Is reputation a new currency ?

December 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary :reputation is often mentioned as a new currency in models based on exchange, trust and collaboration. It’ logical to some extent but a too easy shortcut if it prevent from thinking about how to remunerate contributions from people who are not looking for recognition but to satisfy more basic needs. Reputation is rather a new raw material that will be used to build new systems than an alternative money.

That’s something we often hear here and there : reputation is the new currency for a world and companies based on collaboration, sharing, networking. Both a liogical and too easy shortcut.

It’s logical because trust is key in emergent collaboration based systems. And reputations contributes a lot to trust. It does not replace trust but can accelerate it. Similarly, systems promoting empowerment and intrapreneurship, making employees become businesses in the business, need a personal branding approach in which reputation plays a big part. That’s also the same outside of the organization because reputation contributes to separate the wheat from the chaff on an internet where every individual can participate and could need to prove his legitimacy. Last, in a connected world, one’s reputation helps to spread ideas and thoughts.

That’s also an easy shortcut because, in a social or community system that need the contribution of lots of people, reward and remuneration approaches to contribution are still poorly understood and defined (and sometimes even taboo). Hence the choice of the easy way : reputation is the reward. As a matter of fact, who does not like to see his work and contribution recognized and his reputation improved. And what’s more it has been proven right by Maslow : this kind of need strands at the top of his famous pyramid. But does something hide behind this sweet image ?

If we want Maslow’s model to be relevant in this case, the people in question are supposed to have climbed up the first steps of the pyramid. It’s easy to say that reputation equals money when it applies to people who have no problems with their basic needs. That’s true for most of the people (and I’m one of them) that talk about this topic, practitioners, consultants etc.. But when it comes to embark all kind of employees in the system, one need to address people whose opinion is seldom asked, don’t blog or speak at conferences to share their point of view. But that’s the economy of sharing, of donation isn’t it ? Maybe…but it implies people have things to give and to share. And, most of all that they have the means and enough time to do it because that’s not because something is free that it costs nothing. We are not all equal in such situations. As someone recently told me “it’s easier to nicely contribute for free when your job is secured than when you fear to be laid off or don’t know if you’ll be able to pay or rent at the end of the month”. Try to pay your rend with reputation and you’ll measure how wide is the gap.

Being paid with a currency with which you can’t by anything is just like being fobbed off.

Let me also mention the french philosopher François Elie, someone very involved in open source communities and I had the chance to met a couple of week ago. Speaking about communities in a conference he said ; “in communities, people contribute and people get money and rewards for the work done. The problem is that these are not the same people. Community bases systems don’t scale if you only pay people by saying ‘thank you’”.

So, is reputation a new currency ? I don’t think so. It’s rather a raw material that will be used to built new models for HR, collaboration etc… and provided that it won’t be use to avoid tackling trust related issue to focus on a personal marketing approach that’s often lead astray and becomes unhealthy and counter-productive.

 

 

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

The problem with knowledge economy : it does not exist !

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

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...]

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

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: , , , , , , , , ,

The other debt organizations may die of : the trust one

November 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : trust  is the fuel that will power new forms of work and management and make change possible. But trust can’t be mandated and has to we won over time. In fact, it’s being lost, day after day, for decades by actions that look anecdotical for organizations but are meaningful to employees who feel belittled and considered as poorly responsible, unworthy of trust and unable to understand the challenges at stake. The trust deficit is very actual and costs a lot to organizations every day, not mentioning it makes changes hard to drive. But they still can change their message and, so, their future.

Debt is very trendy topic these days. Most of times it’s about states, not businesses which have pretty good results. But, as states have refused to consider their financial debt for decades, businesses are exposed to a similar form of risk that is not related to money but another kind of matter.

It’s been said again and again : trust is key to business competitiveness. Because its impacts collaboration, collaboration and knowledge sharing. Because it supports the new forms of management that are needed in such contexts. Because no change program aiming at adopting new forms of work can be successfully undertaken without trust.

But that’s a fact : trust is more and more uncommon in the workplace. Weak between colleagues and nearly non-existent between businesses and employees. And this works in the two ways. It’s hard to tell who, businesses and employees, started the move that is leading the couple into this diabolical helix…But we can suppose that the management and operation models that were born at the beginning of the industrial revolution contributed a lot to the disappearing of trust, because of businesses. By putting trust into the system and not into people who act in the systems, businesses made the gap become wider and wider.

