The collective is not always the answer

Summary : one of the assumption on which many enterprise projects rely is that the collective is better than the sum of the individuals that composes it. This have been proven being right many times. But is it that simple ? In systems that struggle at jointing people and groups, in which people have more and more difficulties to see to see what is their contribution to a global purpose and what this purpose is, there are three obvious risks. The first is to built an organizations in which the collective makes no sense. The second is to use the collective to avoid facing individual issues, a way to blame others for one’s lacks. The third, on the enterprise side, is to believe that the social or 2.0 orgnanization will be the remedy for irrelevant processus no one dares changing.

 

More ideas can be found in ten heads than in a single one. 100 people are stronger than ten. Crowds are wiser than individuals. We are more efficient when we act together as a living organism than as a sum of individuals. As many facts and assumptions that make organizations think about 2.0 or social approaches of work. With some “magic words” raised as remedies to all diseases : “communities”, “network”, “ties”, “together”.

But do these approaches come without shortcomings ?

Implementing those approaches and the tools that support them often aim at improving collective dynamics through more efficient interactions between resources, bewteen those who have something to do and those who can help them to do better and faster. Gathering and exchanging seem to be the cornerstones of these approaches. But :

• Interacting is not producing : conversations, exchanges are preparatory to action but, in the end, there’s still one person that has to deliver something, make a decision, act. People co-innovate, co-design but action is still an individual issue. One may mention co-writing something with solutions like Google Docs as an exception. But, with a closer look, it appears that someone always have to “clean up” the document, align styles and ideas. Doing so helps a lot a the beginning but anyone who once had to do this cleaning job on a document written by 4 or 10 people can tell it’s like hell. The more basic unit of work, the task, is and will remain an individual issue if we adopt an execution driven point of view.

• many organizations trie to use the collective as a remedy for individual discipline, accountability, professionalism issues. If one does not behave as a professional when managing his tasks, its workload, gathering everyone won’t solve the problem. Things may even get worse because of unproductive interactions that won’t improve anything, no one having done the preparatory work needed to make group discussions productive.

• the focus is put where there problem isn’t, avoiding to tackle what’s core, and accountability moves from individuals to the group. “If I don’t do that, the community will”. SInce everybody thinks the same, the collective does not do anything. Remember that a community is nothing more than a gathering of individuals who may have their own priorities and agendas. When the community does something, it only means that one or some of its members have individually decided to move forward. So we thank the community while, in many cases, only one of its members should be thanked. Communities don’t move forward if, at least, one member does not decide to.

• but organizations are doing the same mistakes. “If we bring employees to communities, if we make them more social, they’ll make up for our crappy processes without us having to work on that”. On the contrary, these dynamics need strong processes to give people reasons and time to move toward the collective. [Read more...]

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

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”.

[Read more...]

If it matters measure it. If it’s new build a new frame of reference.

Summary : When the world and the economy are transforming, the existing frames of references on which be base our thinking and decision making become obsolete. To adapat to their current and future context, organizations not only should have the vision of what they want to become but also implement it in their employees’ day do day work. Not superposing two opposite models in order to let change happen without daring changing the existing but replacing the one with the other. It only makes sense when employees are provided with tools and indicators that favor and reward actions that are aligned with the new model and not with the old one anymore. It also helps to measure the impact of change and measure how far they’ve been. That seldom happens in enterprise 2.0 projects because of a lack of reflexion on new frames of references. Fortunately, examples coming from other fields shows that when one really want to do things well and deep, change is possible and measurable.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Danone to talk about their social responsibility program, what made me learn a lot, believe it nor not, in terms of organizational transformation and had many things in common with enterprises 2.0 approaches. How possible is that ? Read what’s coming in the following lines.

Like many enterprises, Danone has understood that the environmental question will be key in its business. It’s already a cultural fact that is not new at all (remember that Antoine Riboud, Danone’s former CEO, used to say that the responsibility of the enterprise did not end at the facilities’ doors…30 years ago) and new an economic fact. There are many chances that, in a near future, carbon will be monetized, so managing it efficiently leads to a competitive advantage.

How did danone do ? First by stating it in its corporate values and project, long before it becomes a trendy topic. Anyone who has a few contacts with Danone knows that concepts such as double project ou triple bottom line are known by everyone and are a share concern. Such an approach need to be embodied and the discourse has to be turned into action. So Danone established a “Nature VP” so the environmental concern has currency at the very top of the organization. But, since Danone is a business and that there is an economic reality behind all that, that people need to change the way they understand and feel what added value means in such a context, they even established a Nature CFO. The logic is obvious : we’re entering a world when things that used to be secondary are becomming essential. So they need  to be integrated into the value calculation system so what was a cost in the previous vision becomes an investment and an opportunity in 2012.

