double loop learning: necessity of learning and adapted processes are in the center of this phase.

Single loop is only concerned by change, Double loop and Deutero are concerned by “why and how” and questions about core beliefs, strategy, and the company’s fundamentals.

So, let have a few questios about that:(we’ll talk about that in a next post…)
- in wich measures OL is a step to intelligent firms, which other steps are necessary to go from one to the other?

- as feedback is essential in OL, how is it collected, managed, treated (individually, collectively, at which level of the company?)

- which factors are key in such a process…and what were the braking factors.

- did this theory have a real impact, or was it only partially adopted?

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