To such an extent that I recently wondered if businesses, abstract entities, did not have their own consciousness, independent from the one of people that are part of it. When you see how people who are deeply humane can consider and treat their fellow colleagues once they’re in a work context you can really wonder. At this moment they are not themselves anymore but a part of the system. A part that treats other parts, those they have authority over, like immature, irresponsible and unworthy of trust people.

I’m not talking about face to face relationships (even if…sometimes….) but systemic relationships. Where the ones make decision that apply to “other” people they don’t even know. Examples are numerous.

The cult of presenteism, which is pillar of the control and command system. People have to be here, no matter why. The myth of “work hours” that makes no sense for more and more occupations. Restrictions to internet access. Policy of use for communication and collaboration tools. I’m not saying that some barriers should not exist. I’m only questioning which ones are legitimate, how high they should be and what words should be used to explain them.

 

[Read more...]

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

Enterprise social networking : the difference between voluntary participation and optional membership

March 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Summary : If participation in social networks can only be voluntary, only voluntary people should access the network. Is this assumption, on which many adoption programs are based on, relevant ? It’s the result of a mix-up between the network and its community part, between membership and participation. It creates a frontier between those who want to try and others, a frontier that limits the spreading of the “social phenomenon” and the related benefits. If, for most workers, the network is not something obvious, it may come to them instead of waiting for people to come to the network. Interest comes from passive exposure and not from concealing to non-members. A real enterprise 2.0 or social intranet implies that everybody is a member, can browse and read, that the network is a part of the IS, that profiles have a pivotal role. What does not prevent participation from relying on people’s goodwill.

Most of times, when an assessment is made on an internal social network project, we can hear “xxxx employees decided to join”. As a matter of fact, since participation can’t be mandatory, volunteers are asked to register. So it’s logical that only a part of them can be found on the network. So, for instance, we can have 80 000 employees who can access the intranet and 6,7,8 000 that decided to also access the social network. Is that an impressive victory ? If we consider that it’s only a first step on a global roll-out program it may be, but if we consider that’s the way things should work I don’t believe in such approaches (except for very specific cases.

Of course, participation in a social network can’t be made mandatory. But this assumption deserves further explanation. Social networks are often mixed-up with communities. Participation in communities can’t be mandatory and depend on people’s goodwill. But sometimes work groups are turned into communities and, in this case, the answer is different. But things are different for the network as such, what is nothing but having a profile (they can fill in or not) and be able to connect to others, follow them, get in touch with them, follow the activity of blogs, communities, wikis etc…

The truth is critical mass is key to a successful project.

The network will spontaneously attract those who are born networkers. Some bystanders will also follow them. At then end it’s about 10% of employees. Bystanders will slowly move away (except the few that will “get” the social thing). So the network will live on volunteers, some will give up because the system will bring them back to the party line but, at the end, this small group of people will be the center of gravity of the social platform. Provided they don’t get out of breath.

This way of doing things has nothing to do with transforming work or the organization. Those who want will do things differently…and that’s all. It will only happen among them because they won’t be numerous enough to make the whole organization move with them. That’s another example of the “social bubble” syndrome that can even be painful for participants that work in a way with some people and in another way with the rest of the organization.

We can bet that some will want to join them over time. But it won’t happen if they have to reason to try, to find a personal benefit and feel like keeping the “social way”. What can bring them there ? They may think they’ll be able to find, at a given moment, the answer to a problem or the person that will be able to help. If only 10% are on the network there are many chances the others will think that it’s not worth, that there are few chances what they need will be there.

Confusing mandatory participation with mandatory membership has obviously a negative impact. That’s not because no one can be forced to participate that not everybody could access the network. There are many reasons to that :

[Read more...]

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

Can participation be mandated into communities. Yes…most of all when it’s not communities

December 7, 2010 By 2 Comments

Summary : organizations have to face a real issue about  managing their communities : making the system work without mandating. unfortunately there’s no alternative : communities rely on voluntary service. But there are two possible options. The first is, since it’s impossible to mandate participation, to tackle what prevent people from participating. The second is to wonder if the group in question is a community…and adapt rules accordingly.

Many organizations that try to harness the power of internal communities wonder if participation can be made mandatory. But they already know the answer : participation into communities rely on voluntary service and the best they can do is to create the conditions that will make employees feel like participating and understand how important it is.

