Social-Business-2 on Philip Sheldrake

Barking a top-down command to be bottom-up

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

According to The Onion earlier this year:

Warning of severe consequences if he didn’t see results, Pantheon Digital Consulting COO Daniel Abelson, 59, told employees Monday he wants a relaxed, friendly company culture implemented by the end of the week …

Interesting approach.

Organisational culture is a notoriously tricky thing to pin down. My favoured definition is simply – how things get done round here. And if you’re tempted by new forms of organisation that retire command and control and emphasise self-organisation, how on Earth do you get that process started?

Can you use that command and control authority one last time to instruct people to dismantle command and control?

Recoding public relations

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Having co-founded, built and sold a PR consultancy. Having written a book on reframing marketing and PR for the digital age that’s now recommended reading across a number of under- and post-graduate courses. Having made some of the first presentations to the PR profession on the implications of the Internet of Things, the Semantic Web, and machined media. And having co-founded the CIPR’s prolific social media group, I have it appears left the profession. And for some good time now.

I’ve taken the best the PR profession and academe have to offer the world, and then determinedly escaped its narrow practice. I’ve found I can now offer consultancy that isn’t framed by preconceived ideas of PR. I can combine it with management consultancy more broadly, with org design and social business, with digital transformation and web science, without anyone saying “that’s not PR!”

It does I admit help that I am a chartered engineer. Engineering is my nature. I will always be an engineer, but my association with PR is always framed these days in the past tense, if only to disassociate myself from inadequate and inappropriate context.

21st Century public relations isn’t a synonym for media relations, or earned media, or simply “communications” come to that. It isn’t publicity or, worse, spin. It isn’t a side function and it’s definitely ill-suited as a marketing function.

Google on collaboration – a new study

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Our customers often tell us that encouraging and enabling collaboration has dramatically improved their business. We decided to dig a little deeper by conducting some original cross-industry research that measures the power of workplace collaboration in concrete terms.

This is how Google introduces the findings of its recent survey of senior staff and C-suite executives at 258 North American companies across a wide range of business sectors and sizes. (PDF of full report .) The primary conclusion is presented up front:

… collaboration has a significant impact on business innovation, performance, culture and even the bottom line.

This is quite right and quite wrong. Collaboration is at once driven and the driver; it is both a cause and an effect. As is culture come to that. Effectively, Google must grapple with two distinct appreciations of business among its customers and prospects.

Simply complex

If there’s one thing that differentiates organization this century from the last it’s that we may now acknowledge complexity and do something about it. We increasingly have the technologies to help navigate complexity. Choosing to do so offers competitive advantage for the time being; there will soon come a time when failing to do so renders an organization unresponsive, fragile and, consequently, bust. (Note that complexity and complication are different things.)

Work IT: bring-you-and-your-own-everything

Fri, 07 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

First published to Gigaom Research .

Cast your mind back a decade or more. Did you request specific hardware from your company’s IT team? If so, you started a trend that continues to play out to this day, and will continue to its logical and exciting conclusion.

You may or may not have been successful in your request given IT’s historic intransigence, but nowadays many of us expect to rock up to work with the laptop and tablet and smartphone of our choosing – often our own – and expect the IT team’s full accommodation.

We’re also bringing our own applications. Non-IT staff have adopted software-as-a-service without necessarily going through their IT colleagues. Yammer, Trello and Slack for example. Perhaps Google Docs crept in without organization-wide adoption of Google for Work. Meeting schedulers. Note-takers. Expense trackers. Skype. Dropbox. Instagram. The list is as long as the kind of things you need to get done.

It’s useful to think of this in terms of Enterprise IT and Work IT. The enterprise owns Enterprise IT whereas the worker owns Work IT. In simple terms, Enterprise IT is focused on the organization, Work IT on organizing. Enterprise IT is top-down with the starting position of locking everything down, whereas Work IT is bottom-up, thriving by facilitating sharing and openness.

Marketing and PR and the General Data Protection Regulation

Fri, 22 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

My main character in Attenzi – a social business story , the CEO Eli Appel, has this to say over lunch with his chairman:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

He adds:

… No business can really get to be social in a meaningful and valuable way simply by indulging in social media or by slapping apps onto social devices or by subscribing to a social enterprise network.

Eli is referring here to the visceral difference between ‘doing’ social (bolted on) and ‘being’ social (built in), and you know which one you’re on the receiving end of in any given situation right?

