Planet Enterprise 2.0

We could all benefit from this level of energy and commitment

With a hat tip to Espen for finding and sharing this.

[cross posted at FAST Forward]

The Obama campaign was innovative on a number of dimensions, particularly with the use of social media and the effective leverage of committed volunteers. There’s been some good reporting that captures the ground truth of what the campaign actually did and some early efforts to make sense out of these facts in a way that offers lessons for those of us interested in their relevance to broader organizational and enterprise needs.

Use of social media

• The Machinery of Hope : Rolling Stone - A substantial article analyzing the volunteer organization in the Obama campaign and the role of social media tools
• BBC NEWS | Technology | Internet key to Obama victories - A fairly substantial report on the Obama campaign’s effective use of the Internet during the primary season
• Inside Obama’s Surging Net-Roots Campaign - Analysis and commentary of the Obama campaign’s use of the internet as an organizing and fund-raising tool
• Members vs. Customers: How the Obama and Clinton Online Campaigns Differ - Harvard Business Online’s Conversation Starter - An analysis of the differing approaches to enlisting supporters by the Obama and Clinton campaigns during primary season. Turns an eye toward the differing uses of supporting technology and how those differences reflected differing assumptions and goals about the role of supporters
• The Media Equation - How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power - NYTimes.com - An excellent overview piece of reporting on how the Obama campaign made effective use of social media tools and thinking.

Effective use of engaged volunteers

• Obama Opens the GOTV Firehose | The Next Right - Analysis of the organizing principles and strategies behind the Obama campaign’s ground organization
• Obama Camp Relying Heavily on Ground Effort - A fairly detailed analysis of the organizing principles behind how the Obama campaign built its volunteer organization
• Zack Exley: The New Organizers, Part 1: What’s really behind Obama’s ground game - A case study of the principles and approach behind the ground level volunteer organization in the Obama campaign. Some good insights into how to take full advantage of a motivated volunteer force with the right organizing principles and the right supporting technology

Lessons for organizational design and strategy

• Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators - Umair Haque - Umair Haque is one of the most insightful analysts and interpreters of how new technologies are influencing and shaping organizational design choices. Here he turns his eye on the lessons available in the success of the Obama campaign.
• Barack Obama’s Edge-Based Organization - John Sviokla - An early analysis of some of the broader lessons for organizations and organizational design that can be drawn from the Obama campaign

This has been lurking in my RSS aggregator for quite a while, courtesy of Jon Husband. There is really a lot of highly condensed insight in this post.

Thanks to JP Rangaswami for distilling social computing (in the context of work) to an essence.

From his post “Facebook and the Enterprise, Part 5: Knowledge Management“.

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“More and more, knowledge management is going to be about reducing the cost of, and simplifying the process for, letting someone watch what you do. Nonintrusively. Time-shifted. Place-shifted. Searchable. Archivable. Retrievable.”

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Via Dave Pollard via Nancy White …

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JP Rangaswami on KM … “Clear, Transparent, Searchable, Archivable, Retrievable”
admin
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:08:06 GMT

[cross posted at FAST Forward blog]

How often do you run across organizations that claim they intend to be “fast followers” when it comes to some dimension of strategy and innovation? Maybe I’m simply cranky because it’s Monday, but is there any way to make sense of such an approach in operational terms? The image of “fast follower” is intended to evoke a NASCAR driver drafting behind the leader, carefully waiting for the right moment to streak past and across the finish line. It’s deeply rooted in a notion that strategic success is a function of execution.

Any fast following strategy assumes learning from the leaders as a necessary first step. If you actually believe that the strategy can work, you need to be operating with something along the lines of the following as a theory of learning over time:

In this model, watching a first mover and waiting allows you to start your learning at a higher level and sometime later pass the first mover as their learning process peaks and levels off or slows down. I have two problems with this model. First, it assumes that the lessons learned by our first mover are easily observable and quickly transferable. Second, it still denigrates learning as an ongoing requirement. In this model, learning only needs to happen long enough to figure out the new strategic game and we get back to execution as the only relevant differentiator. It encourages you to undervalue and under invest in learning as a strategic competence.