There’s also  another lever. That’s not because participation can”t be mandated that it’s impossible to fight against what prevents people from participating. It’s obvious that many factors exist in the workplace that incite people not to participate. Job description,  goals, evaluations…are, among many others, strong signals saying “focus on your job, don’t put you at risk by joining this stuff”. Then, even before inciting people to play the game, rather start with what tells them not to. I remember people from financial group Hypoport speaking at the last Enterprise 2.0 Summit quoting their CEO : “wiki time is work time…”.

Then, remember that many of the communities organizations want to make emerge (I’m not talking about user generated communities) are not communities. So they don’t have to respect the art of managing communities. When your community has the same scope has an operational entity (team, department) and is supposed to be used to perform daily tasks through better collaboration coordination etc… so it’s a workspace, rather a socialized workspace. Since then, its rules are the team’s. What would you say to the sales representative who would refuse to use the CRM, the accountant that refuses to use the accounting software ?

The success of such group does not rely on content generation or of a community manager that would interfer with the real manager. It needs a model that fits employees needs, tools that fit in this model and some consistency into management. I remember of a director who said “the era of emails send to the whole department is over…everyhting has to be be shared in our new space. Same for the ideas I’m submitted, competitive watching, best practices etc…. This is also the only place where I’ll talk to you and answer questions that my interest everybody. It will also makes it easier for me to assess how collaborative and supportive each of you will be toward his colleagues in a transparent and factual way”. Let me tell you that “adoption” happened very fast. Of course, in the tool’s terminology, this group was a community but he knew that it was nothing but the way to fluidify his team’s daily operations.

A community will always rely on voluntary service. But are you sure what you’re setting up is a community ? Do you think it’s a part of people daily work to perform tasks that are part of their job description ? If so, that’s not a community, what does not mean that tools and operating models can’t be changed. Do you think it’s a voluntary contribution in addition to people’s “official” work ? This is a community and can be managed as such.

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

The day they (may) stop sharing

April 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Many current projects among enterprises rely on well known beliefs and needs : a better sharing and circulation of information are key to business performance, people share a lot on the web so organization have to provide them with the means to do the same at work.

Experience shows that it’s not that easy. Personal life is one thing, worklife is another one. That’s not because peope adopt some behaviors in one case that they’ll do the same in the other case in a natural fashion. Most of all, everybody now know that only less than 10% are actual content producers on the web. 10% on the web is a critical mass but 10% in an organization can be very few people so it implies to design work-specific approaches.

Anyway, more and and more businesses achieve it successfully. But we can already wonder how long it will last.

[Read more...]

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

Enterprise 2.0, collaboration and personal constraints

February 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Like it or not, the smallest unit of work is the individual task. People’s workday is made of achieving tasks, and even in the context of group or collaborative work. A group only delivers the sum of the tasks achieved by its members. That’s why coordination matters. We can even say that, how ironic, knowledge work makes individual tasks even more important : if it’s possible to achieve a physical task through a joint effort, thinking jointly is impssible. We think individually and group work implies increased interactions to stay coordinated and consistent. Ten people can push a car together but they can’t think as one to solve a problem : that’s why it’s important to exchange to share task statuses, update, get coordinated.

Now, let’s guess how an individual does when they have a task to achieve.

If he can do it by himself, it’s alright. And what if he can’t ? He reports to his team to ask for help and sometimes the problem solving is assigned to the group. What implies a new individual task for members even if the numerous interactions makes it look like a collectivce task. By group I mean a formalized set of people that have been assigned an objective, would it be a department or a project team. This situation looks very usual but some “2.0″ practices may improve things as it may help to deal with a lot of informal signals aiming at making everyone’s work status more visible, avoiding an heavy,time consuming and poorly responsive coordination. But what happens when the group reaches a dead-end ?

In a traditional system, the group would be in big trouble : the solution to avoid being block would be to throw a bottle into the sea. But how to find the right people out the human structure one is used to work into ? At this point, a 2.0 approach becomes very valuable : people rely on their network, on communities where discussions on this specific topic take place. If a similar problem has already been solved, it’s ok. If not, it’s possible to find the right people/communities and submit the problem. People are easy to find because their social activity enrich their profile…

A first conclusion has to be made at this point : people start from themselves, then go to formal groups they’re part of and to networks and communities. They start with an individual work, then a coordinated work in a defined geoup and, at the end, unstructed  interactions within fuzzy-boundaries groups. Things happen in this order and in not other. That’s nothing but logic : from the nearer to the most distant, from the known to the unknown, from the certain to the uncertain.

