Links for this week (weekly)

  • “Recently some select firms have forgone the necessity to prove return on investment (ROI), for KM, portal and Enterprise 2.0. However for the vast majority, ROI justification remains a constant. In this session at the 2010 ILTA Conference, the panel examined the basics of metrics, how to measure productivity rather than busyness, how to measure engagement and concrete ways to measure portal and Enterprise 2.0 applications.

    As a baseline understanding for this discussion, metrics are numbers to gauge progress, i.e. a quantifiable means to measure if there is a move from one point to another. Firms engage in this activity to evaluate success and decide what to fund.”

    tags: enterprise2.0 portals KM ROI metrics

  • “I’m happy to announce that we are undertaking a thorough, public trial of an alternative to the traditional performance review.
    ratings pic.pptx.jpgDo you ever wonder if and how you could call a halt to your performance review process? Do you think traditional processes are marred by the distribution curve (and forced rankings), huge time investments and low impact on performance improvements? Maybe you agree that your processes have their faults, but you think that it’s not sensible to abolish performance appraisals altogether or replace them with coaching sessions.”

    tags: performancereview performanceappraisal hr hr2.0 coaching review peerreview

    • o, what was the problem? In short, twice a year the model did exactly the opposite to what we wanted to accomplish. Instead of an inspiring discussion about how to enhance people’s performance, the reviews caused disruptions, anxiety and de-motivated team members and managers. Also, even though our model was extremely lean and simple, the time investment was significant.
    • We’ll stop paying individual performance bonuses. Instead, we’ll give everyone a salary bump (similar to Netflix’s approach, paying top market salaries rather than bonuses).
    • Every six months, managers and team members use a one-on-one catch up to discuss their performance and how often they have challenged themselves in the last six months. Unlike in traditional performance reviews, there will be no requirements to write lengthy written assessments in preparation for the catch up
    • At the beginning of each six month period, we’d like everyone to focus on some personal areas where they can challenge themselves either by capitalising on activities they already love or by improving a weakness.
    • Also, whilst we have been pretty good in concentrating on people’s ‘weaknesses’, we seldom focus on developing areas that people are intrinsically motivated by. Research shows that people don’t change that much. Put simply, we may be wasting time by only concentrating on flaws. Instead, we will make a shift where we can try to enhance existing strengths to make full use of them
  • “Innovation communities are a way of giving new shape and purpose to knowledge that your employees already possess. The detailed discussions that take place, led by senior managers, often represent a company’s most productive and economical engine for increased profits.”

    tags: innovation communities conversations productdevelopment measurement value

    • CREATE THE SPACE TO INNOVATE. Line managers and employees occupied with operational issues normally don’t have the time to sit around and discuss ideas that lead to cross-organizational innovation. Innovation communities create a space in which employees from across the organization can exchange ideas.
    • GET A BROAD VARIETY OF VIEWPOINTS. It’s essential to involve people from different functions, locations and ranks, not only for their unique perspectives, but also to ensure buy-in throughout the company afterward. Innovation communities focus on creating enthusiasm as well as new products.
    • CREATE A CONVERSATION BETWEEN SENIOR MANAGEMENT AND PARTICIPANTS. By definition, innovation communities can’t work in isolation: To create sustainable cross-organizational innovation, it’s important that ideas flow to senior managers.
    • PARTICIPANTS SHOULD BE PULLED TO JOIN, NOT PUSHED. Members need to be enthusiastic about participating. Employees can’t be forced to reveal their thoughts or be imaginative.
    • MEASUREMENT IS KEY. Innovation communities are sustainable only if they can produce demonstrable value. Otherwise senior management loses interest.
  • “The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently asked a large group of experts if they thought Millennials would grow out of their currently strong penchant for online sharing and self-revelation. A strong majority of this group — 67% — said that this would not be the case, and that Generation Y would keep sharing as it aged.”

    tags: generationy sharing

    • As this happens, two broad benefits materialize. First, people who narrate their work become helpful to the rest of the organization, because the digital trail they leave makes others more efficient.
  • “I don’t know how many times I’ve read alarmist material that says Gen Y, millennials or whatever they’re now called are going to change the workplace beyond recognition. It’s nonsense. “

    tags: generationy humanresources millenials

    • The fact that change is a constant is nothing new. The pace of change may be accelerating but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with seismic changes in work practices though it might signal changes in buying behaviours.
    • I worry that Gen Y is an entitlement generation where work is not a priority and where dependency upon state and family are genuine issue
    • The idea widely spread that Gen Y wants to collaborate and that peer recommendation is their normal way of engaging in consumption is again
    • Rigour in understanding what is going is being eschewed for popularity and plugging into fleeting sentiment rather than addressing the deeper issues of the day.
    • Invention, innovation and world class thinking is not restricted to the Gen Y’ers. Most of my peers are Gen X, Boomers and almost all have some reasonable claim to genuine influence across all generations
  • “We thought we would kick off our new postings by summarizing some of the ideas from Pull that resonated the most in our many conversations from the last few months. from The Power of Pull.”

