Disintermediarization : how a 2.0 practice can help against credit crunch

October 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Enterprise 2.0 is enterprise before being 2.0 and social tools are tools before being social. It’s very important to understand that anything 2.0 is, before all, characterized by a vision of interactions between people before being about the use of such or such tools. And a relevant vision can help bringing an old legacy business back to youth without changing its purposes nor its main characteristics.

The current economic situation shows us how once “what can’t be changed” faces a major crisis despite a presupposed infallibility, it’s possible to makes things change since the “we’ve always done things this way so there’s no other way” reflex is not relevant anymore. But it needs a real paradigm shift.

Banks don’t have money anymore ? They don’t trust people ? They don’t lend anymore ? They don’t even trust other ? Add to that the fact people don’t trust banks anymore too and you get all the required elements for a credit cruch.

So, strangely, everything that was only about mathematics, based on foresseable nature of things, cartesian risk scoring, showed its limits and more and more attention is paid to what was ignored : people, trust and what underlies all that, that’s to say the existence of links, of interpersonnal exchanges that make trust possible. Perhaps the beginning of an answer for those for are convinced that discussions and networkings had no business value.

[Read more...]

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

Can we identify good managers by the way their team uses the net ?

October 1, 2008 By Leave a Comment

A very common discourse within companies is : “our people waste their time on social networks and, more globally, on the web. We have to restrict access to it”.

If, when talking about social networks, it depends on the way people use them, so its important to grant access to what useful for business, I find it very damageable when companies come to restrict access to the whole web.

What are the motives for that ?

First comes security. I think it’s more a convenient motive than a relevant one and is an excuse for the next point I’ll mention. Second, it’s IT depts job to ensure security without blocking everything. Did we remove doors and windows from houses and offices in order to prevent to struggle against burglars ? No, because we need to go outside, to see what’s happening by the window,
The second point is abiut productivity. It’s a waste of time and people are not here to do that during work hours. But what does companies mean by “doing that” ?

[Read more...]

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

Quotations between provocation and good sense

June 3, 2008 By 1 Comment

Sometimes I find sentences which are really worth by themselves, that have a lot of meaning, whether in or out of their original context. I often bookmark them but this time I think they’re worth a post. As a matter of fact I find two series of nice quotations in two posts I recently read : the first from Andrew McAfee are more about provocation (but provocation is sometimes useful to make people wonder), the second is from Jon Husband and  is more about good sense.

So…let’s start with provocation :

Tim Brown, IDEO: Creative people aren’t interested in management.
Hal Varian, Google: ‘Statistician’ is the sexy job of the 21st century.
Henry Mitzberg, McGill: We are not living in time of great change. Companies will not save the world.
Eric Abrahamson, Columbia:  Organizations are over-organized.
Yves Doz, INSEAD: The danger is to think that what’s new is exciting and good, while what’s old is bad and tired.
Keith Sawyer, Washington University: People are deeply uncomfortable with uncertainty.
James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: The centralization of decision-making is a conceptual error. Individuals are not better than the collective.

Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford: The language of economics is toxic to the practice of management.
Kevin Kelly, Wired: Productivity is for machines. If you can measure it, robots should do it.

…and finish with good sense :

“Networks make organizational politics and culture explicit“  (Michael Schrage, MIT)

“The most difficult thing about IBM’s transformation was that so many people delegated responsibility upwards” (Lou Gerstner, IBM CEO)

“Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust“  (Warren Bennis, USC)

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

Is creativity the only answer to complexity ?

May 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Basically that would make sense. In an industrial economy everything is product-centric : we know what it is, what it’s made of, of which pieces it’s composed, there’s one and only one to produce and assemble them, and everyone knows exactly what he has to do. It’s a system based on infinite repetition of totally scripted actions whithout any deviation : each production has to be the exact clone of the previous one.

In a knowledge based economy, things change. Most of times, the product consists in “finding a solution to a problem”. That makes things much more complex. Each steps depends on the the result of the previous and the product (ie the solution) is unknown at the starting of the production.

So there’s no suprise to see projects failing when people try to apply them what used to work before.

But we can get throught that : let’s see how.

[Read more...]

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

Archimedes theorem applied to Enterprise 2.0..with trust instead of liquid

April 1, 2008 By 2 Comments

I often say that even when change seems promising, it’s important to keep our feets on the ground and to go step by step. Excess often lead to another excess in the opposite direction and organizations rarely benefit from what seemed to be so promising.

If we consider companies will have to change, two solutions are possible :

- going quietly, in order to be ready when the “old” model will be out of date. It supposes to start early in order to have time to find one’s own way, since “magical recipes” don’t exist.

- jaming on the brakes and accepting the risk of facing violents changes later. Some, like Gary Hamel, think since change isn’t in corporate DNAs, this is what will happen.

But when it’s time to migrate to management 2.0, enteprise 2.0 or to adopt social computing tools, more than the fear of change, trust is essential.  [Read more...]

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

Talking with Michel Hervé about turning the pyramid upside down

March 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

You problably don’t know Michel Hervé and that’s a pity since thy guy is really worth being exported. This entrepreneur is well known for his book “from the pyramid to the networks”  (unfortunately only available in french) that describes the way he run his business, has he says, in a participative and democrat way.  Something that’s like Ricardo Semler runs Semco, if you’ve heard about him.

I had the chance to spend a whole afternoon with Michel Hervé and talk with him of many things. Despite we often speak or attend in the same events, we never had time to sit down and talk, now that’s done.

There’s so many things to say that I could fill a book with, but I’d like to focus on two points of our discussions. The principle of subsidiarity and why connecting people through information is so important. [Read more...]

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

Trust doesn’t preclude control…but which control ?

March 21, 2008 By 1 Comment

That’s a key point in enterprise 2.0 discussion : build a base called trust, which has effects on transparency, loosen grip and the command and control world that’s ours. Hence the announced end of “command and control”.

Why the end of command and control ? Regarding “command”, can you imagine an organization where nobody commands ? That’s not because we need more place for serendipity that we have to let luck rule our companies. Command must stay, but people may be allowed to also do what’s not asked. Most of all, command can be about goals definition, not about the means you’ll use to reach it.

And what about control ? According to Maddie Grant, companies can’t adapt to the present context because they can’t live without control. I fully agree with that opinion but I’d like to add something. [Read more...]

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

Collaboration, enterprise 2.0 and the dimensions of trust

June 26, 2007 By Leave a Comment

As a networking enterprise, one of the enterprise 2.0 most important assets is that it takes the maximum benefits from synergies between people within the enterprise. If we want such synergies to emerge, there’s one ingredient we can’t forget : trust.

So trust is necessary…but what are we really talking about ? And what’s its importance in enterprise 2.0 adoption ?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR Tagged With: , , ,
Newer Posts »