Enterprise 2.0 and culture : change or do with it ?

December 2, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : Behind culture there are one thousand things, more or less objective or real to explain with more or less sincerity what prevent organizations and people from changing. Enterprise 2.0 faces the same kind of problems even if it’s not specific to it.  Acknowledgement : it’s an real concern that can be counterbalanced by corporate culture in some cases. There are many and varied solutions to override this issue but all are imperfect and none is universal. However, a difference as to me made between the impact of culture on behaviors than can be offset overtime with the right incentives and what has to deal with cultural identity that people will over try to protect against any change.

During the last Enterprise 2.0 summit I gave a talk about cultural boundaries and their impact on enterprise 2.0 and the transformation processus. This post is the occasion to sum up some of the discussions that followed my presentations as well as some thoughts I gathered from insightful posts that have been published since then.

To begin, we have to admit that this problem is as old as the world and did not wait for the raise of enterprise 2.0 to impact organizations. It’s a kind of usual suspects that’s pointed at every time something new is being implemented within a defined human, geographic, linguistic scope.

• A double importation issue seen from Europe

The question, in Europe, is that even before thinking of implementing enterprise 2.0 within european boundaries, it’s a north american concept that has to be imported. That’s easier in some countries for two reasons. The first is that the concept and many implementation strategies rely on positive thinking, what’s far from being a common attitude here. Then comes a systematic reaction towards what comes from overseas. The famous “it comes from overseas so it won’t work here”. What means many things. The first is rather a protectionist reflex, the second is a lack of self-confidence (“we won’t be able to make it work”). Note that the same arguments may be used wherever the change comes from. To be more specific on the second point, as I mentioned here, I see things changing and, as time flies, european organizations realize that they can make it, what has an interesting chain effect.

So that’s a concept that has to be “Europeanized” in terms of wording and levers before thinking to spreading it.

• A question that’s not only European.

Europe is not the only part of the world where the values that come with enterprise 2.0 may be problematic. In fact, problems will rise every time something has to be adopted and shared within people who have another identity (culture, language etc..). Maybe that’s a real concern in europe but the same kind of thing can be experienced inside one unique country. And let me tell you things may be much more complicated when we’ll have to deal with some asian countries.

• A false problem [Read more...]

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

The death of oral exchanges in the workplace ?

September 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Résumé :some people are more comfortable with oral exchanges, some others with written ones. Similarly, some companies have a culture that’s more “latin” than others. Before even thinking of changing the way people work we have to admit that some of the tools that have to support these new ways of working do not fit a part of the workforce and even many companys for which switching from oral to written  is vert hard. Does it mean that enterprise 2.0 is doomed to failure ? Will the upcoming evolution happen to detriment of oral culture cimpanies ? No, because tools are getting more oral themselves. But a question remains : will tools evolve before many people give up ?

Do you prefer oral or written communication ? And your enterprise ? We all have our own preferences, each company has its culture and an efficient work requires to find the right balance between staff preferences and the corporate culture.

This is not trivial at all. Imagine two people having to work together, who have a very good relationship together, if one is more “oral” and the other more “written’ it may cause many issues and misunderstandings in their everyday work. Imagine a high level executive who joins a new company, if he’s “oral” in a very formal organization or very formal in an oral culture company, things will be very difficult.

That clearly impacts the capacity any organization has to change the way it works, to embark on social media. What, seen from a different standpoint, could be turned into : “will enterprise 2.0 kill oral cultures ?”.

Traditionnally, organizations favor written things. More reliable, more “engaging” while words only engage those who hear them, easier to track and to be used as an evidence the day someone has to find what has gone wrong and why. But there are also organizations where people prefer to talk together rather than write, where the direct human contact is prefered. The Chief HR Officer of a company of this kind once used the word “latin” to describe their culture when we were discussing this kind of issue together. That’s the same for people, each have their prefered way of communicating.