So they invented “green Capex”, some very concretes things to implement to translate this vision and awareness into business. Looking for ROI on a 3 or 5 years scale to take time to learn and not give up too early. But there were no relevant indicators to do that. So they could have come to the conclusion that it was not measurable, what could have lead to the consequence we all know : the project would have become a dead body because no one would have been able to see its impact or one’s personal contribution through one’s decisions, not even the interest of changing one’s thinking and decision making model.

So Danone worked on designing new models allowing to measure the impact of their business in terms of carbon and its short and long term financial consequences. They experimented it on the field, tried to make the most of new data, made an empirical job then tried to model. The organization tried to measure what matters, since it matters. That’s as simple as that.

It also helped to make something else possible : reducing the carbon footprint is now a part of executive’s evaluation and reward system. So everyone, at his own level, in his business unit, in his field is concerned.

But they still were trying to make sense of it for more and more employees. It means that anyone should understand his own role, impact, contribution to the project. It also means that, when facing two possible choices, one making sense in the old paradigm and the other making sense in the new one, they people should make the right one without fearing to put their performance at risk and sacrifice their bonuses.

So Danone co-innovated with SAP to integrate this new model in their business tools, in their production management system. It was all about putting the new model at work in employees’ day to day lives, in the flow of work and avoid schizophrenia. No contradiction here anymore : there’s a single model, a single vision and not an ideal one set on the top of an old operation model that has nothing in common. All indicators, measurement tools, tools supporting processes takes it into account. SAP brought the technology and Danone its knowledge and IP.

Anything in common with enterprise 2.0 projects ?

[Read more...]

Enterprise 2.0 and social business : what to expect in 2012 ?

Résumé : what will be the enterprise 2.0 / social business in 2012 ? It will highly depends on choices organizations will make to deal with the paradox of finding ways to go out of the crisis while not having much money to invest. 2012 will certainly be the year where window window-dressing projects and deeper corporate ones will diverge as well as those aiming at adding a community layer to the existing organization vs those aiming at reinventing the organizational structure and operation models. Should the world be perfect, we’ll see budgets shift from technology to organizational transformation, from adding new layers to integrating existing ones, community approaches becoming more operations-driven, social becoming more a transformation than transplanting an external body. In a non perfect world we’d see window-dressing projects surviving a little bit before the final collapse, because of approaches too disconnected from the enterprise world to deliver results and sustain long term engagement.

A new year is starting…with the usual prediction challenge. It does not matter if these predictions become true or not, that anticipation is confused with taking one’s dreams for granted : predictions are a part of the landscape and even those who don’t take them seriously expect them. So I’m trying to play the game one more time.

First, let’s be clear on what prediction means. Even if I’m happy with what I “predicted” these last years (understand “I was right”), don’t expect to find anything revolutionary in the next lines. What we usually call predictions is nothing more than common sense (or lack of). Predicting the iPhone en 1990 would have been a prediction. Prediction the need from bringing social into the flow of work in 2009 was only common sense. Rather stating the obvious.

What leads us to a very important point. As long as one is lucid and clearly understands that, even social or 2.0, the real point is enterprise and business, with all the constraints and context that comes with, it’s not that hard to identify where things will block and what concerns will arise. Finding how organizations will decide to respond is much harder. Anyway each one will respond in its own way depending on its culture, its culture, the courage of its executives when it will come to make strategic decisions. Because of all that, we’ll surely see much more diversity than before in social business approaches…

So, here are the trends I seen for 2012.

1°) Budget : from technology to organizational transformation

Before being about people or technology, that’s a matter of money. Technology, accompaniment, internal efforts… And we all know that in 2012 money will fall from the sky and anyone will be able to spend it on any shiny initiative. Or not. So it all depends of a strategic choice for enterprises facing crises : getting ready for the crash or finding the winning way out.

Finding the winning way out may mean many different things. One of them could be keeping the investments and even making more efforts because it’s “now or never”. Another could be of not changing the amount but the allocation. I recently mentioned a survey saying that HR seem to refocus on organizational transformation to the detriment of some other points. I read another one, about services budgets, saying something like “less software and integration, more on building new business and organizational models”.

