Links for this week (weekly)

  • “Le ministre de l’Industrie, Eric Besson, a annoncé le 19 juillet le lancement d’une étude sur le télétravail en entreprises par le cabinet de conseil Greenworking. L’occasion pour L’Usine Nouvelle de revenir avec Olivier Brun, fondateur et associé du cabinet, sur cette mission. “

    tags: remotework management middlemanagement

    • Le télétravail connaît aujourd’hui un fort essor sous l’impulsion de la génération Y, des 25-34 ans : ils souhaitent un meilleur équilibre avec leur vie personnelle, tout en prenant le risque que le professionnel empiète sur le personnel
    • Mais le manager intermédiaire est le premier frein au télétravail. Un frein lié à une peur de l’abus, du litige et de ne plus pouvoir contrôler ses troupes. Le modèle managérial français est encore essentiellement basé sur le temps de travail et non sur le résultat, tandis que les anglo-saxons sont passés à un management par objectifs.
    • Le développement par l’exemple est moteur en accompagnement du changement
    • La satisfaction des salariés, chez Renault par exemple, est élevée. Réduction du temps de travail, meilleure vie familiale… meilleur temps de somme
    • S’extraire un ou deux jours de son lieu de travail par semaine ne cause pas de rupture du lien social, mais permet d’éviter la fragmentation
  • “So, why do I think that Social Media isn’t Community Management?

    Simple – win scenarios. For most (not all) Social Media professionals, they “win” if they maintain a conversation with every person who touches a brand to personalize that brand and create an engaged audience.

    For most (again, not all) Community Managers, they “win” if they put themselves out of a job because their users are talking to each other (not just to the community manager), evangelizing the brand and defending itself to the point that the Community Manager is no longer needed.”

    tags: socialmedia communities communitymanagement

    • The metrics for both are different. The goals for both are different. The tools for both are different. The success factors are different. So why on earth do we keep calling them the same thing?
    • “The NY Community Manager will be responsible for launching all marketing plans for the new service (in soft test now with launch date set for July), to include social media, viral marketing, event marketing, etc.”

       

      Not a single mention of building an actual community, just talking and selling to an engaged audience.

    • If your job is primarily to talk to lots of people, you work in Social Media

       

      If your job is primarily to get lots of people talking to each other, you work in Community Management.

    • Either one is ok,  but mixing the two up can only be bad for all of us.
  • “This has led to a small but growing movement to make the workplace take on this issue, with the premise that traditional, pre-digital work processes tended to have more people directly in the loop, reviewing, editing, overseeing, and so on. Now too often, work takes place in digital silos that greatly reduce the human involvement, fails to capture much of the knowledge at all (something I call knowledge evaporation), and leaves little behind to learn from, build upon, or otherwise reuse. This is because older digital tools aren’t nearly as focused on discovery, collaboration, or network effects.”

    tags: socialmedia enterprise2.0 socialbusiness businessprocess process visibility visiblework agility openwork

    • it’s a process of narrating your work in a social forum and involving your co-workers, business partners, and customers to join you, as appropriate. Is it a formal process? No, not really. Is it repeatable and easy to do? Yes, with a little preparation. Are there people doing it today, and succeeding? Yes, it’s done all the time.
    • This is where agility and social business have much in common. In the end, being in frequent (some would say constant) contact with ones stakeholders makes for a highly aligned, mutually well understood, and jointly accepted work product.
    • For now, I’m referring to the combined concepts of observable work, narrated workflow, open collaboration, and working out loud, in the most generic sense as open work.
    • There are many success stories for open work, probably the best known being Alcoa’s case study delivered at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference a while back. There are others. I urge you to read McGee’s excellent Managing the Visibility of Knowledge Work for additional thinking.
  • “Yesterday Ben Horowitz published a solid post “When Employees Misinterpret Management,” which should have been titled “When Management Misdirects Employees.”

    He gives three examples, the most fun of which is him trying to get his sales team at Opsware — the company he and Marc Andreessen famously rode through the bust to a huge, huge win — to not cram all their sales into the quarter’s last week.”

    tags: incentives sales management goals target quantification quality

    • I’ve long learned to embrace this dynamic at new companies by setting
      a) absurdly low base salaries (think $30K to 60K)
      b) absurdly high commission structures (10% to 25%)

      Why?

      It’s a filtering mechanism for me to get the most insane, rabid and self-confident sales folks — and filter out the lame “professionals.

