Mintzberg | Bertrand Duperrin's Notepad

Corporate e-reputation is the visible part of an impressive iceberg

October 28, 2010 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

Summary : enterprises fear, and sometimes with good reasons, the impact on their reputation of what their employees could write on the web. But this fear is sometimes so disproportinate that it leads to ludicrous situations. New balances have to be found in this domain, but that’s not all. The image of the organization, its business behaviors, ethics, also impact employee’s pride, motivation, engagement…and their propensity for harming their employer. Even worse : beyond the visible part that is made of one’s image and reputation, the same causes impact deeper mechanisms that drives quality, performance and the sustainability of business.

Lots of businesses are careful about the impact of their employees’ behaviors on their reputation. Should something negative appear somewhere on the web and an impressive self-defense system is activated. Employees have already been sharing their opinion about their employer with family and friends for ages and there’s nothing new here. The point is that, now, they can share with so many people that the situation has become critical from a corporate point of view.

In some cases we have to admit that employees are going to far beyond what the law and his employment contract allow. Of course we can discuss the right for privacy but there are things one can’t say publicly…even not at all. Not because the organization is over-sensitive but because law says so. That’s as simple as that and apply to the web as well as to any situation in real life.

But, not being comfortable with this new and unavoidable transparency, businesses are sometimes over sensitive and react to anything that’s said about them, regardless to the subject and context. This may make us wonder about to what extent employees belong their employer and what is the limit to having and sharing an opinion. The following video may look caricatured but it raises actual questions that are not that far from reality.

Would businesses want it or not, employees can impact their reputation but not as much as they may think. Once the moment of panic that comes with the emergence of a new phenomenon has ended, they’ll have to accept what’s unavoidable, learn to know what deserves a sanction and not, what is like using a bozooka to kill a fly and what deserves no reaction. After all the absence of criticism is suspicious and transparency can, to some extent, made the organization more human with its qualities and defaults.

A more human organization…that’s the point…

Enterprises far beyond enterprise 2.0

January 20, 2009 By Bertrand DUPERRIN Leave a Comment

A few weeks ago I amused myself proposing a few tracks on what enterprise 2.0 may be in 2009. But I think pushing the reflection beyond would be worth : enterprise 2.0 is only a side of a much complex reality that is enterprise and will be of any use only in a global framework. Since enterprise, and economy in general, can be defined as the place where more and more numerous interactions melts, believing it can be improved by only cosmetic improvements. Evry initiative that’s not aligned with a macro vision that will take all these considerations into account won’t bring anything worthy.

So, let’s put ourselves in the main player’s place.

• The top management

The less we can say is that top management is very worried. Because of the downturn, CEOs are trying to protect the organization. It’s hard to find more revenue so, in order to preserve the result they want costs to be cut. Or spendings, which is not the same thing. In the other hand they know that if they keep on cutting costs, they will soon be unable to make any cent go in the bank so they try to find how to make work more efficient, to work on costs instead of expenses. And, finally, the idea of business networks comes to the surface. But how to make it happen ?

On the other hand, this crises is about something deeper that worries them a lot. Always promising more has its limits and now it seems that these limits have been reached. Do they have to stop promising the moon since they know organization’s performance have its limit and trying to balance it with financial performance leads to the situation we now know ? Do we have reached the limits of a system and is this crisis the consequence of a management model failure. Do we have to reinvent the way we do business ?

In brief, an increasing demand for more responsability and sustainability in management, that is not so far from a tendency that brings many companies to think their development together with their human ecosystem’s in order not to ruin their tomorrow’s markets.

Many issues that have a lot in common and that, without forseeing the answers that will be given, will have to be taken into account this year.

A crisis that’s not that economic

December 17, 2008 By Bertrand DUPERRIN 2 Comments

Many people agree to admit the time has come to built a kind of new economic order, the drifts of the current system having lead to the situation we all know. But, saying that, people often neglect what I consider being a management failure. As for the hen and the egg it’s hard to say who was responsible but we have to admit both successfully helped one another.

Weeks ago I wrote that logic without good sens leads to catastroph and worried about companies who only had halve strategies, that’s to say that focus on exploiting the present without thinking of allocating part of their ressources in order to prepare the future. Said differently, it’s like promising a linear performance when they only give themselves enough assets to follow a curve limited at its top.

Recently I was backed up by a note by Jon Husband who pointed at an interview of Henry Mintzberg who was saying it was more a management crisis than an economic one. An opinion I share. A few points I bring out from this interview [Read more...]