The fact is that writing is the enteprise 2.0 tool’s favorite way of communicating. It’s easy to understand why. [Read more...]

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

Are in-the-flow activities a cure against cultural barriers ?

January 7, 2010 By 1 Comment

The importance of culture on the success of enterprise 2.0 projects is now acknoledged by everybody. The issue was widely discussed at the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Franfort where I took part in a panel about it. Even apart from this specific session, culture was the hot topic in many discussions during the breaks and the lunches what proves that beyond the agenda of the conference this subject was naturally coming to the surface.

Besides that, let me make a short aside about that. I appreciated a lot to see some our overseas counterpart showing interest about this point. Even if Dion Hinchliffe can often be seen in events taking place in Europe, the attendance of Gil Yehuda who wanted to “see by himself how things were going here and have a better understanding of our context” (if I remember well his words) was a really good news. I don’t even mention those who would have liked to be there but couldn’t due to the closeness to the San Francisco Enterprise 2.0 Conference. In short, on the heels of all the discussions on  blogs or on twitter, both sides of the Ocean are beginning to get  closer, listen to one another and the idea that there is not one adoption model that is supposed to work everywhere emerges. So any international project has to take all local issues into account. In my opinion, discussions and cooperations between Europe and the US will be a major trend in 2010…

This allowed Gil to write two insightful notes (here et here) about his discovery of the german market.

Coming back to the conference’s discussions, it was very easy for each of us to find many example of cases where cultural issues impacted a project. Sometimes it was local culture (country or even region), sometimes corporate culture, or even language issues that are often cleared with the back the hand (“How course, all our employees are fluent in english and many other languages…”) and often come back as a boomerang. I also learned with interest by people from CSC that beyond the strict adoption, depending on countries, people do not necessarily use the same functionalities or don’t use them the same way.

In the “Culture hurts” series, competing to find the most painful experience was not hard at all. But, as conclusion was coming up, I felt that something was missing. Culture is obviously a key issue in many projects but…many projects went well without any problems due to cultural issues. Sometimes it was because culture has been properly addressed, but some other times it was because culture forgot to bother us. And, in my opinion, it was not always a matter of luck.

So I tried to quickly gather the common denominator of all theses projects (of course its only reflects my own experience). And the conclusion was obvious : most of times, the projects that successfully neutralized the cultural issues were those that favored the “in the flow ” dimension rather than the “over the flow” one.

This is also the difference between community management and team management : the first needs feeling like participating, conviction, and cultures plays a big part to make people decide whether to get involved or not, the second only needs people to follow the “official way of doing things” and, even if the cultural dimension does not disappear, it’s less impacting because people’s free will does not have much room.

I also found a corroborating voice in Andrew McAfee’s book (Enterprise 2.0) that also concludes that over the flow activities may not lead to a massive and uniform participation, contrary to in-the-flow activities.

So I let you draw you own conclusions from your own experience (and comments are welcome) but it seems that it’s something that as to be taken into account when designing an enterprise 2.0 project in a multicultural context. Maybe we can also consider that the best way to reassure people and make them feel more comfortable with the “over the flow” is to start with “in the flow” that is more worklow oriented but less involving.

This is one more argument in favor of in-the-flow activities which, more than properly addressing the sense and alignent issues also allow to lower the cultural risk.

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

Enterprise 2.0 : what’s the missing link ?

May 5, 2009 By 1 Comment

Knowing why enterprise 2.0 sometimes failed to deliver its promises is now a maintream issue. I’m talking about turning the promise into results because the question of knowing whether the promise is well-founded or not has already been answered. Many examples, such as Cisco‘s, show that it’s possible and that it actually works. But some other, with the same technologies used for the same purposes, show that the results are hard to bring. What may imply that the success factor has to be found in the context.

I’m currently working on a deeper reflection but I’d like to share my first impressions. What seems to be lacking most of times is :

• Visualization : people, staff, even managers, don’t “visualize” what they are expected to, they can’t imagine and “see” themselves in the future context. Neither in terms of behaviors nor in terms of using tools.