The most meaningful choice will on whether to favor technology or its usages. It seems that the second may win or at least not being the least considered part of the job anymore. Such arbitrations will be key facts to understand 2012.

 

2°) A more operations-driven approach to social dynamics

Some of us have been discussing this point for years but it seems that things are becoming more mature now. In 2009, anyone talking about a social approach to business processes was considered as an heretic. Today things seem to be converging and enterprises are more ready to listen and understand to such discourses that make more sense for them. Or maybe the disciples of the “Care Bears Social Church” have given up and admit that the word process was not a blasphemy anymore.

So, the job is not about keeping the old organizational structure and adding a community layer on its top, out of the flow of work, but :

1°) Bringing  social into the flow of work even it means fixing the flow to make it agile and adaptable

2°) Jointing flows of work and out-of-the-flow community approaches to ensure all the efforts will contribute to value creation. If not, the final conclusion will come quickly : communities = unproductive silos…and once again we’ll have missed a great opportunity to improve things.

But being aware does not mean acting accordingly. Even if a consensus forms on such an approach, it will take time to implement it because it needs organizations to put their hands in the organizational mess and out of age processes. That’s what the “E20 = E1.0+communities” was designed to avoid. Unsuccessfully.

Depending on the choices made in each organizations, we’ll see forks forming in the the social business world. And, in my opinion, one of them is a dead end.

Behind this point lies something deeper…that’s my third point.

[Read more...]

The problem with knowledge economy : it does not exist !

Summary : Enterprise 2.0 or social business initiatives aim at crafting organizations that fit what we call the knowledge economy. And that’s quite hard…for one reason. The knowledge economy does not exist. Knowledge work and workers do. Not the economy. What’s missing ? A global environment that would help its blooming, its take-off rather than forcing enterprises to make industrial decisions on matters that are not industrial. Education, law, tax system, accounting has to be rethought from a new angle. In the meantime, anything undertaken by organizations will be bricolage : it will need lots of efforts for marginal or even futile results regarding to the deep transformation challenges that are at stake.

When we talk about new organization or management approach, about the tools that support new ways to communicate or collaborate we often use the knowledge economy as a justification. Moving from an industrial to a knowledge economy means a deep change of context and responses of a new kind from businesses. That’s an obvious fact and none of the current social business or enterprise 2.0 expert has coined anything new : there already was an abundant literacy on these new forms of organization while most of os where still learning writing and counting at school. If we take the technology side apart, any old book from Peter Drucker could be a best seller if published today with the same texts and a socially fashionable title.

So knowledge economy is there and both organizations and people have to deal with it. But what do they do it so slow, with so much reluctance, fears and doubts ? Why can’t we see this draught, this collective march that happened when the world faced its last similar evolution ? The answer is easy : because the knowledge economy does not exist. Not because it’s a dream kept alive buy a few passionate and lunatic people but because it’s not a concrete reality, foundations on which we’ll be able to craft the future.

A field was not enough to craft the agrarian economy. A factory and some steam or electricity did not found the industrial economy. There were organization models designed for the factory. Labor laws evolved to lead the change. Financial mechanisms were set up to make the requires investment possible, what made industrial economy grow. A factory did not made the industrial economy but a set of rules, practices, mechanisms did. They turned a need and an opportunity into reality.

So, what’s about knowledge economy ?

One swallow doesn’t make a summer and a knowledge worker does not make a knowledge economy. Knowledge work exists. Knowledge workers too and they represent each day a bigger part of the working population. They are the resources that may help to build a sustainable growth for the future. But that won’t happen unless some requirements are met.

As a matter of fact, even if the potential exists it’s poorly exploited. First because businesses don’t do everything possible to make the most of it…but that’s an easy pretext. Businesses  also are  looking for sense, for reasons to do things. They don’t find these reasons because they are operating in an environment that did not change that much during the last 50 years. Consequence : they struggle to reinvent their model, to reinvent themselves. Evidence  is those that success, that find the way of a new durable growth, are those who made choices that were both “obvious” regarding to where the world is heading and crazy according to the current environment in which they operate.

What’s missing to craft the appropriate environment ? [Read more...]

Two months left before the enterprise 2.0 Summit

Every year, at this period, I usually write a debrief of the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Frankfurt. No such thing this year since the Summit did not take place in Frankfurt in november but will in Paris on the 8th and 9th of february.There are many reasons why I highly suggest you to attend this conference.

