A few weeks ago, I was a part of a panel intiatied by Yann Gourvennec, with Vincent Berthelot and Emilie Ogez. At the beginning there was a book , The Hamster Revolution: How to Manage Your Email Before It Manages You
So let’s start.
Email, hamsters and bottlenecks
August 14, 2009 By 1 Comment
At the beginning, there was the email
May 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I’m a bottleneck…but I try to improve
May 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment
I wrote “I”…as I could I written “us”, “you”… a little story that’s, of course, imaginary. Any similarity whith any existing situation or people is accidental.
Finally, I did it well. Slowly, step by step, I climbed up the company’s hierarchy and took more and more responsabilities.
Today, I’m managing a large team. I’m responsible for my team’s results so I take care of everyhting and do my best to keep everything under control. Nothing is done without my approval. And nothing can happen if I’m not informed. As time went by I become a little less directive, more mature. I know that giving orders and setting objectives is not enough. So I’m trying to do make myself avaible to help my staff, to help them to carry on.
I also have many internal responsabilities. On many strategic fields, nothing is done without consulting me. I’m involved in many internal think tanks, advisory groups. The company does nothing until such a group has spent a long time thinking about what has to be done and how.
I don’t even mention the relations with key clients and partners, which is my exclusive domain.
That’s not easy everyday. The people I’m in contact with are as busy as me. It’s very hard to find a moment to discuss together, to make the decisions that break deadlocks. And this can’t be done by email. It’s even worth with internal meetings, because we have to deal with the schedules of sometimes ten or fifteen very busy people. What a pity : most of times, only five are really active, the other being a part of the decorum. Sometimes I’m one of the five. Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing there. A short report would be enough, just to let me know what has been said and decided.
In short : I’m responsible and essential. Nothing can be done without me. So you can imagine how much money my company makes thanks to me.
Humm… I have to admit that sometimes I’m doubtful.
Information flows needs a plumber
September 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Information overload has thress main causes : the first is information dispersal among too many tools which force people to continuously switch from one to another in order to be sure not miss anything, the second is the fact people are affected by the information flow that fall on them as is they were at the bottom of the waterfall, forcing them to continuously sort and establish priorities without forgotting the time needed to refocus after interuptions, the third is the gap between the information people receive according to what others want them to known and the information people really need and spend a lot of time to find.
Sometimes I dream of seing within companies what we have on the net : millions of information sources which contents go “on the cloud” through RSSS feeds and APIs and are gathered in a sort of “common base” from which, according to searchs on people, tags, plain text…I extract feeds that really interest me in order to read them in an unique tools, according to my priorities, to the time at my disposal, mastering what I read instead of being bombarded with messages.
To illustrate this point I often the comparison between being under a waterfall and having a shower with multiple jets massaging me. Instead of experiencing the violence of an unique and uncontroled flow, I set every jet direction and power and comfort replaces pain.
It implies companies open their eyes, think about the notion of information flow (vs stock), governance and think in terms of marketplaces and personal information supply chain rather than in termes of massive and inefficiant spraying.
For those who are interested in that and would like to get more on these issues, I advise to have a look at Stowe Boy’s keynote at the next Web 2.0 expo, “Better Media Plumbing for the Social Web” in order to become more familiar with these new logics and issues and begin to wonder about new ways to live out information and transform the way people will exchange and interact in the upcoming years.
It’s not conceivable that two worlds will co-exist : the general public’s and the enterprise’s (which is made of the same people), with two radically different conceptions of information flows, separated by a will. And it’s not conceivable either that those who live in one side of the wall forget in a second what they are and the way they behave when they are at home, on the other side of the wall.
Otherwise, if you wish to attend the Web 2.0 expo, you can get a discount code here.
What management has to learn from the Airbus vs. Boeing competition
August 8, 2008 By 1 Comment
Remember, it was a long long time ago, that, in the times we are living, means something like ten years. At this time Airbus was wondering how to compete with Boeing on the big carriersmarket and was working on what would become the A380. On its side, Boeing was not thinking about replacing its mythic 747 and was working on a smaller carrier, which would become the 787.
Why these two so opposite approaches ? In fact, they were the embodiment of two radically different visions.
According to Airbus, airlines companies and were should be on a trend of rationalizing costs and most globally transportation organization. So their conclusions were that passengers would have to be taken to Hubs from where they would fly to their final destination, possibly another Hub. That meant that, for example, to go from Marseille to Miami, you should go from Marseille to Paris where you would be gathered with a lot of people going to the USA, then fly to New York and, then onlyn take a plane from NYC to Miami. It would allow to rationalize the use of airports infrastructures (for which companies has to pay), take off slots, ensure a maximum planes occupancy in order to lower the cost per passenger.
In the other hand, Boeing was convinced the future was in peer to peer travels (ie direct flight from Marseille to Miami). That implies smaller planes that can be more easily filled filled.
Who was finally rigth ?
On august 1st, some companies will start giving up email
July 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment
To all employees:
Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees’ time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.
You can read the rest of the entry here. And as the author concludes, “well, we can dream anyway”
I spend 28% of my time reading your useless emails !
July 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment
That’s what many employees could (should ?) say to their colleagues and managers.
I’ve been pleading for a system which would make the right information find the right people instead of sending grouped emails to people who don’t need them and often forgot those for whom it would have been useful.
I’m often answered the same thing : people may miss some information. Yes, of course. And that’s a good thing. They will miss any information that is useless at a given moment, will stop wasting their time reading what does not concern them and having to refocus on what they were doing. And if, one day, they need to find it, a simple search on the intranet will do the job.
I’m talking about making it possible for people to build their own information supply chain depending on their needs and concerns and not about other’s people needs to show they are working or to cover themselves saying ‘”but they knew”. We already do it very well on the web with, on the one hand published information, and in the other RSS feeds coming from identified sources or search agents and I can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t be able to do this within the enterprise.
What emails can’t do, and how much they cost
November 5, 2006 By 2 Comments
How many emails a day do you receive? And how long does it takes to read it all? 2 hours? How many of them are useful ? 50% ? Considering every people in your company have to face the same situation try to calculate according to the hourly salary how much does it cost in wasted time.
Amazing, isn’t it.
The main problem with emails is that you’re not sure the right information is delevered to the right person.If I have something to say to a defined person and I’m sure no one would be interested in, I can mail.
But what if I have an information that’s not usefull for me but may certainly be valuable for someone else? The kind of infomation that may be used very quickly because the opportunities won’t last a long time.
If I refer to my hierarchy, the time it will take to “climb” the stairs and then to be validated and given to everyone it will be to late.
If I mail it to “all employees” it will be non productive and nearly a spam.
If I had the opportunity to publish a non intrusive way in a system that notifies only people who are interested in (and only them) that would be quite efficient.
In a lot of cases I think, for everybody’s good, a publishing platform with a smart alert system would be more adapted.
Like an internal blog with RSS alerts on keywords? Why not…
With such a platform you can publish as easily as an email, you don’t bother people that’s not interested in, and information is available for everyone who needs it even if you don’t know them.
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
