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.

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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 ?

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Learning at work ? More proactivity is needed

Summary : considering how fast things change and knowledge becomes outdated, employees can’t rely anymore on the official enterprise training programs that are only relevant for heavy and “structuring’ trainings. Moreover, knowledge and know-how acquisition is not enough : people now have to understand the fast-moving context where they’ll use it all. Beyond training programs there’s a room for awareness ones.

Keeping employees’ knowledge up-to-date is essential for both employers and employees. Everyone has to keep the pace of a fast-moving context and except a few very structuring things, most of what we know as a life durations that’s getting everyday shorter.

Moreover, any knowledge makes no sense without a deep understand of the context. A recruiter, a communication project manager etc… have still been doing the same job for decades and have to master some basics. But if they spent the three last years doing “as usual” they may experience some some troubles in a close future, if not already, because they have too little or even no understanding of the fast-emerging practices and tools.

That’s were the problem is.

The traditional corporate training programs have a big downside : they made employees become passive if not assisted. While the enterprise has not said that something is important, trying to know more about it is not worth it. If the enterprise does not say that the context is moving, it means that it’s not moving. With such behaviors, it’s not impossible to see this kind of thing happening : in 2010 the head of communication wakes up and says “we don’t master our message anymore : people talk about us on the we. We have to join the conversation”. Scene of panic among employees. Facebook ? Twitter ? “But we were not told it was important”. “Do businesses have something to do on these platforms ?”…”Oh but there’s no training session about Twitter on the catalog !”.

It reminds me of a friend working at the HR dept at a large company. The conversation took place in 2008. “You know linkedin ?”. “Heard about…”. “It does not interest you ?”. “No, because we’re not using it”. “And what about being the first who wonders how to use it ?”. “No. We don’t use it. Not one of our business tools. Moreover, we have not been trained to use it”.

Enterprises and HR dept can’t do everything, can’t keep the pace of context evolutions, build training sessions for anything. There’s a flow of continuous evolutions that has to be captured, understood in such short cycles that a centralized system can’t meet this kind of need.

But there’s an unfortunate belief according to which :

- all that is not “official enterprise usage” does not exist. There’s nothing to learn by looking by the office window.

- if anything new is needed, then the enterprise will tell and teach and train.

But there’s also a need for awareness, context understanding that have to come before training. Moreover the “learning how to” can also be dangerous : people have to understand what they do and why. Back to the anticipation and awareness need…

The fault is “shared” :

- employees are not enough curious about their work, their job, the coming evolutions. What can explain a kind of fear of the future….

- organizations make everything to prevent employees from being proactive while they would benefit a lot from it. Awareness and watch are parts of anyone’s job and reduce the risk of seeing, one day, a lot of employees being outdated and off topic because “they didn’t know”, “they were not told”, “they did not anticipate”, “they did not see” things were changing that fast and their job was being transformed on a 3 years cycle.

Employees should know they can’t expect everything for the “welfare enterprise”, that they have to care themselves of their knowledge, watch, benchmark, network. They should be told why, shown how and, most of all, not been prevented from doing so.

In addition to training programs, awareness programs would be fully relevant today. knowledge are not only stocks we receive but more and more flows we need to capture.

Many challenges and lots of progress to make for HR according to IBM

IBM recently issued a study after having gathered insights from more than 700 Chief Human resources officers, titled “Working Beyond Borders”.. I let  you peruse this long and interesting document but here’s in a few lines some of my takes from it.

Let’s start with te conclusion. As we could expect, it confirms what many people have been knowing for years : in today’s economic context and makets, HR’s main challenge is to develop work “beyond the borders”. What does it mean ?

  • ability to work out of the enterprise silos and collaborate acrosse functions, departments, countries.
  • ability to work out of the enterprise boundaries with partners, clients
  • ability to work out of one’s own competence boundaries : mobilize expertises one don’t have and acquire new ones in a flexible and responsive way.
  • ability to mobilize out of one’s comfort and authority zone what implies to develop new forms of leadership.

These are creativity, agility and flexibility challenges that CHROs want to address in many ways

  • Develop creative leaders that will tackl challenges and opportunities in a new way that’s more adapted to our times. Kind of “intrapreneurs” able to react in an innovative way and engage people around them.
  • Develop speed and flexibility by simplifying processes and making employees more responsive.
  • Capitalize on collective intelligence by finding new ways to connect people

Even more interesting, one of the many illustrations of the study

It’s the evidence that while there are domains where CHROs find themselves efficient, some remain where about which they acknowledge not being effective although they will be critical in the future : fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing, developing leaders and developing workforce skills.

