What personal business model in the new economy

December 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

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...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Society Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Borrowing profitability from the future ?

December 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What challenges for HR in 2012 ?

November 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

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...]

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

New White Paper on Enterprise 2.0

October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment

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 !

Enterprise 2.0, french touch : the white paper
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.
Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , ,

Teambuilding and breaking silos only take post-its

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : strengthening ties between employees, increasing the membership feeling, learning to collaborate out of silos are challenges organizations try to meet with limited success and at a quite high cost. But, sometimes, things happen by themselves. Lots of parisian workers made the most of the summer decreasing business activity to compete on frescos made with post its on the windows of their offices. Behind what may be seen as a game or triviality, we witnessed emerging spontaneous team building and creativity programs no HR manager would have even dreamed of, with no involvement from their part.

The need for working out of rigid silos, cohesion, collaboration, engagement are matters I discuss a lot on this blog. Most of times they’re addressed through heavy programs, supported by social software platforms that have an organizational and financial cost that can’t be overlooked. Either we talk about enterprise 2.0, social business, or making things change in more traditional forms of organization does not change anything. As I often witnessed : nothing happens online that would have not happened offline. In other words, if employees have no reason or will to talk to each other, exchange, share, collaborate, help one another, the best social platform or the nicest intranet in the world won’t change anything.

Businesses invest a lot in programs aiming at improving cohesion, in team building activities etc…and are far from always being paid back. But, sometimes, things happen by themselves, like a miracle.

In the first days of July, we saw lots of frescos flourishing on the windows of many offices buildings in Paris. All were made of post-its. According to “historians”, Ubisoft was the first to start the game. Of course, such an initiative is not very discreet as it can easily be seen from the streets and surrounding buildings. So, employees from companies in the neighborhood reacted to show they could do the same. We could even see “well done” written on some windows to congratulate the neighbor company that had made a great fresco. And, day after day, post its started to cover the windows of lots of offices buildings.

Blogs and even traditional media mentioned this phenomenon that quickly become famous as the “post it war”. [Read more...]

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

Is your organization good at multiplexing ?

September 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Knowing who should drive and own social media in the organization is a recurring question. Experience shows that when the project falls to a “central department”, this latter often struggles to spread adoption outside of its own range, what causes the system to be underused or the emergence of internal competing projects. In the end, it’s a costly and counter-productive situation. New approaches a needed that rely on new methodologies and attitudes : those who own the platform need to learn to share it with others, involve them from the early stage, listen to their needs and let them use it the way they want to meet their own needs.

This post is a synthesis of many discussions that followed what I wrote on the use of social platforms both for external communication and intranet purposes.

Such projects are often owned by a department that drives them. That’s the reason why many organizations start by wondering which department should own social media.

When one owns something, he uses it for his own purposes. There are many reasons to that. Most of all because one does not know anything about others’ needs, because some uses are counter-cultural to the DNA of a given department or because internal power games and politics makes it logical to keep one’s projects for oneself.

Consequence : a communication department that drives an internal social network struggle at making the most out of its collaborative potential. Sometimes because they don’t want but, most of times because it’s out of their competence field for obvious reasons. Replace communication with HR, IT, Innovation or business unit, the result is the same. It’s no use to blame the people in question because the situation is often caused by the lack of means and the irrelevance of some uses regarding to their mission and not by unwillingness. In fact, most of time you can hear them say “We’d like to but don’t know to”.

Whatever the owner, a social networks serves for communication, collaboration, innovation, expert location, talent management, supports some processes. If each of these needs rely on a different tool and project, there are lots of chances everything fails.

That’s the same for external facing projects. Marketing, communication, innovation, customer care etc…should be able to use the system, whatever the official owner is.

That’s why we can see more and more competing projects that, in the end, cause unproductivity and waste resources, those needed to drive them, to implement them and, last but not least, employee’s attention.

As one of my readers said, these are only channels, channels that can convey many kinds of signals, of flows. I usually use the pipe metaphor. One can own the pipe but it does not mean that it can be used to convey lots of things, for several purposes, from and to third part people.

Organization will have to embrace the culture of multiplexing. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Social networks and recruitment 2.0 : does it work well ?