I suspect that strategic learning is much more likely to follow a logistics curve of some sort. Early learning is relatively slow, followed by a period a very rapid learning, and ultimately a leveling off. If you accept that model of learning, then a fast follower strategy becomes even more suspect. In that environment, first mover advantages are likely to be more pronounced, with something like the following representing that situation:

At this point, being early in my own learning process, I mostly have more questions, not answers. Among them, in no particular order, are:

1. What’s the relative value of competitive secrecy vs. the internal organizational drag on learning imposed by attempts to preserve secrecy?
2. What can you do to shorten the slow ramp stage of learning?
3. Under what circumstances would fast following remain a viable strategy? Are those circumstances strategically interesting?
4. How do shortening learning cycles alter this argument?

Just managing some administrivia for bloglines. Please ignore

As part of my talk yesterday at the Social Media Strategies conference, I made passing reference to a number of stories, blog posts, bloggers, thinkers, and writers. It’s an occupational hazard of being a former professor.

I’ve written about different elements of yesterday’s talk over the course of various blog posts over time. Here are links to some of the most directly relevant together with links to other items I referenced:

• Dueling philosophies: social media vs. knowledge management
• Best Practices: Eureka! Xerox discovers way to grow community knowledge. . And customer satisfaction
• Knowledge management at Andersen Consulting (Harvard Business School case study)
• Knowledge work and micro-processes
• Knowledge management: the newest battle between the neats and the scruffies
• Useful models of systems change

Finally, I drew on a number of smarter people than I on the topics of expertise and organizational change. Here are some good entry points for further reading.

Seeing Organizational Patterns : A New Theory and Language of Organizational Design, Keidel, Robert W.
Keidel is an organizational theorist/designer who builds a very practical way of thinking and talking about organizations around the simple observation that all interactions in organizations can be understood in terms of the blend of control, cooperative, and autonomous ways of relating that organizational members can engage in. For the sports-minded, Keidel maps these three basic relating choices to the sports of American football, basketball, and baseball. He builds a nice case that organizational design choices can all be understood in terms of how these three fundamental relationship choices are mixed and blended.

Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Lave, Jean
Jean Lave is an ethnographer working as part of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. In this volume, Lave explores learning as primarily a social phenomenon and builds a very practical theory of how apprenticeship forms of skill acquisition and learning work in the real world.

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware, Hunt, Andy
I’ve become a general fan of Andy Hunt’s pragmatic programming series of books. They are useful well beyond the narrow area of software development. In this new book, Hunt offers a useful introduction to the Dreyfus model of expertise and how it applies in the general context of knowledge work.

Quality Software Management (V1) : Systems Thinking, Weinberg, Gerald M.
The first of a four-volume exploration of the particular and peculiar challenges of managing the development and implementation of software. The first volume introduces fundamental notions of how to model and think about complex systems and how they respond to change. Weinberg adapts Virginia Satir’s family therapy theories to the environment of complex organizational environments.

Quality Software Management (V3): Congruent Action, Weinberg, Gerald M.

While all four volumes of Weinberg’s work are valuable, this volume on what Weinberg describes as “Congruent Action” is the most useful for understanding organizational change in concert with Volume 1.

Here is the presentation I did today at the Social Media Strategies conference going on at the Stanford Court in San Francisco. We got some excellent input and interaction going. There should be a full size version of this graphic linked to this version.

I did this presentation using MindManager 7.0. It mostly worked, but not as well as I would have liked. The link to the MindManager file itself is below:

MindManager format file: Internal communities mindmap

Here’s an excellent idea. I’ll be on the West Coast on the 29th (I’m speaking at the Social Media Strategies conference), but I’m sure I’ll be able to fit this into my schedule for the day. This comes to me by way of my long-time friend and colleague Keri Pearlson (who might get one of those recommendations).

My dear friend and Enterprise 2.0 Evangelista, Susan Scrupski, has posted an idea  that I’m passing along to you. She’s titled it “LinkedIn Pay It Forward Day”. She’s suggesting that next week, on October 29, 2008 we all go visit the LinkedIn Page of someone in our social network and write a recommendation for them.