Talking garbage and the purpose of business

Fri, 15 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The third in a series on the topic of the purpose of business. Follows:

Business exists to establish and drive mutual value creation. Steve Denning challenged this statement, preferring Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. I responded, and he has challenged my response:

we may be talking about different things: theoretical purpose of a firm and how to run it

“satisfying all the stakeholders” isn’t a viable heuristic to run a firm. See Making Management as Simple as Frisbee

“satisfying all the stakeholders” was tried in mid20thC. It led to Garbage Can firms.

[tweet tweet tweet ]

Garbage

Steve refers to “garbage can firms” in his Forbes article, Is The Tyranny Of Shareholder Value Finally Ending? , an eloquent take down of prioritizing the pursuit of shareholder value. When it comes to garbage it quotes a trio of academics – Cohen, March and Olsen – who in 1972 explained:

Debating the purpose of business

Thu, 07 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The second in a series on the topic of the purpose of business:

Steve Denning published an article to the Drucker Forum last week, How The Internet Is Forcing The Humanization Of Work , an argument founded on Drucker’s assertion that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.

Steve found my post on the purpose of business post-Drucker via a thread with Kenneth Mikkelsen and tweeted his comments. His first quotes my re-definition of the purpose of business:

[The] Problem with “establish and drive mutual value creation” is that it doesn’t tell me what anyone has to do.

and then :

“Delight customers” as the goal is crystal clear as to what everyone has to do.

and lastly :

Since power has shifted from seller to buyer, “delighting customers” sets priorities right, for firm to survive

I share Steve’s optimism that we may be on the cusp of the potential to possibly humanize work (can my optimism be more tentative?!), but I cannot subscribe to his rationale.

What, exactly, is the purpose of business? An answer post-Drucker

Fri, 17 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The first post in what turned out to be a series of three on the topic of the purpose of business:

Peter Drucker asserted that the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer. He was right at the time in offering previously inward-looking firms a more appropriate beacon. His dictum is, however, wrong for our time.

The assertion is insufficient in sustainability terms; ie, being concerned with the health and resilience of living systems such as organizations, society and the environment. A customer-centric outlook is too simplistic, simply failing to recognise complexity, and therefore at threat from business that has progressed beyond Drucker’s heuristic.

Technology trends relevant to change management

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I have been invited to talk about tech trends relevant to change management at this evening’s London meeting of the Change Management Institute .

I’m keeping most excellent company alongside Karolina Lewandowska , Change and Transformation Manager at Google UK, and Faith Forster , Founder and CEO Pinipa .

The image here is taken from an excellent blog post by Lee Bryant of PostShift – The Quantified Organisation: can change become routine?

The quantified self, the quantified organization, and the organized self

Fri, 27 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The diagram here portrays where I’m going with this post, so let’s dive in.

The quantified self

The current Wikipedia entry for quantified self (QS) describes it as “a movement to incorporate technology into data acquisition on aspects of a person’s daily life in terms of inputs (e.g. food consumed, quality of surrounding air), states (e.g. mood, arousal, blood oxygen levels), and performance (mental and physical).”

And it doesn’t stop at mere data acquisition of course; as the strapline for a major QS community puts it, we’re looking at self knowledge through numbers. Adriana Lukas, founder and organiser at London Quantified Self Group , proselytizes self-managed QS, a future in which “expertise is supplied rather than outsourced”, where each of us acquires “agency as sense-maker”.

That’s certainly a powerful and possibly quite natural vision, and one I wholeheartedly embrace. Yet it’s also counter to the branded data siloes many a purveyor of QS gadgetry would, it seems, have one locked into. Adriana employs a turn of phrase, which may well be riffing off Doc Searls :

We can’t treat individuals as data cows to be milked for the data bucket.

The quantified organization

Lee Bryant, founder of PostShift, describes their take on ‘quantified organization’ :

… a framework of organisational health measures, informed by theory and company goals, that can guide ongoing change in an agile, iterative way and assess the success or failure of change actions against a desired future operating state.

The hi:project, social business and Flat Army

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I help organisations work better, so how on Earth is that connected to the hi:project ? Given I dedicate not a small fraction of my time to this non-profit endeavour, I’m asked on occasion to explain how the two are related.

The ‘HI’ of the hi:project stands for human interface. It’s our way of describing the technology we think should and will largely supplant the user interface, the UI. Here’s how I’ve begun to explain it of late …

When we approach digital, we have a natural propensity to digitize the pre-digital; after all, that is all we know. That’s how we ended up sticking an ’e’ in front of mail for example, and went from having desktops, files and folders to, well, desktops, files and folders.