Now that that’s everybody know in what direction to head…the only thing to do is to work on that. The road seems very long but the amount of opportunities is more than worthy.

One more point to conclude :

I think there’s nothing to add. Just do it…

Enterprise 2.0 trainings are not useless

Like any new topic, enterprise 2.0 comes with lots of myths. One of them dies hard : no training should be needed, if things are not simple enough to avoid training, rather give up. In fact it’s not that simple and, before all, we should wonder what kind of training we’re talking about.

The first idea that comes is “tool training”. Many say that if an enterprise tool needs more than five minutes to be understood, people won’t use it. Really ?

A difference has to be made between “basic” and “advanced” use. The first has to come intuitively, the second needs much more than five minutes and may, at the end, not concern more than a few users.

Why this 5 minutes thing ? In a perfect world I can understand that any tool, whatever its purpose is, should be as easy to use that no training would be needed. In this case we’re talking about social networkin tools, anything 2.0 or social but it should be the case for any application…starting with the settings of any OS than runs employees’ computers. But we also have to pay attention to what I call the “Excel case”.

We all know at least one “Excel Master”, someone able to design a tangle of spreadsheets that can do nearly anything and look like small personal ERPs. No one can say that mastering Excel to this extent is a simple and even pleasant things, but most of these people learned it by themselves. We can’t say either that it’s the kind of tool that makes people feeling like discovering or using it. But facts are here : people use it, a lot, well and every day more. Even those who are not savvy users are doing things with Excel because no one can’t avoid it in the workplace. Anyway, it takes more than five minutes for anyone to have at least a basic use of it, and it doesn’t prevent people from using it. The reason is simple.

Excel is useful. Excel helps to make in a fast and efficient way things that would take much more time and would be subjects to many errors if done otherwise. It’s often said that before having what we like, we have to like what we have and Excel is the perfect example. It does not matter people like it or not, it’s as indispensable as a screwdriver is to a carpenter. Vital.

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Moving toward business models of a new kind : the example of “Danone Supporting Life”

One thing is sure : the “after the crisis world” will be very different from what it was before. It may seem obvious, but if we have a closer look at what happened in the past, we have to admit many upturns consisted of the rebuilding of what used to exist as it was. This time it seems that both economy and society learned things.

• growth is not and endless spiral. Especially if you want it to be strong.

• whoever creates value for onself while destroying value for the others will be impacted by the economical consequences of his behaviors one day or the orther.

• Companies are parts of an ecosystem (customers, suppliers, employess…). If a part of this ecosystem collapses, the company will soon follow because when value is destroyed at its periphery, it destroyes its own potential markets.

• Growing by developping new markets is healthier than using financial lever to balance the fact its current markets are finite.

• People, at the same time employees, clients, and member of the society, now want to fully play their part and judge corporate behaviors according to these lessons.

All this things are worth because management and work models will be impacted by these societal facts and, in the same way, being successful in this new context will imply new internal practices. This teaches us, once again, that the current crisis is not as economic as it may seem.

This can lead to predict the advent of business models of a new kind, close to Umair Haque’s smart Growth Manifesto d’Umair Haque. But many people wonder when it will happen and how it may look like. A first example is coming from France with “Danone Supporting Life”.

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3 web 2.0 tools enterprises must consider

I often touch on the need for professionaling web 2.0′s tools and usages in order to make them consistent in a corporate context. But we also have to keep in mind that there are some tools and usages that exist on the general public web that businesses haven’t considered yet and that they should bring inside their firewall.

Why three tools ? Because I didn’t find more. Even if I more addicted to the Harvard Business Review than to Techcrunch, it seems to me that as regards tools the essentials are behind us. Some cobble things up, make improveent, build mashups but no new logic comes and bring something really new in the extensive catalog that already exists. I was really looking for some new logics and not for an nth copy of something that already exists.

If you look at web 2.0 tools, very few are those that businesses have not try to implement for internal purposes yet (which does not mean they successfully managed to do so). Blogs : done. Wikis : done too. Social Networs k : they are learning. FlickR and YouTube like ? Done. Google Docs : done. Bookmarking : done. Then come some new services that are nothing but mashups. Let’s end the list.

3°) Silentale

I’ve put silentale on the third step of the podium because it’s not available yet so I rely on the promise that was made at the last LeWeb08 conference when won a special award from the public. The ability to gather and funnel all your conversations, exchanges, wherever they take place is an interesting productivity booster. This is a part of the “personal information supply chain” I’ve already developed here. A part of the corporate plumbing.