    • Those sales folks are death at startups. They lack the drive and creativity to sell new products  because they are — largely — old, fat dogs.
    • At some big company with 300 sales folks, they’re great for managing existing accounts. At a small company with under 10 sales folks, those “professional” sales types are the kiss of death. They need everything handed to them on a silver platter, and they can’t close deals because of the product, the marketing kit or the fact that we’re doing something new.
    • Bottom line: People who lack quality products focus on quantifying them.
    • That’s your job as a manager: get folks through the self-imposed barriers.
    • 1. Read Ben’s piece.
      2. Be careful what you incent for.
      3. If you use quantitative incentives, be sure to complement them with qualitative ones.
      4. The best systems are the ones that constantly evolve, challenge, change and layer incentives and goals, while constantly communicating why.
      5. Most of the time when a team misinterprets a manager, it is the manager’s fault for not anticipating the ramifications of his behavior or monitoring the system he put in place. It could also simply have been a bad idea on the manager’s part.
      6. Even if it is the employees’ fault, the manager should take ownership since that’s the easiest way to move on (e.g., “Listen, I set the wrong goal here. Let me reset the expectation and you tell me if you think it’s correct.”).
  • “SocialBPM was explained by Elise Olding in a recent research paper, which sadly is only available to Gartner clients, called “Social BPM: Design by Doing”. She did a great job of starting to explain what SocialBPM by highlighting 2 very different perspectives, to which I have added a 3rd, which I have described below with some of the issues I see.”

    tags: BPM socialBPM processes collaboration socialnetworking

    • 1. Social by Design: Collaboration around process improvement
    • The initial discovery of processes is often in workshops, but once deployed and executed, then it is critical that there is a feedback mechanism so those actually using the processes can identify issues or suggest improvements. Typically this is ‘send the process owner an email’.

       

      With SocialBPM the discussion is all linked to the automated or manual process step, related document, form, system, metric or compliance statement

    • So until the “Yammer crowd*” (Yammer, Jive Software, SocialText, CubeTree, …. ) genre of social software, which is ‘standalone social technology’, is tightly integrated into BPM modeling and execution software it is making life worse not better in the long term.
    • 2. Design by Doing; Collaboration around ‘getting a job done’
    • This is not about improvement, but getting a number of people together to get a particular problem solved – ie a specific instance of a process.
    • These discussions are more than just discussions or chatter  – they are on-line meetings – with decisions and actions. So any social networking software needs the capability to create, assign or track actions
    • 3. Social Network: Social networking within the organization
    • So, organisations need to start defining what they are trying to achieve and therefore what they need from a social software solution before they pile in with a ‘limited trial’ that suddenly becomes the defacto standard, running roughshod over formal process and procedure.
  • “L’enjeu est de pouvoir auditer leur stratégie digitale et l’améliorer afin d’impacter plus fortement les consommateurs qui se font de plus en plus nombreux sur le Net.”

    tags: DigitalIQ digital

    • On y apprend par exemple que sur 27 banques de détails et établissements de crédits américains étudiés seules 2 entreprises, American Express et Bank of America, atteignent le stade qualifié de « génie » avec score Digital
    • A travers de nombreuses analyses, le think tank L2 montre également d’intéressantes corrélations avec les performances économiques des entreprises
  • “n the world of work, we encounter three primary tasks:

    First, there are many processes that are, in fact, repeatable in the enterprise. Some examples: how we process orders, how we assemble products, how we deliver products to end customers.
    Second, project work where the overall steps are repeatable but the ingredients are not. Examples: product development, managing marketing campaigns, executing a sale and the like.
    Then there are those that aren’t exactly predictable: A question a prospect or customer may have before making a purchase decisions, a complex product that has customizable/subjective uses or accessories that work better with certain models. These come in both transactive/process as well as project flavors and almost always show up unannounced. “

    tags: predictabiliy processes exception problemsolving customersatisfaction PR customer