Yet digital has unprecedented qualities – it just takes us a while to discover and exploit them. It’s only with the passing of decades for example that organisations can now explore alternatives to email. And filing stuff looks increasingly anachronistic with the power of near-instant search at our fingertips.

In the same way, the UI is attached to the digital machine / service today because pre-digital physical machines had a physical interface.

An open letter to Paul Polman, Unilever – from Enterprise 2.0 Summit, London

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit at the British Academy in London today, courtesy of Kongress Media and Agile Elephant . In conversation with Lee Bryant , Matt Partovi , David Terrar , Damian Corbet , Céline Schillinger , Johan Lange , Janet Parkinson and Anne McCrossan , a common theme is emerging – we need such events as this, and the deep and wide potential of Enterprise 2.0, to extend beyond the inevitable echo chamber of today’s eager community.

McVeillance, coveillance, and socioveillance in the context of social business

Tue, 21 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was a victim of McVeillance in June this year. I was walking around a shopping mall under systematic surveillance – CCTV everywhere – when I was accosted by security upon taking out my own camera to photograph the mall. (FYI, the mall itself was the subject of my photography and not its customers per se.)

Professor Steve Mann coined the expression McVeillance after he was manhandled out of a McDonalds in Paris where he was eating with his family in 2012 for no other reason than for wearing a computer vision system. McDonalds was watching him. He was watching McDonalds. And ’they’ didn’t like it.

I wasn’t ejected from the mall as I was actually undertaking a project for the mall’s owners, unbeknownst to the security personnel. I was escorted to the security office for appropriate clearance – an act which, per Mann’s definitions, officially made me a surveiller.

The word surveillance originates from French, from sur- ‘over’ + veiller ‘watch’ (from Latin vigilare ‘keep watch’). It invokes an authoritative orientation where one in authority, metaphorically if not physically above, watches those below. Mann had previously coined the word sousveillance . The French for ‘below’ is sous, hence the neologism for watching the watchers.

Introducing the hi:project

Wed, 10 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The hi:project launches today. It’s a synthesis of many of the things I care about, from the original decentralizing visions for the Internet and Web, the aspiration that digital technologies can help people relate to each other better and understand each other better, and the idea that we might connect to each other without wondering who’s monitoring our every action.

I believe that making all variety of organization more agile, more valuable, more useful starts by empowering all the individuals that play a role in the organization’s success. The creation of mutual value begins with acquiring self-knowledge and mutual understanding to effect mutual influence, and this is exemplified by the question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story :

The blockchain is coming your way

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Bitcoin is the most famous cryptocurrency with the highest capitalization. As you can see from this screenshot from the “block reader” blockr , the capitalization at the time of writing is over eight billion dollars. According to citations of an IMF report on Wikipedia, that places it just above Moldova ’s GDP.

This post isn’t about bitcoin but the cryptographic foundation of Bitcoin. (The community prefers to capitalize the word when referring to the system, and lower case when referring to the currency.) This post doesn’t explain Bitcoin or the blockchain in detail – I recommend this series of presentations courtesy of the Khan Academy for those who want to learn more – but rather it’s about the technology’s wider application and its emergence and growth beyond the early adopters.

Get this into your block

So why am I interested in Bitcoin specifically, and its blockchain foundation more broadly? What does this have to do with social business ?

We are contemplating blockchain platforms to enable decentralized consensus in the not too distant future, allowing us to codify, decentralize, secure and trade many things that historically have demanded some centralized facility. This is akin to the bitcoin currency functioning without the need for a central bank, and the vista includes voting, domain names, financial exchanges, crowd funding, organizational governance, intellectual property, contracts and agreements of most kinds. The landscape even extends to so-called smart property with appropriate hardware integration.

Sometimes I wish I was more of a wordsmith, but this word will have to suffice – wowzers!

Deliberate and emergent, by design

Wed, 16 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been trying to reconcile the apparent tensions between the deliberate and emergent strategy schools of thought. After all, it’s a fundamental question at the heart of organizational life today.

Defining deliberate and emergent strategy

The deliberate strategy process is the one with which most people are most familiar if only because it dominated 20th Century organizational life and still does. A senior team reviews the market, the trends, the SWOT, the fruits of R&D, etc., and formulates strategy – where to play and how to win – that the wider organization is then charged with executing. And based on nothing more than atavistic agricultural habits that are now largely irrelevant, we exhibit a predilection for going through this process with a calendar based drumbeat.