1°) Because it’s an european event

Cases and experiences are often shared nationwide. French ones in France, German ones in Germany etc… This event is a unique occasion to compare and benchmark things from all over Europe with, for example AXA, BASF, Lufthansa, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Danone, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent, Lyonnaise des Eaux, Allianz, Saint-Gobain, Bayer, JC Decaux…and many others.

 

2°) Because of top level speakers

A look at the speakers list will be enough. Many VPS, directors…that will speak about the strategic dimension of projects that are deeper than giving their information system a facelift. As for experts that will also be speaking, I think their names are very familiar to you. The focus will be on strategic projects, value creation…what leads to the next point.

 

3°) Because the nature of the discussion is dramatically shifting

As we can see, the point is not about knowing how to bring social media in the workplace anymore. At least, not for most speakers. The real question is about designing a new model for the enterprise to face today’s challenges, how to create value in a complex and unpredictable context, what do organizational experience means in 2012. The agenda perferfectly reflects this…

4°) Because of the Keynotes

In addition to talks and discussions on cases and best practices, a conference should also bring something more in term of vision and sense. Something that will shape the business for the next years. So you may like to see :

 

- Rawn Shah,  social business transformation expert at IBM (also author of  social networking for business) and Yves Caseau (Vice President Bouygues Telecom, author of  Processus et enteprise 2.0) discussing about social and community approaches and how it will impact processes and new excellence models.

- Richard Collin (Grenoble Business School- Nextmodernity) ans Jean-Christophe Kugler (Renault) discussing the new organizational models as well as the future of processes and workflows

- Dion Hinchcliffe will be talking about the evolution of business models and key success factors for organizational excellence.

 

5°) Because of the format

No one way speech here. Each session includes a discussion with other practionners, experts and the audience. So the audience has time to ask questions and challenge the speakers. The conference is organized so that speakers and audience have time to exchange and debate and the time allowed for discussions is quite the same as for speeches.

That’s all… for more information, please visit the ‘Enterprise 2.0 Summit here.

The registration page is here...and people who register before december 17th will get a 800€ discount.

See you there !

 

What personal business model in the new economy

Summary : Beyond enterprise 2.0 and social business, there’s a major change in value creation models. Unfortunately, in  these models that are still in preparation, it’s hard to determine causal relationships between participation in value creation and getting the fruits from one’s participation. Participating in these new channels is now an option for people looking for qualitative rewards. But if, tomorrow, such activities become central in our lives and incomes there are new remuneration models to be found for people who will mainly rely in their participation in this new economy. The will to help others and participate will be replaced by personal business models logics as well as new recognition and remuneration systems in a world where value creation will involve less and less formal contributors and more and more informal ones.

People talk a lot about social business, enterprise 2.0 or similar concepts to refer to new ways to organize work, new relationships between people and between people and their work. But that’s only the smallest part of a global transformation that impacts the whole economy, a transformation that need to be taken into account if we don’t want all the efforts made at a micro level to change the way people work to be irrelevant with the economic structures that exist at a macro level.

Taking into account the deep change of the nature of economy and the relationships between players (not only economic ones) does only not mean  stating that the world is changing and urging people and organizations to change. That’s what has been done for years and we have not admit that was not enough. It’s about aligning the macro context with the new nature of economy, to make efforts that are undertaken at a micro level bear fruits.

We’re heading towards new value creation models that don’t adapt very well to manufacturing and taylorian ones that have been set up to help things in the past. I already mentioned the accounting side of the problem…and that’s only a part of the issue.

Today, value is created through information sharing, connecting people and knowledge, in a networked and decentralized way. In fact…not exactly. To be more precise, this decentralized and connected world works in the background of the economy we know, making it work faster, better, even in a more balanced and responsible way for those for make the most of its new potential. This background activity works both inside and outside enterprises, bridging both worlds. On the other hand, this background world need to make sense for people involved in to work well. They need to know in which way it could be beneficial to them. It’s very well explained in this McKinsey post, titled  “the second economy“.

If the “first” economy, the one we know and see in our everyday lives, works according to well known logics and rules for what’s about people’s contribution to value creation and and what they get from it (even if the balance of the system is more and more questioned), there’s no such thing for the second economy. It relies on the invisible, voluntary and often unsolicited work of lots of people, in either their personal or business lives. The problem is that it creates value and improves competitiveness for the visible economy while there is no remuneration model for participants who created value for others. [Read more...]

Borrowing profitability from the future ?