Susan explained, “Everyone has worked with someone in their network who is deserving of a positive recommendation. The randomness of the recommendation will make it satisfying for you and the recipient.”

Giving someone the ‘gift of kind words’ is a wonderful idea. My daughter’s class did that one year around the holiday time. It was free, and you should have seen the smile on the faces of the kids when they came home with their gift. My daughter put hers up on her wall and had me read it to her for months.

The idea of paying it forward is very appealing. As Susan mentions, in this economic environment, so many of our friends and colleagues find themselves out of a job or fearing that they may be. A gift of kind words is a great gift indeed.

I’m endorsing her idea. I’ve just put a note to myself on October 29 to go write a recommendation for someone in my social network. Let’s all do that.

Pay it Forward on LinkedIn
kpearlson
Sat, 25 Oct 2008 04:14:42 GMT

I’m presenting today to the Technology Leaders Association meeting in Chicago on the topic of “Technology for Us.” I’ve uploaded my slides to Slideshare.

I’ve also tagged a number of links at delicious; both of sites we may check out and references to follow up materials. Those links can be found here.

[cross posted at FASTForward Blog]

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work, Anthony, Scott D. et.al.

The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is the newest installment in a series of books articulating and explicating Prof. Clay Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation. This hands on guide packages some of the insights developed as an outgrowth of the consulting work of Innosight, LLC, the consulting firm founded by Christensen to pursue the practical insights from his research at the Harvard Business School. If innovation is part of your current or prospective job description, this needs to be on your shelf (after you’ve read it, of course).

Christensen’s theories of disruptive innovation appeared first with the publication of The Innovator’s Dilemma in 1997. During the worst excesses of the dotcom boom, every start up business plan including an obligatory head nod to Christensen and an assertion that their business model was truly disruptive. Who doesn’t want to be innovative; ideally disruptively so. Christensen and his colleagues have continued to develop his theories in The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth, Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change, and now The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

Christensen distinguishes two forms of innovation — sustaining and disruptive — not in terms of their technological features but in terms of their relationship to markets. The distinction in summarized in the following diagram reproduced from The Innovator’s Guide to Growth.

In essence, Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation flows from recognizing that the pace of technology improvement is generally more rapid than the capacity of users in the market to take advantage of those improvements. This differential is what open possibilities for differing approaches to innovation.

In this market oriented theory of innovation, there are three paths available to organizations interested in articulating potentially disruptive strategies. The first is to identify and target “nonconsumers;” potential consumers for whom existing technologies fail to meet their particular needs. The second is to identify existing customers where existing technologies are more technology than they needs. The final is to investigate potential consumers in terms of what Christensen’s theory describes as “jobs to be done” as a path to defining new products and services to perform these jobs. I must confess that I still find this path the least well articulated aspect of this theory.

Throughout this book, the authors start by recapping the essentials of Christensen’s theoretical arguments and proceed to develop the next level of operational detail it takes to transform strategic insights into execution details. If you’re an organization seeking to develop its own disruptive strategy, the authors here have worked out many of the next level questions and identified the supporting analyses and design steps you would need to answer and complete. The authors are clearly competent and talented consultants who are willing to share how they manage and do their work. Their hope, of course, is that many of you will conclude that you need their help to do the work. What is nice here, is that they are confident enough in their abilities that they are quite thorough in what they share. This volume is not a teaser; it’s complete and coherent. You could pretty much take the book as a recipe and use it to develop your project plans. On the other hand, the plans by themselves won’t guarantee that you can assemble a team with the necessary qualifications to execute the plan successfully.

The other thing that this book does quite nicely is identify the kinds of organizational support structures and processes that you would want to put in place to institutionalize systematic disruptive innovation.

Christensen and his colleagues are continuing to build a rich, systematic, theory of disruptive innovation. With roots in academic research, they are freely sharing their insights and their methods. The Innovator’s Guide to Growth is a solid workbook that will let you develop your own skill at doing disruptive innovation. Of course, the plan by itself won’t eliminate the need to gain the experience for yourself. But it’s a lot better strategy than to have to work everything out from scratch on your own.