This is a very “in the zflow” approach. Here, the 2.0 dimension favors visibility, micro-coordination and quick problem solving. In the other hand, people don’t have to expose themselves, to do more than their jon, to engage more. The group efficiency is improved and people can even go and find answers out of it. This is an organization oriented approach : social practices are built around a process or a workflow to increase their bandwith.

But it also need another factor : to push the logic to its end, vibrant and relevant communities are needed, making it possible for people to swith in a network mode when the group reaches its limits. This is a more “social” approach. This communities are made of people who naturally share their experiences, their thoughts on a given subject, to go one step beyond their job description and their assignments, to put a little bit of their soul into their work. In this casen people expose themselves more because they share more than knowledge : they give opinions, propose things. This is clearly about “over the flow” activities, with a participation depending on people goodwill. This is what we can call pure 2.0 : conversations, communities that form and die, soft collaboration, informal, unstructured, unpredictable, with a hudge human component because it relies on people’s will to share, learn, connect to people they would never have met otherwise. This is nearly often what people think about when thinking about enterprise 2.0.

This brings things back to the distinction I already made a few months ago.

Now it’s time to go to the point.

[Read more...]

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

The myth of free and how it impacts employee’s participation

November 12, 2009 By 3 Comments

Many people are discussing all around the web (and even beyond) whether digital things must be free or not. On the one hand, there are those who think that everything that is not tangible and is fluidly exchanged through the net is free by nature, on the other end there are those who think that everything as value, because of the time spent to make these contents and that their dematerialization, even if it can lower storage and distribution costs in such ways to lower the final price, doesn’t mean things have to be free.

It’s both a social and economic discussion, that is very close to more concrete things we experience everyday in the workspace.

Let’s be clear : nothing is free. There are things that people has not to pay for, and mistaking the two concepts may make us go astray to a large extent. When we don’t pay for a content we must keep in mind that advertisers pay for us. Let’s consider, for instance, something that is free at first sight : the content of a blog. The author pays the price : hosting, the time invested… But, most of times, he decides not to pass the costs along the readers. Fortunately, he has a job that makes him earn enough to live. No one pays his rents with the consideration shown by his audience or with an exchange of service.

Knowing that, if the actitivity of producing contents is different from the one that makes people earn for their living, it could be free, when they meet it’s impossible except if the content producer can live on nothing and than gentle organizations will provide him with a home, food, electricity,…without anything in return. Stop dreaming.

The same phenomenon happens in the workplace when things come to collaboration, participation, social networking.

Everyone has his job, for which he’s paid. Everything he does and produces is financed by the person who pays him (he’s paid on a “local” budget which someone is responsible for even if at the end it’s the company money). On a strictly accounting point of view (and don’t tell me it’s irrelevant, everyone who has to manage a budget knows what I’m talking about), breaking silos means making something that has been financed by one person should become freely accessible by the whole company. Even worse, freeform collaboration means that someone someone who is paid on a department or business unit’s budget should be asked to make something (either it lasts 1 min or 1 hour) that someone else will benefit from.

The problem is not a the employee’s level, at his level everything being transparent, but at the management’s level because it’s in charge of optimizing how budgets are used. Unlike the general public web, businesses don’t know how not to pass a local cost along to the the whole organization since everyone has to justify the way the allowed funds are used. In brief, businesses don’t understand free across its departments. Rather, their internal policies don’t make that possible.

Do solutions exist ? Knowing that, in the end, the company takes benefit from collaboration, beyond internal rivalry, maybe the equivalent of a “global licence” should be a good thing. As a matter of fact, money comes from a one and only pocket, the company’s, that would like collaboration to grow within its walls. But it should take away manager’s sense of responsibility and the cure may be worse than de disease. Or maybe the good old distribution key, revisited for the service industry, could work. Who knows.

NB : Goldratt tells us that “cost allocation kills productivity”. Here’s an example that makes businesses continuously reivent the weel.

Filed Under: Recommended Bookmarks Tagged With: , , , ,

Meeting Rex Lee : collaboration, problem solving and innovation on the programme

June 2, 2008 By 1 Comment

I took advantage from my trip to attend Webcom Montreal to make a flying visit to Toronto. The main purpose was family but it was also the occasion to meet Rex Lee in person at his Toronto’s office. For those who don’t know him, he’s collaboration director at Bell Canada and, although less mediatized than many others, he’s blog is one of the most relevant on collaboration and social computing.

First step in the office, a wide open space, white boards all over the walls, a call for creativity. A “cross” space, as the team that makes it live, where people from all parts of the company can be gathered in order to improve the way they collaborate.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Innovation, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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