• Listening and understanding : as paradoxical as it may seem, although we’re talking about “people-centrism”, it seems that staff can’t express their feeling toward the current situation, the way they understand the “promised future” and the questions that come to their mind, at any time.

• The first step : even if everyone agree on the targeted goals and the way to achieve them, it seems that the “first step” is often lacking. It’s about the approach that starts, not from standard starting point but to each staff member’s proper situation. Not those who explain how “any people in any company” achieves a successful transition but those who explain how M. Smith, working at BigCorp inc. can do it, taking into account his job’s context, the corporate culture etc…

This takes me to the final question : how many companies try :

1°) To exactly understand what they’re aiming at, what’s the state of the art, what’s been done elswhere.

2°) To take over it and translate it into their context, into each function, job description instead of making a cut & paste of what the others are doing or starting without any idea of what the concrete result will be. If this is not done, enterprise 2.0 is launched disconnected from the real enterprise just when what matters is the “real enterprise”, everything 2.0 having to merge into the global schema.

3°) To make a real diagnosis of the current situation, to identify the desired and undesired consequences of change in order to make the first possible and prevent the others from happening.

Recently, Harold Jarche told me that the missing link was management. Even if  it can sound provocate, I’d say it’s people (paradoxical, isn’t it ?). The the one is the consequence of the other…

More about this later…

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

Can enterprise 2.0 spread without adhocracy ?

June 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

The fact that more and more people agree on the fact that enterprise 2.0 is mainly about the way we do things takes us back to corporate culture issues.

It’s not something that’s easy to deal with. Since it’s been proved that culture is a key performance factor and that it’s important to recruit people who are aligned with the corporate culture, one logical attitude would be to say “strengthen and preserve it”.

It’s also proved that launching a project which may not be aligned with the culture is like organizing failure. Which is logical because it would be like asking an enterprise to act the way she is not, to ask people to act according to values which are not those those they were hired for.

That leads us to the central question : what to do is your culture is not aligned with the goals you want to achieve [Read more...]

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Enterprise 2.0, Management 2.0, HR 2.0 and Culture 2.0 according to Jon Husband

May 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

As I wrote earlier, for most of Webcom audience, Jon Husband’s Keynote was the most impressive (actually it seems he enjoyed it too)

Jon had the kindness to send me his slides so I can share some of them with you.

[Read more...]

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Creating a corporate memory is about telling stories

April 27, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I really believe conversations are key to capturing tacit knowledge, best practices,  all those things that are parts of the individual’s patrimony and can only be captured an harnessed by stimulating individual memories through conversations, since they are the most accessible form of knowledge.

Hence the necessity to provide the organization with tools that make those open discussions and their stimulation possible, just as their capitalization.

Most often, when I talk about conversations it’s about best practices, knowledge transfer, everything that can suport the business function and I think there’s nothing more to say on this point, but this note from Scott Monty made me think of another dimension that would really fit with the idea of “corporate memories”, going beyond pure business to adress corporate culture purposes. [Read more...]

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

Tools won’t seduce digital natives. Culture will.

April 16, 2008 By 1 Comment

Recruiting Digital Natives make companies ask lots of questions. Some of their concerns are not justfied, and we can also read many nonsenses.

“They have their habits, their own way to do things, with their own tools…we only have to adopt those tools to seduce them”. Wrong ! They don’t juge by appearances (or as we say in french, “a cowl doesn’t make a monk”. That’s not the way to attract them. Even if they come, they’ll leave soon.

What matters isn’t tools but culture. A certain culture implies a certain way of working, a certain kind of organization, and at the end, the relevant tools to support it. Tools are only the proof that alignment was made. Put wikis, blogs, social networks, IM, make it available oustide the firewall, make people and information accessible without changing anything else and you’ll fail. They won’t come, leave quickly or will be very disapointed, whith the feeling of having been tricked. Claim you are what you are not and you won’t be believed for long. The difference between marketing and reality is aligment.