    tags: work management value asia knowledge socialnetworks push pull innovation collaboration passion ROA training talents

    • he average return on assets (ROA) of US companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of what it was in 1965. We’re running faster, but still losing ground. There is no sign of this long-term erosion flattening out, much less turning around.
    • Value ain’t where it used to be. Competition is not only intensifying (pdf), it’s changing the source of value creation from stocks to flows of knowledge, and the means for value creation from push to pull.
    • The collaboration curve supplants the experience curve. We may, for the first time, have an opportunity to turn diminishing returns performance improvement into increasing returns.
    • As it becomes increasingly possible to scale the number of connections and interactions between participants in a given environment, however, a new kind of performance curve is emerging: the collaboration curve. This is characterized by increasing returns: the more participants — and interactions between those participants
    • In part, the paradox arises because executives tend to focus on talent acquisition and retention, but do not invest much time on talent development throughout the firm. When they think about talent development, they spend time designing training programs rather than re-thinking the work environment to accelerate talent development
  • “The Internet is ultimately about sharing knowledge, making connections and collaborating to put knowledge to work. This makes it the platform for much of what your organization will do in coming years. But the Internet is the exception to the rule as networks go. Most networks are smaller, with limited size and, usually, a specific purpose. Every organization today is itself a network that is made up of many smaller networks. This means that, without a doubt, you need to understand networks. “

    tags: networks internet organization processes humancapital relationshipcapital structuralcapital

    • And you need to learn to think of your organization as a network, your people as participants in networks and your work processes as themselves as networks.
    • This form of model shows the unique combination that your organization creates by connecting human and relationship capital through structural capital.
    • The knowledge factory includes a series of processes (structural capital) that bridge human and relationship capital. Each one of these processes is essentially its own network.
  • “The social business analyst team at IDC, led by Michael Fauscette, has stepped in to fill the need for an impartial framework, and currently offers its document as a free download. This image shows the IDC social business framework:”

    tags: socialbusiness socialbusinessframework framework

  • “But can this great 20th century innovation survive and thrive in the 21st? Evidence suggests: Probably not. “Modern” management is nearing its existential moment.”

    tags: management managers bureaucracy change transactioncosts coase resources resourceallocation costallocation

    • Corporations are bureaucracies and managers are bureaucrats. Their fundamental tendency is toward self-perpetuation. They are, almost by definition, resistant to change. They were designed and tasked, not with reinforcing market forces, but with supplanting and even resisting the market.
    • The weakness of managed corporations in dealing with accelerating change is only half the double-flanked attack on traditional notions of corporate management. The other half comes from the erosion of the fundamental justification for corporations in the first place.
    • He argued corporations were necessary because of what he called “transaction costs.” It was simply too complicated and too costly to search for and find the right worker at the right moment for any given task, or to search for supplies, or to renegotiate prices, police performance and protect trade secrets in an open marketplace. The corporation might not be as good at allocating labor and capital as the marketplace; it made up for those weaknesses by reducing transaction cost
    • Complicated enterprises, like maintaining Wikipedia or building a Linux operating system, now can be accomplished with little or no corporate management structure at all.
    • They believe corporate hierarchies will disappear, as individuals are empowered to work together in creating “a new era, perhaps even a golden one, on par with the Italian renaissance or the rise of Athenian democracy.”
    • Transaction costs are rapidly diminishing. And as a result, everything we learned in the last century about managing large corporations is in need of a serious rethink. We have both a need and an opportunity to devise a new form of economic organization, and a new science of management, that can deal with the breakneck realities of 21st century change.
    • The new model will have to be more like the marketplace, and less like corporations of the past. It will need to be flexible, agile, able to quickly adjust to market developments, and ruthless in reallocating resources to new opportunities.
    • Resource allocation will be one of the biggest challenges. The beauty of markets is that, over time, they tend to ensure that both people and money end up employed in the highest-value enterprises. In corporations, decisions about allocating resources are made by people with a vested interest in the status quo.
    • Because engineers don’t have to compete for funds, the Google approach doesn’t have the discipline of a true marketplace, and it hasn’t yet proven itself as a way to generate incremental profits. But it does allow new ideas to get some attention.
    • Information gathering also needs to be broader and more inclusive. Former Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley’s demand that the company cull product ideas from outside the company, rather than developing them all from within, was a step in this direction. (It even has a website for submitting ideas.) The new model will have to go further. New mechanisms will have to be created for harnessing the “wisdom of crowds.” Feedback loops will need to be built that allow products and services to constantly evolve in response to new information. Change, innovation, adaptability, all have to become orders of the day.
  • “Or mettre en Å“uvre une solution de sécurité flexible capable d’administrer les outils du Web 2.0 exige davantage de visibilité, ainsi qu’une plus large sensibilisation des utilisateurs et un contrôle granulaire des applications. Il s’agit à la fois d’un défi technologique et d’une question d’éducation des employés. » “

    tags: web2.0 ITdepartment IT security

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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