Today is my seventh blogiversary.

Over time, we’ve seen a proliferation of tools and services that give us ways to connect and interact. Today we have Twitter, Friendfeed, LinkedIn, Facebook, and more. All are ways to improve our chances of connecting. As you can see in the sidebar, I  maintain some presence on most of them.

This space is the place where I try to get my thinking straight and immerse myself in the ongoing conversation of others trying to get their thinking straight. Some of them think in like-minded ways, others in very different ways, and all are important to the journey.

Social technologies must be lived in to be understood. You can’t understand from the sidelines. I think this is one of the impediments that larger organizations face in managing adoption. They are comfortable with the illusion of carefully crafted plans. They need to become reacquainted with the less well-marked paths of real learning.

What I said in 2005 is still true:

I remain interested in the challenges of making organizations better places for real people to work in and still believe that the effective use of technology makes a difference. I suspect that large organizations are nearing the end of their useful life and that the evolution toward new forms will continue to be painful and noisy. I worry about leaders and executives who choose to ignore facts and who can’t or won’t distinguish between the theory of evolution and the theory of who shot JFK. [McGee’s Musings]

In years past, I’ve tried to acknowledge the interesting people I’ve managed to cross paths with as one of the primary benefits of choosing to participate in the read/write web. As those numbers continue to grow, that’s becoming unwieldy. I’m also reluctant to single out only those people who happen to blog themselves. Today’s environment is too rich for me to be that restrictive. Regardless of whether you’re another blogger on a similar journey, a friend by way of one of today’s social networks, a microblogger, or commenter here, thanks for participating and thanks for sharing. I will give one shout out to a new friend, Liz Strauss, to momentarily borrow her tagline…”you’re only a stranger once.” Tell me more about you and your experience.

An excellent example this morning of the wonderfully organic way that our evolving social and technological environment supports learning and sharing. I checked out Twitter this morning by way of TweetDeck and found this item from Liz Strauss:

I trust Liz so I check out Saul Colt on Twitter and go from there to his blog where I discover this blog post:

Seriously…drop what you are doing and watch this….

it is that important!

I want to be Gary when I grow up!

The end result is that I get a good 15 minutes of insight into the changing nature of branding and brand building as affected by the landscape of social media. I also get some new sources of potential future insight and reinforcement of the quality of Liz’s insight and advice. Repeat this cycle regularly and you build up both a coherent picture of what is going on now and a perspective network that you can use to continue to monitor changes as they unfold. An excellent return on a few moments of my time and attention. Add a few more minutes to compose this post and you’ll benefit as well.

• ChiefTech: Aligning business needs to SharePoint capabilities A thoughtful analysis of the potential limits of SharePoint as a platform for collaboration in enterprises. I suspect that SharePoint is becoming the "safe" choice for a lot of organizations interested in elements of social networking and Enterprise 2.0. This post offers some insights into the risks of that default strategy for enterprises that become more sophisticated in their approach to collaboration over time. (tags: sharepoint km enterprise2.0)
• Viral Marketing gone bad… Funny bit of video suggesting where viral marketing efforts might take us if we aren't careful. Enough truth in it to be scary (tags: marketing video sch)
• How Wall Street Lied to Its Computers - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com An interesting and insightful analysis to remind us that GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is still a relevant bit of advice to keep in mind as information systems become more sophisticated and more tightly embedded in organizational decision making. No matter how clever the model, if management wants to get a particular answer they can find a way to do so. (tags: technology risk quants)

Paul Myers and I were colleagues back in Boston back in the early 1990s. Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, LinkedIn, and RSS we reconnected and I came across his excellent blog and found this little gem this afternoon. I suspect that your politics might influence exactly how funny you find this, but I think everyone ought to be able to appreciate it at some level.