Then the first thing to think about is “what are our future stakes” and “do we need to change the way we operate”. The operating modes will soon need new tools to support them. And at this time things will be coherent.

And what about culture ? It’s an objective, not a starting point, you can’t decree it (unless you already have the needed one). It will evolve because of both new internal practices and recruitment of people who are like you or like what you want to become. A self-feeding phenomenon.

Believing that tools will make your enterprise trendy is mistaking question for its answer : he point is not about attracting digital natives but attracting those who’ll serve your goals and being able to take the most of their potential. Provided their skills match your needs….

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Managing Complexity : Danone Tries to Spread its Values through a Business Game

April 7, 2008 By Leave a Comment

“Managing Complexity” or “Managing in complexity” is a very common word at this time. This only means people have to take into account more and more changing factors before making a decision. It may seem obvious but it’s still useful to remind some people of that as we can see too many managers acting as if everything was still binary, predictable.

Complexity also depends on the company, its values. There is what is strictly necessary (figures, reporting) what is often considered as accessory (context, non structured information) and the icing on the cake : values which respect is adding and added complexity. Let’s also add the necessity of taking into account elements from outside the company. I’ll soon make a post about that but I’m often appaled when I see that so many people don’t pay any attention to what’s happening outside the organization’s walls : no intelligence, no weak signals detection, no benchmark. They live looking at each other and become victiom of the NIH and MCID syndroms (Not Invented Here and My Company Is Different), which is an organizational form of consanguinity.

In short, some companies are culturally more likely to take “others” into account when it comes to make decisions. By “the others” I mean employees but also all the ecosystem, the social reality the enterprise lives in.

This introduces two projects from Danone I’d like to talk you about : Danone Way Ahead and Trust by Danone

Ce qui m’amène à vous parler de deux initiatives mises en œuvre chez Danone : le programme Danone Way Ahead et Trust by Danone. [Read more...]

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

Enterprise is not a closed system : the Starbucks example

March 22, 2008 By 2 Comments

No company can (sur)vive isolating itself from the outside. In the other hand it has to grow richer because of all its ecosystem and consider it as an allied, not an enemy. There are many reasons for that.

- improve the way it benchmarks by taking the most of ideas and feedbacks coming from what’s essentiel : its market, its clients, its community.

- avoid being overtakes : whatever people talk. It’s better joining the discussion and learn from it than turning a deaf ear. Doing disconnects a company from its ecosystem and doesn’t help building a welcoming brand.

- keep control : it’s useless putting barriers where a tidal wave is coming : there are many chances for  barrage gives away. In the other hand, by funnelling the wave you can create energy.

- starting a costless BI approach.

That’s exactly what Starbucks is doing with MyStarbucksIdea et dont Pascal Veilleux nous parle ici. Pas besoin d’en dire plus, son article résume fort bien la situation. As its CEO says :

Welcome to MyStarbucksIdea.com. This is your invitation to help us transform the future of Starbucks with your ideas-and build upon our history of co-creating the Starbucks Experience together.

And just like in our stores, our curious and passionate Starbucks partners are here. Engaging in daily conversation-bringing the warm, human connection of a great Starbucks experience to this online community.

So, pull up a comfortable chair and participate in My Starbucks Idea. We’re here, we’re engaged, and we’re taking it seriously.

Some say there’s a risk to see competitors come and take Startbucks’ ideas. It’s a wrong problem : the same facts must not have the same consequences for two companies. Depending on their culture, two companies having the same information are supposed to act two different ways. Just cloning one’s competitors lead to failure. The approach my be the same, results have to be different instead one don’t assume the importance of corporate culture.

But first, information has to be gathered.

Whatever, information marketplaces are a very heavy trend, a young model that will take more and more importance.

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