Socializing your decision making process

August 4, 2009 By 1 Comment

A good example of process socialization is about decision making. A few weeks ago I read this interesting paper from Olivier Sibony (Associate Director at McKinsey). Since the article is in French I hope Google Translator will provide you with a good english translation.

What is it about ?

Making the right decisions is key to be a successful business. Nothing new here. But Olivier Sibony provides us with interesting numbers.

. Between those who have used the analysis tools the most advanced and recognize those who were far away, the performance gap is important: 2.7 points in return on investment between them. But those who have followed a process of rigorous and objective decision showed a much higher performance: the gain is 7.3 points ROI ! In other words, there are three times more to gain by using a method of decision-making!

The impact of a good decision is obvious and its ROI clear enough to justify enteprises invest in what makes it possible. It would seem obvious that the solution is to be brought by analysis tools and the definition of relevant indicators. Nothings social here. At first sight…

[Read more...]

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

My Webcom 2009 in a few words

May 14, 2009 By Leave a Comment

You may have a few ideas of what I liked at webcom if you followed my twitts yesterday, but before going deeper into each topic into future posts, here’s what I found really interesting. Some thoughts, ideas, favorites in a jumble

• Don’t refuse abnormality because it’s tomorrow’s normality. Cycles from the one to the other are getting shorter and shorter. Companies have to understand what something that is abnormal today means. It’s, once again, a matter of culture and its impact on decision making and organizational performance.

• “Open is the future”. Open stack, open mesh, open social.. But there are cases when, according to me, it can be counter productive. Anyway it’s the best (and only ?) mean to fight against personal fragmentation on many social platforms, private or corporate, and to turn into a platform centric world into a people centric one. Everything can be portable, not everything must be. Toward an “open governance” ?

• Turning the pyramid model into a network. Nice, I wrote about that this morning. But this just don’t happen by luck and a preliminary analysis is desirable. I was really impressed by Jessica Lipnack (Netage) presentations and the use of the l’Orgscope. According to me it’s an essential approach to design an enterprise 2.0 project, knowing that it as to articulate with the actual corporate structure and its purpose which is to produce, deliver processes. But it implies a deep understanding of how things are actually getting done today.

• Then came the “usual suspect”. Companies are facing challenges that will force them to adopt new tools. Even if there’s nothing new for those who know him, Claude’s approach, relying on demographic, sociological elements and cross-generation dynamics is still relevant. More than the “2.0″ dream that relies on unexpected serendipity miracles. Another traditional issue is open innovation about which Innocentive is still relevant according to its deep experience and their record of achievements.

• And a little “family touch to end. The very refreshing presentation made by Cyrille de Lasteyrie (CEO  Hellotipi) had two interests. The first was to show how a strong message could be delivered through storytelling without mentionning a product or service. The second is that he made us think about the sociological dimension of social media, about people’s concerns about privacy an about cross-generations dynamics that are made possible by massive social media adoption within the society. I have no doubt that businesses will have a lot to learn  to what will happen in these family networks because the person that walks though his office’s door is the same than the one who shares pictures of his baby with his family. Beyond constrained behavioral changes, his expectations and fears remain the same in his mind.

A last word about the conference itself. Wifi worked perfectly well what does not happen so often in such events. But it was a pity for all those who couldn’t attend that the streaming didn’t work (but all the videos will be put online soon).

It was my second time at webcom (always in may…I’m affraid of the weather at the november session ;-) ). I attend very few conferences to protect myself from the “bowl” effect : always being with people who think like you often makes you forget the “real enterprise”. Here, a lot of “real” people, looking for answers to their concerns, I really had the impression that something is transmitted instead of self-contragulating among “experts”. Of course, there were the speeches (interesting, no bla-bla that only highlight the speaker without any value for the audience), the business contacts…but also a human contact with the people, the city, I hardly find elswhere. A business event that makes you feel well is so rare…

It’s really worth crossing the ocean. Anyway, we don’t have such a “web, business and enterprise” conference in France. A real pity.

Entreprise 2.0, hiérarchie, innovation participative, montreal, netAge, open innovation, organigrammes, organisation, orgscope, réseaux-sociaux, web-2.0, webcom, webcom2009,décision,performance organisationnelle,

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

Considering the gap between management 2.0 and enterprise 2.0

February 24, 2009 By 1 Comment

I’ve been neglecting the management 2.0 topic for a long time although it was what this blog was about since 2005. Last years I slowely slipped from management 2.0 to enterprise 2.0, even if I find it sad that there were so many people to discuss about of make companies use 2.0 tools than people wanting to focus on building a new management framework in which these tools would make sense. But this question is coming back like a boomerang while companies are slowly realizing that small side adjustments won’t be enough to make tools useful and that a systemic overhaul is needed to make tools serve as catalyssts in a new organization model.

In february’s issue of the Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel put this issue back to the headlines with an article called “Moon shots for management” which clearly defines management issues for the upcoming years.

Namely :

[Read more...]