September 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Mixed results make people wonder on the relevance of social networks as recruitment tools. It all depends on what one mean by recruiment, because if it’s easy to measure the transactional side, recruitment processes are much broader and are made of diverse elements that can use social networks as catalysts. For reasons due to the job profile, the volume of people to hire or the scalability of the system, social networks won’t always be the right tool to recruit in the strict sense of the the word. But if we take all non-transactional activities into account (such as HR marketing), these tools can act like a process booster and also impact the quality of the final result. But businesses need to consider a broader range of activities and not focus on the number of people hired depending on the media.

A couple of weeks ago, french HR blogger Jean-Noël Chaintreuil wrote on the poorly kepts promise of social networks as a recruitment tool.  Did we get it all wrong ? Not a all. First, we need to know what we’re talking about.

Recruitment. If, for many people that are not involved in HR activities, recruitment means placing an advertisement, having interviews and chosing the right person, it’s in fact, a much more complex process. It’s about defining the job, sourcing candidates, choosing the right ones. We can also all what has to do with employer branding that reinforce the attractiveness of the enterprise and the quality of applications (because people know more things about the enterprise, its culture and values..). And even if considered as another process, onboarding programs that will help new hires to be at their best and make their first steps easier are very close to recruitment. As a matter of fact, if we consider that the goal is not to recruit someone but someone who’ll stay and find his/her place in the organization, onboarding programs are an essential part of the recruitment process.

Recruitment 2.0. There’s nothing really new on the nature of recruitment but on execution. As usual, when something turns 2.0, it’s about a better (qualitative and quantitative) use of the knowledge and relational capital of all the stakeholders (including the candidate) to improve the bandwidth of the process and the quality of the result. It comes in many forms. First, finding the means to have a better knowledge of the other and let the other know who you are (employer and personal branding). It also implies a move from mass communication to conversation. Then, it’s about using networks to have “better” applications that fit both the need and the corporate culture as well as a better sourcing. Here, it’s about trust/reputation and the power of weak ties. At the selection level, there are also ways to make the person be chosen not only by his future manager but also the people he’ll work with. To end, new onboarding and immersion programs will complete the traditional mentoring by peers networks.

Obviously, lots of businesses did not wait for the 2.0 era to put some of these things at work. What has changed is that, to make things work on a wide scale, new tools were needed. As a matter of fact, talking about networks to use the available human capital and knowledge is nice but when one can access to few people and is limited to strong ties, the promise is hard to keep. What leads to the next point.

Social Networks. When talking about networks, knowledge and weak ties in 2011, things often come to social networks. But, if we look at the past, social networks are not the only tool that have been (and still are) used to meet recruitment and HR goals. When we started to work on recruitment 2.0 with a couple of french professionals in 2004/2005, the trending topic was blogging. At this moment, media paid a lot of attention to “these bloggers who foun a job because they were active on the web”. To be more precise, most of these people already had a job, bloggint only helped them to meet the people and networks that offered them more appealing jobs in enterprises that were really wanting them for what they were. Then came enterprise HR blogs and, only then, social networks like LinkedIn became mainstream. Today, people talk about Facebook or Twitter even if the latter is not even seen as a network by its founders and is rather about a branding and influence strategy as blogs were before. But, in the end, that’s the same because it all melts in a global strategy.

Now, what do we mean by “recruitment on social networks” ?

[Read more...]

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

Tomorrow’s enterprise as a galley ?

August 23, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I won’t teach anything to anyone by saying that, to make someone understand a concept that’s very new to him, an analogy with something known is often the best way to deliver the message. Note that this means is often an easy way for the “pupil” to help a too passionate teacher to keep his feet on the ground. Of course, we need an analogy that “talks” to the person either because he or she knows the subject well or because that’s about something that’s common to everybody.

The other day I happened to have a discussion with a couple of person and a new angle appeared in the discussion on “social” and things like that. It’s only worth what it’s worth but, after all, it’s summer, holidays so we can take the liberty of giving free reins to our imagination.

Let’s take the example of a galley. You know, a boat with people rowing, other shouting at them and one who rule. Let’s try to imagine what a galley 2.0 would look like.

[Read more...]

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

Enterprise and business first, 2.0 and social second

August 16, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary : Enterprise 2.0 and social business when they become, as it often happens, their own goal, struggle to convince businesses of their significance. The reason is simple : beyond soft and qualitative benefits, the quantitative aspect is often overlook while, in the end, the enterprise has no other purpose than producing tangible wealth. This being the very basis of the concept of enterprise, there’s a need of reconsidering the social phenomenon regarding to this goal. Benefits of these new approaches are obvious in terms of value creation provided the changing nature of our economy that relies more and on people, knowledge and accumulation processes is taken into account. In this context, social and 2.0 speed up the processes that allow the accumulation of knowledge, relationship capital, trust and even reputation. This leads to a conclusion : pushing change in organizations which plan and value creation model does not take this factor into account won’t be more than a pleasant distraction. Organizations need the courage to bring the matter back to its real level where it has to be tackled : the value creation and business model one.