A teaser on the front page of this week’s Simmons Voice, the college newspaper, declares "Student questions Palin’s qualifictions [sic]." That last word was a typo - obviously the intended word was "qualification" - but when you think about it, "qualifiction" is a dandy word for false or misleading credentials. On resumes, people commonly stretch the truth of their experience by taking more credit for some accomplishment than they probably deserve. But lies presented as truths are, in a sense, fictions. Thus a new word for the week - "qualifiction: the outright misrepresentations of job titles, degrees, or achievements that are presented to bolster one’s suitability for a job." Pass it on!

Neologism of the Day: Qualifiction
professormyers@professormyers.com
Thu, 18 Sep 2008 21:58:41 GMT

• I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You - Clive Thompson - NYTimes.com This has been pointed to from multiple sources I trust. It's something I need to get to before too long (tags: socialmedia twitter coi sch)
• Presentation Zen: Is education killing creativity? An interview with Ken Robinson on education and creativity. A useful supplement to his TED talks (tags: education innovation design blogs Robinson)
• 1000 things I’ve learned about blogging | Online Journalism Blog OK, it's only 100 things, but it is a pretty useful set of lessons learned from blogging. Worth a few minutes of your time to scan and reflect on (tags: blogs socialmedia learning tips)

• Michael Dell 'Friends' his customers - Sep. 4, 2008 A useful mini-case study of how Dell is making use of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media tools as part of listening to its customers and markets more systematically. (tags: socialmedia twitter dell sch coi musings)

Billion-Dollar Lessons: What You Can Learn from the Most Inexcusable Business Failures of the Last 25 Years, Carroll, Paul B. and Chunka Mui

Progress in science and engineering proceeds from the dispassionate analysis of failure. We learn more when we screw up than when we succeed. However, since Waterman and Peters In Search of Excellence,  the trend in business books has been to celebrate and analyze apparent success. In Billion-Dollar Lessons, Paul Carroll and Chunka Mui demonstrate the power of good failure analysis. They turn their attention to what can be learned from large-scale business failure. First, a necessary disclaimer; Paul and Chunka were partners of mine at Diamond Consultants in the 1990s. I already know how smart and insightful they are.

If they were to succeed simply in making failure analysis respectable, Paul and Chunka would be making a major contribution. They manage to do considerably more. First, they debunk the conventional wisdom that failure is the result of poor execution. The danger in attributing failure to solely execution factors is that it gets you off the hook from drawing useful lessons. If the failure is yours, you need only try harder the next time. If it belongs to someone else, you, of course, wouldn’t have made such foolish mistakes.

Instead, Carroll and Mui construct a compelling case that real failures stem from poor strategic thinking; identifying seven patterns of strategic failure ranging from unrealistic belief in synergy to a poor grasp of technology evolution and change. These patterns provide a valuable set of lenses to examine and assess strategic options.

There is a thread through much of the first half of the book that failure occurs when ego trumps evidence. But the authors avoid the temptation of settling on that as the underlying explanation. Actually, their awareness of temptation leads them to the another of the major contributions of this book. While ego and misdirected drive can be found in most strategic failures, ego and correctly focused drive are essential to strategic success.

The question becomes how to bring evidence to strategic debates so that it can be incorporated most effectively. Better due diligence processes can help. So can a deeper appreciation of our innate cognitive biases. While covering these topics, Carroll and Mui have a more provocative idea; they call for organizations to establish the strategic equivalent of the Catholic Church’s Devil’s Advocate. The role of the Devil’s Advocate is to argue against the proposal under consideration. Formalizing and structuring that role in organizations offers a potential counterbalance to the forces arrayed in favor of the strategic actions that Billion-Dollar Lessons call into question.

There is, of course, a website to accompany the book. There is also a Billion-Dollar Lessons blog. I’ve subscribed in the hope that it will become an ongoing source of lessons.

[cross-posted at Fast Forward blog]

Recently, I sat through a presentation about a Sharepoint-based intranet project to improve processes within the HR group of a medium-sized organization. The process in question was one of collecting annual performance reviews throughout the organization. Using Sharepoint, the HR group and their consultants replaced Word documents, spreadsheets, and email with Infopath forms and programmatic workflows. The client was happy and the consultants had a nice demo they could show to their prospects. Nonetheless, I found myself dissatisfied.