2°) Dopplr

To be honnest, Iwould  never have thought of mentionning  Dopplr here if I hadn’t have a conversation with a friend weeks ago. He works for a company that has subsidiaries all over the world and which teams are send…all over the world too. Experts can be in a local headquarter or send to join temps in a place near you, in the jungle or in the middle of the ocean. “Sometimes we can be 10 at the same time in NYC, each one coming from a different country….plus our NYC team. But it can also happen in the middle of nowhere without any of us knowing others people from the company are there. So we’d like to use Dopplr but, considering our industry, we can’t rely on a public platform. A prive dopplr would do the job”. What may seem of a secondary importance for sedentary businesses may be essential for those where mobility is the norm. And not only for human reasons…

1°) Seesmic.

Here is the big winner, coming in an easy first. It take a long time for businesses to recognize the business value of asynchronous and public conversations between the members of their staff. Video seems to be gadget for many of them. But the video asynchronous public conversations, instead of cumulating all the barriers bring a sudden ray of light as its ROI is obvious. Perhaps it’s also because of the current context.

Imagine that you need your sales team to be more efficient (I know…nobody cares about that today ;-) ). They are asked to qualify their leads better, to react in an adapted way to each situation…. The solution has a name : training. But how can an expert trainer work with people all over the world knowing that it’s just not possible to put him on a plane every morning !

A case can be imaginated. Everyone is asked to register his sales speech when he can. The trainer can see them one by one, make corrections showing what to improve, the the sales person start again… It’s more efficient than a videoconference because it does not disturb people’s own agendas, it allow corrections, it allow to teach by the example and, most of all, conversations can made accessible for all so that a real expertise library is available on the intranet with cases, real examples, corrections etc…

Only a blind person would not see the ROI here. And it’s only a quick and dirty example.

Ok…maybe none of these players are interested in this kind of market.

And you ? Do you see others ?

Digital natives, e-culture, e-students

Everybody focuses on the digital natives, the e-culture, and how those who are coming after us will deeply transform organizations.

Another point is the underlying question of the use of new tools in the educational process. Because Digital Natives are Digital Learners, what perhaps count much more than anything else, if they can’t learn, their difference may of very few use.

It points at important issues regarding to the way the eductional system and their professors are interacting with them.

What consequences can be drawn from these quotes :

  • my parents use e-mail … I text instant message
  • 76% of my teachers never used wikis, blogs, podcats
  • once a weekn 14% of my teachers let me create something using new technologies ; 63% never…

Humm…aren’t they the 21th century students and the future of our workforce, those we’ll have to rely on to face dramatically new business challenges ?

The art of mistaking means for goals

I often worry when I see companies that mistakes means for goals. It’s a common issue on enterprise 2.0 : “put people into networks”, “share information”, “collaborate” are not goals, they are only means that help to achieve goals. Reduce the time of response, innovate more and quicker, devilver something that exactly meets client’s needs, reusing people’s knowledge are goals

This post [fr] is obviously a good example

Sudden thought during a meeting.

Training’s goal is not the training, it’s the company !

Evaluating the training is relevant only if it measures the impact on the company !

Right said ! It’s one of the consequences of a disease that affects organization, which causes are nearly twins :

- mistaking means for goals

- evaluating a on local scale although the benefits take place on a global scale

It can be linked to my series on the impact of enterprise 2.0 on intangible assets (here, here, here, here and here ;-) ), which may be useful when discussing the ROI of enterprise 2.0. As a matter of fact, even if I’m convinced that a “Soft ROI”, unquantifiable, exists, I don’t think the hard ROI topic is taboo and, on the contrary, I’m sure it exists. No need to complicate the issue : the ROI has to be measured at the level of the business processes that are supported by intangible assets, and strategy maps and BSC indicators make it very easy to visualize.

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Enterprise 2.0 and Human Capital Management to support strategy

As we saw in a previous post, since human, information and organization capital support all the processes that create value, the question we have to answer is whether all these things we put in this “big bag” called enterprise 2.0 can help developing this pool of value. Or to make it clearer : in which way a company can rely on enterprise 2.0 to achieve its goals.

I’ll start with a warning : when saying enterprise 2.0 I’m talking in a broad sens, which also includes management practices and culture in addition to the tools. I don’t believe in the tool-centric definition that reduces a company to the tools it uses and forget its rules, its people, its culture, its history.

I’ll also add that what I say is “how can enteprise 2.0 help” : in no way I’d think that enteprise 2.0 would be self-sufficient. What we’re talking about must be used together with many existing things.

So let’s start our first step : human capital.

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