An increasing number of people are working through the world on transforming their organization into a social business or enterprise 2.0. In fact, this is partly wrong. In most cases it’s about making organizations adopt enterprise 2.0 or implement it where it’s possible (even in competition with the current organization), what is not the same thing. I’ve often said what the concept of adoption means to me, easy but fragile replacement for a real reflexion on sense and alignment, so I’ll change and mention this brilliant post from Oliver Marks where Oliver reminds us that “adoption is for kittens”.

Things happen this way for many reasons. Sometimes the people in charge are so passionate that 2.0 and social have become their one and only goal. The rest does not matter as long as many people use the wonderful tool that come with and form communities, regardless to the real business value of these communities. Sometimes the project is managed at a too low level of responsibility, sometimes with a poor sponsorship, so the person in charge does what he/she can with the available means, the provided support and the existing risk of doing too much. We all know what happens in such situations. If, in the first case, it’s only an excess of passion (and passion makes people blind), what causes the second (and may also apply to the first) is that there is no consciousness of the context in which people are operating. Enterprises are enterprises before being 2.0, business is business before being social. If organizations take no benefit from change in the context of reaching their goals, they have no reason to change.

If social and 2.0 forget the reason why enterprise exist, they become their own goal and are, at best, useless. The two above-mentioned cases are perfect evidences : when confined in a stooge role or added to the existing organization without being integrated in real business operations, social/2.0, even adopted, brings nothing. If the enterprise plan is not coherent, aligned with what social can bring, few progress will be made. Of course, many enterprise plans and discourse mention these points but it seldom means that the core of the organization is changing. Instead it’s often a nice making-up on things what don’t fundamentally change.

Don’t you find exasperating that too many discussions and event on the future of business are focused on how such or such technology spreads ? It seems that more and more people do. This revolution is presented as the remedy to all the things businesses suffer from in this early XXIth century. If I compare to this excellent post by Umair Haque, the problem is bigger and the cure needs a deep change of DNA. As a matter of fact most of the businesses that are mentioned in the most aren’t “2.0″ in the traditional meaning. They integrated this paradigm in their corporate plan, their value creation model instead of just trying to make people change the way they work. In this context, social and 2.0 are an important part of tomorrow’s enterprises, but not the only one. But, when applied to good old plans without taking into account new realities at a higher level, they won’t help to avoid the placebo effect.

So…what’s the goal of an enterprise ? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In Social Business, Businesses are the Care Bears

May 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : Either externally with customers or internally with employees, one the pillars of any “social” or “2.0″ project is people’s need for more closeness, even intimacy with the enterprise and between themselves. This is the reason why organizations started focusing on engagement, social networks and communities. But is this lever so relevant ? It seems that even if communities have a role to play, organizations and customers don’t agree on the role each of them should have inside and even of the legitimacy of a brand joining customer communities. Ditto for employees who seem to have more desire for efficient work tools than for approaches aiming at bringing them closer one to another. In the end, people seem to be more pragmatic and realistic than businesses. A call for these latter to move toward more operational and pragmatic approaches ?

Among postulates that underlie many social or 2.0 approaches, one is so ubiquitous that seems to be taken for granted by everybody. According to this postulate people, either outside the organization (when they ar customers) or inside (when they are employees) have an irrepressible desire to strengthen their ties with business, to tell them things, to feel valued, to “be a part of something” that will bring them together. Businesses, that are “by definition”, aloof, malicious and inhuman, have to listen to this cry from the heart, facilitate and join communities where attention, passion and even love between participants will make amazing things happen.

We could have believed that businesses with their cold and rational logic would have stepped away and stand their ground…but they did not. They dove into the social world, often in a ungainly way, dreaming of internal and external communities, of being as one with passionate and engaged people in a win-win relationship. With uncertain results.

Some weeks ago, an IBM study dropped a bombshell. It shows that, even if businesses need to be closer to their customers, they don’t understand what customers are expecting.

[Read more...]

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