    • But as to the third, the sheer impracticality of channeling exceptions in any scalable way to get the right answers has plagued organizations for ever
    • Each exception requires a different set of experts or problem owners, some known but most unknown, and often spread across a global footprint at large organizations.
    • Exceptions maybe just that – stuff that happens less frequently. But the mistake we often inadvertently make is equating lesser frequency to relatively lesser criticality in terms of loss or risk.
    • So why is it then, that we pay more attention to facilitating repeatable process, over exception handling
    • Customers certainly need more judgment from us. But the answer won’t come from values alone. That’s just dreamy stuff and an expensive change management bill if the pipes don’t exist to channel those values
    • It’s, in fact, the lack of internal wiring of people (as opposed to systems) across our organizations that’s the core problem.
    • Look, collaboration is not the answer to every problem. But by the same token, I’m more convinced everyday that the unwavering belief in the notion that there is 100% repeatability in most processes is grossly overestimated and even downright dangerous.
    • ’ve long said that what rigid process systems are missing is a giant Discuss button that sits right between Submit and Cancel buttons that govern what in reality is not a very black and white day in the office
  • “Face à l’innovation de rupture, je repense toujours à cette citation du Pr. Jean Mathiex (un historien) qui, parlant des mouvements révolutionnaires du XXème siècle, affirmait non sans humour : « un révolutionnaire c’est un terroriste qui a réussi » !
    Je trouve que cette citation s’applique fort bien à l’innovation : sans sanction du marché, pas d’innovation de rupture ni de produit révolutionnaire. C’est parce qu’elles réussissent commercialement que les “bonnes idées” et autres rêveries d’ingénieurs ou d’inventeurs deviennent des innovations.

    tags: innovation structure organization management breakthrough

    • Je trouve que cette citation s’applique fort bien à l’innovation : sans sanction du marché, pas d’innovation de rupture ni de produit révolutionnaire. C’est parce qu’elles réussissent commercialement que les “bonnes idées” et autres rêveries d’ingénieurs ou d’inventeurs deviennent des innovations.
    • En 2003, Clayton Christensen a proposé, dans le fameux Innovator’s Dilemma une approche paradigmatique et démontré que les innovations de rupture étaient souvent le fait de structures elles-même en rupture avec leur éco-système et donc qu’en cela une rupture n’est pas seulement technologique mais globale.
    • Certaines grandes entreprises savent innover en dépit de structures en apparence sclérosées, Apple en étant d’ailleurs le meilleur exemple : cette entreprise n’arrête pas d’innover mais garde une structure quasiment gravée dans le marbre : les mêmes départements, les mêmes dirigeants depuis 15 ans ! A opposer à Microsoft (naturellement) dont les structures n’arrêtent pas de bouger et qui n’innove plus depuis bien longtemps…
    • Or la plupart des entreprises innovantes ont des structures plutôt fortes, voire sclérosée en apparence : Michelin ou Saint Gobain par exemple sont des entreprises très innovantes et pourtant très “raides” structurellement.
    •  Certaines ex-start-up au développement express, quant à elles, ne savent pas trouver l’énergie de la croissance et s’enlisent dans l’entropie de buzz en tous genres. Elles en sont réduites à acheter leurs innovations (qu’on songe à Google ou à Twitter rachetant Android ou TweetDeck). Ces entreprises là ne sont pas structurellement innovantes :
    •  Innover en rupture ce n’est pas seulement penser autrement, c’est également (voire peut-être avant-tout) se remettre en question.
  • “Today, 22% of employees say that they have used a non-IT-provisioned service over the Web to perform their job function —not to update their Facebook accounts, but to do real work.[i] Many employees are no longer relying on IT to provision, manage, and run their technology because they feel IT is too slow and puts unnecessary restrictions on their use of technology. Many customers expect on-demand information, customized user experiences, and mobile apps that IT is expected to deliver quickly, cheaply, and reliably. Some CIOs have reacted to this shift by vigorously defending their turf from these encroachments. Others have ceded control to third-party service providers and business managers who now make their own technology decisions.”

    tags: CIO IT technology empowerment governance

    • From alignment to convergence. CIOs who can only take orders, who can’t speak the language of the business, who can’t step out of the proverbial back office and into the front lines of the business will not last long.
    • From execution to innovation. Project execution and on-time delivery are not goals but table stakes today. Having this focus will not be enough. You must drive innovation and boost business-partner relationships.
    • From technology supplier to services orchestrator. The traditional role of the CIO has been to manage the technology needs of the organization. The new CIO will not just supply technology but will be responsible for sourcing technology solutions and developing services for business.
    • Today many CIOs are being measured on revenue growth, customer intimacy, and their contribution to innovation
    • From rules to guardrails. IT often enforces rigid rules and convoluted governance processes. IT must evolve new governance approaches that empower the business with providing “guardrails” and education
  • “The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselve”

    tags: knowledge knowledgemanagement Google search searchengines memory information informationmanagement

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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