Summary : in the knowledge economy economy era, investing on human capital development is key but stays marginal because of short term profitability logics. But does this vision actually creates value ? Locally, for the enterprise, it seems so. But globally speaking the question is worth being asked because the related costs does not disappear but are shifted to the society or the future of the enterprise what, in fine, backfires in a long term perspective since it’s becoming harder to pay the debt caused by decisions made in the past. As cycles shorten, it may lead to a dead-end.

A couple of days ago, a started reading again The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business by Umair Haque.This book was already brilliant when it was issued even if it more comfortable to think that the author was exaggerating too much, that his predictions would never happen. Less than one year after, the least we can say is that he was right.

Many concepts and ideas developed in the book look innovating, disruptive…too much according to some even if the news tell us the contrary. A better explanation would be to say theiy’re thought-provoking. Among these ideas, there’s the one according to which enterprises have been borrowing  their benefits while shifting costs to others for decades and that, one day, the debt becomes so big that the whole system jams.

Practically speaking it means that profitability is often overestimated because enterprises don’t assume all their costs that are shifted to the society of the future of the organization. Environmental costs, training costs…many of these things are known under the name of corporate social responsibility. If the whole costs was taken into account we would see that lots of enterprises are not socially profitable. Le system works until the day when shifted costs became so big that society can’t deal with them. And it backfires on the enterprise.

Social Business and triple bottom line experts (not the social business used to rebrand enterprise 2.0, the real  Social Business) will find here some concepts they know quite well and that I’ll sum up using the words of Antoine Riboud when he was leading Danone : enterprise responsibility does not stop at the enterprise’s doors and making one’s ecosystem poorer to become oneself richer will cause one’s failure because it kills future markets.

I don’t claim I’m able to have such a deep thinking as Haque but, by thinking about these things again and again to assess how relevant they were, I ended asking myself a couple of questions.

[Read more...]

What challenges for HR in 2012 ?

Summary : At the dawn of a year that’s expected to be rather difficult, businesses face conflictual choices. On the one hand there are the traditional formula to get prepared for the impact, on the other hand there’s the feeling that anticipating the shock won’t be enough and preparing to get beyond may be a better solution. Withe the same causes producing the same effects, keeping the same structures and functioning models while cycles are getting shorter and the need to adapt to fast transitions may be a dangerous option and rethinking the organizational whole a tempting one. What options will CHROs chose in 2012 ? A recent survey shows that indecision and even contradictory choices prevail. But, beyond the words, vital choices will have to be made. Jack Welsh once said :”When the rate of change outside exceeds the rate of change inside, the end is in sight”. Will he be heard ?

Businesses are facing a paradoxical and challenging equation for 2012. On the one hand the crisis make them wonder about the future and how to have as little exposure as possible to what looks like a major threat. This usually make them freeze their projects and get rid of anything that may load them down when the shock will happen. But, in the other hand, there’s the feeling that this time things will be different. That the old formulas won’t work anymore. That if they content themselves with absorbing the shock, saying to themselves they’ll restart and recover after…they may not restart at all. That, beyond the economic crisis, there’s a crisis of management and organization models that caused the eratic behaviors that lead us to the point we’re now.

So there’s at the same time the reflex of keeping quiet, still and the feeling that a new way to recovery has to be found. Even the idea that there may be other ways to anticipate the shock. So the question is to know how businesses in general and HR in particular will manage this apparent contradiction. I found some pieces of answer in a survey made by TNS-Sofres for CSC in 8 countries.

Four main points

• Attracting and retaining talents is less important than one year ago (76% vs 80%)

• Training and education budgets will be downsized by 34% respondents

• Organization transformation is the new priority (80%)

• Less hirings and more downsizing.

In addition, 78% of CHROs think that CEOs expect them to focus on management effectiveness, 59% on the role of middle managers. The importance of a good social context and strengthening connections between people is mentioned by 64% of respondents.

So, what does it mean ?

[Read more...]

New White Paper on Enterprise 2.0

I’m happy to announce the release of a new white paper on enterprise 2.0. In fact irt’s not that new. Last year, my fellow member Anthony Poncier gathered most of the more relevant french enterprise 2.0 practitioners to write a white paper, each one being in charge of a chapter on his favorite topic. The paper had a lot of success here and we decided to work on an english version…that took time to be released but is now available.

Some of you will find names and people they already know. For the others it will be the occasion to discover the “French touch” of enterprise 2.0.

Enjoy !

View more documents from Anthony Poncier
I’d really like to thank Anthony for his involvement and the coordination work. Nothing would have been possible without him.