For all the new technology deployed, this effort struck me as an example of what my old friend and mentor Benn Konsynski calls "speeding up the mess." This HR process is an instance of the micro-processes that comprise knowledge work activities in organizations.

Other examples might include:

• Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect
• Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting
• Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting
• Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor’s recent pricing announcement

These micro-processes are characterized by:

• A small number of steps
• Ad hoc design created by the knowledge workers responsible for the process
• Loose definitions of the beginning and end of the process
• Loose notions of control, sign-offs, and approvals
• Technology-enabled, if at all, by email and office suite tools.

None of these processes were ever explicitly designed; they’ve evolved over time. The cumulative pain and productivity drag imposed by these processes is accepted as a fact of organizational life. While various technologies are offered up as ways out of the swamp, we need an overall improvement strategy to provide the necessary direction.

The appropriate strategy is readily available. It is the same strategy originally deployed by Frederick Taylor in improving the productivity of manual labor in factory settings. The late Peter Drucker summarizes this strategy nicely:

Taylor’s principles sound deceptively simple. The first step in making the  manual worker more productive is to look at the task and to analyze its constituent motions. The next step is to record each motion, the physical effort it takes, and the time it takes. Then motions that are not needed can be eliminated; and whenever we have looked at manual work, we have found that a great many of the traditionally most- hallowed procedures turn out to be waste and do not add anything. Then, each of the motions that remain as essential to obtaining the  finished product is set up so as to be done the simplest way, the easiest way, the way that puts the least physical and  mental strain on the operator, and the  way that requires the least time. Next, these motions are put together again into a "job" that is in a logical sequence. Finally, the tools needed to do the motions are redesigned. Whenever we have looked at any job-no matter for how many thousands of years it has been performed-we have found that the traditional tools are wrong for the task.
[Peter Drucker. "Knowledge worker  productivity: The biggest challenge."  California Management Review. V41, #2.  Winter 1999. pp. 79-94.]

While the strategy of “go, look, think, improve” is sound, there are some challenges in translating it successfully to knowledge work. First, the outputs of knowledge work are fluid and ill-defined. We have no widgets of constant quality to anchor process improvements against. I’ve argued elsewhere that one of the distinguishing factors of knowledge work deliverables is achieving the necessary uniqueness in the end result (Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work). Applied uncritically, Taylor’s approach can lead us to emphasize superficial uniformities over essential uniqueness. Before we can even hope to improve a knowledge work process, we need to define deliverables in a way that allows us to judge them to be of sufficient quality.

Second, many of the steps in knowledge work processes are invisible. For physical tasks, what we could observe was more than sufficient to identify places for improvement. Not so with knowledge work. Is the person banging away answering email more or less productive than the one reading the latest journal article? Is the all-day project status meeting more or less productive than a well-maintained project wiki and issue tracking system? How would you go about comparing project management approaches to decide? The challenge is to find ways to make the invisible more visible, to distinguish essential activities from peripheral, and to develop robust insights into mental work processes. For that later challenge, I’m planning on revisiting books like John Medina’ Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.

Third, we need to understand how to market knowledge work improvement to knowledge workers. In the world of Frederick Taylor we could treat workers as experimental subjects to be manipulated. Not so with the knowledge workers who drive today’s economy. These are individuals with the discretion and autonomy to ignore our advice on principle or on a whim. They can’t be compelled; they must be persuaded, sold, and possibly seduced into modifying their behaviors. At the very least, we’re going to need to carefully rethink the skills and perspectives we want to have in our deployment efforts.

Someday I’ll manage to get myself to a TED conference.In the meantime, I will continue to take advantage of the wonderful TED videos. Benjamin Zander is someone whose work on leadership I’ve appreciated in the past. The Art of  Possibility, coauthored with his wife Rosamund Stone Zander, remains one of the most useful books on leadership I’ve read in the last several years.

This past February he spoke at TED. Ostensibly about classical music, it’s 20 minutes of powerful insight about leadership.