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Organizing for value

July 19, 2008 By Leave a Comment

One more interesting report at McKinsey’s : this one is titled : “Organizing for value“. You will learn that

- the traditional divisional structure is not relevant to create value

- companies will have to fav our long term value creation instead of focusing on achieving short terms objectives.

- in order to  do that they’ll have to identify “future” value

- this implies a thiner granulity in organization and decision making

- where companies used to have 4 or 5 divisions, 50 “value cells” would to a better job.

Quite interesting because this new awareness of the “short-term mitake” will help justifying, financially, adequate organizational answers. The fact decision making is moving closer to the ground, in smaller structures which are now considered as value creator, that they were not in a wider structure in which their purpose may not be profitable, is also the proof things are (slowly) going the right way.

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

Do (some) managers sabotage their organization ?

June 12, 2008 By 3 Comments

Two people from the CIA gave a talk during last Enteprise 2.0 conference. They cited a 1944 manual which was about sabotage a business from the inside :

(1) Insist on doing everything through “channels.” Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make “speeches.” Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your “points” by long anecdotes and accounts of per­sonal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate “patriotic” comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for “further study and considera­tion.” Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of com­munications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate “caution.” Be “reasonable” and urge your fellow-conferees to be “reason­able” and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the juris­ diction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

Hum…have you ever seen such behaviors within any enterprise ? ;-)

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

Quotations between provocation and good sense

June 3, 2008 By 1 Comment

Sometimes I find sentences which are really worth by themselves, that have a lot of meaning, whether in or out of their original context. I often bookmark them but this time I think they’re worth a post. As a matter of fact I find two series of nice quotations in two posts I recently read : the first from Andrew McAfee are more about provocation (but provocation is sometimes useful to make people wonder), the second is from Jon Husband and  is more about good sense.

So…let’s start with provocation :

Tim Brown, IDEO: Creative people aren’t interested in management.
Hal Varian, Google: ‘Statistician’ is the sexy job of the 21st century.
Henry Mitzberg, McGill: We are not living in time of great change. Companies will not save the world.
Eric Abrahamson, Columbia:  Organizations are over-organized.
Yves Doz, INSEAD: The danger is to think that what’s new is exciting and good, while what’s old is bad and tired.
Keith Sawyer, Washington University: People are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: The centralization of decision-making is a conceptual error. Individuals are not better than the collective.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford: The language of economics is toxic to the practice of management.
Kevin Kelly, Wired: Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.

…and finish with good sense :

“Networks make organizational politics and culture explicit“  (Michael Schrage, MIT)

“The most difficult thing about IBM’s transformation was that so many people delegated responsibility upwards” (Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO)

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust“  (Warren Bennis, USC)

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

Talking with Michel Hervé about turning the pyramid upside down

March 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

You problably don’t know Michel Hervé and that’s a pity since thy guy is really worth being exported. This entrepreneur is well known for his book “from the pyramid to the networks”  (unfortunately only available in french) that describes the way he run his business, has he says, in a participative and democrat way.  Something that’s like Ricardo Semler runs Semco, if you’ve heard about him.

I had the chance to spend a whole afternoon with Michel Hervé and talk with him of many things. Despite we often speak or attend in the same events, we never had time to sit down and talk, now that’s done.

There’s so many things to say that I could fill a book with, but I’d like to focus on two points of our discussions. The principle of subsidiarity and why connecting people through information is so important. [Read more...]

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

About transparency in decision-making

August 1, 2006 By Leave a Comment

corporate communicationI often say that transparency is very important in decision making. Because it gives sense to the decision it’s key in improving membership, trust toward managers and organization, and it makes people more implicated as long as they’ve been implicated in the process. A good approach to solve part of HR problematics.

This post is mainly inspired by a former post by Elizabeth Albrycht that I bookmarked weeks ago.

There are two parts in decision’s transparency:

- toward the outside: it’s very important for customers and (above all) investors. The US context is slightly different from ours since they have to deal with a specific legislation (Sarbanes-Oxley) that force companies to be more transparent on anything that can have a financial impact (that’s to say nearly everything ;-) ). Despite this we, european, must keep eyes open wide because such a legislation may be voted in our countries and, above all, that in case of a coming-together beetween Euronext and the NYSE  our companies  will surely have to take Sarbanes-Oxley in consideration. This is a very important point in a middle term strategy.

- toward the inside: no more to say than that I said in my introduction or what you can find in Elyzabeth’s post. I just want to mention that (few) companies are now getting involved in this (heretic?) way of doing things. Wikis and blogs are empowering transparency in some companies by making it public and sometimes collaborative. A good example I know very  well (because I am involved in as an external consultant) is the deployement of blueKiwi as a beta project at Dassault Systemes Sales France, the project becoming now mainstream. Proximity, explaintions, discussions, co-construction…that what it actually brought to the company and we’re far from having discovered all the potential of this “peopleware” tool.

It will take time to make things change but I’m sure things will go this way. It’s our role to make managers understand what they can win in so doing. It’s not about communication but about management and the need you have to count upon motivated and implicated employees…and to bring a touch of collective intelligence in your company.

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