Emergent strategy adherents on the other hand insist that such practice is pure fancy. It’s divination beyond the realm of even the most cogent, gifted and able senior leadership team. The deliberate strategy process supports C-title egos and little else. Rather, we’re better off making the organization sensitive to even the slightest changes, the weakest of signals, and developing an organizational fabric with the agility to react appropriately, to exploit opportunity and close down risk.

The Mozilla Manifesto amplified, from Internet to organization

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by the analogy of organization-as-software, and indeed the reality of organization-as-software , what might it look like to take a manifesto about software and digital networks and apply it to human networks and organization?

In my recent presentation, The Future of Organization , I took the majority of the Mozilla manifesto and replaced references to the Internet with references to organization. I liked the result so much I thought I’d post it separately here for ease of reference.

Organization is software

Mon, 02 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post is about an exciting vista for organization, one that may sound unhuman on the face of it but which, in contrast, I think could serve human dignity very well.

I first presented it in my Future of Organization video May 23rd, a presentation that appears to have been well received (and the accompanying Slideshare accrued over 2000 views in the week). Given the variety and perceptiveness of the comments the video garnered I’m particularly pleased to have excused the presentation up front as being far from comprehensive. Pete Burden picked up on building inclusiveness and sustainability, and humanity, pointing me to this webpage on concious business . And soulfulness was at the heart of a similar exchange with Frederic Laloux, author of Reinventing Organizations . (I consequently elevated the book to the top of my to-read pile and at page 36 I’m enjoying it very much so far.)

Mr. Wirearchy himself, Jon Husband , was good enough to ’tweet out’ (appended here). And my dear friend Gabbi Cahane wondered what balance of my living in the future and living in the present might be best for business. Hmm, good point :-)

In this post, I’m referring to what I’ve named Bread incorporated – a distributed, self-regulating, incorruptible, frictionless market for organization. Here’s the slide in question and the transcript:

The Future of Organization – a video presentation on the major themes and some new provocations

Fri, 23 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to the future of organization, and plenty to be optimistic about. Saying that, like any and all topics worth grappling with, it takes a bit of time to get up to speed on the depth and breadth of things. As a member of the advisory council for the Future of Work community, and part of the steering group for The Responsive Organization community, I know I’m not the only one looking to communicate these ideas effectively.

Mike Grafham and I talked about compiling a three-minute explanatory video, and I failed woefully at such brevity. This 42-minute video presentation aims to provide a relatively speedy immersion in some of the main themes, spanning human rights, complexity science, the death of heuristics, the six influence flows, personal knowledge mastery, social physics, trust, the digital nervous system, Web 3.0, performance and learning, public relations, collective intelligence, sociocracy, Holacracy, podularity, wirearchy, emergent civilzation, self-organization, organized self, socioveillance, the middleware corporate, Bread incorporated, distributed autonomous corporates, and the Mozilla manifesto.

[embed width=“960”]http://www.vimeo.com/96201589[/embed]

Fancy a coffee? Social business and your non-solicitation terms

Mon, 12 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

The recent antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Google, Adobe and Intel for collusion in hiring practices demonstrates a lack of respect for the respective organisations’ employees. Fundamentally, how dare one’s employer collude with another in ways that may limit one’s career progression!

Having been an employer carrying the not insubstantial costs of hiring I know how difficult it is to watch someone in whom you have invested considerable time, money and energy walk out the door, but I think my memory serves me well when I say we encouraged the team to celebrate such departures. If anything, our alumni network grew +1 each time.

The efficiency fallacy in the #responsiveorg context

Sat, 10 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m at the #responsiveorg unconference in London today, and I’m on the hunt for dissensus rather than the echoic chamber of the converted preaching to the converted, as warm and lovely as that feels. So with that in mind, let me kick the tyres of one of the primary assumptions underpinning the #responsive org manifesto .

From Efficiency to Responsiveness – Historically, competitive advantages came from optimizing for efficiency and labor productivity of standardized product, with companies such as Walmart and Ford being common examples. As the flow of information increases, the competitive advantage is held by the organization that can react the fastest to new information. Companies achieve increased responsiveness by reducing the friction of information flow, increasing their iteration rate, decreasing their cost of failure, and optimizing their structures for adaptability.

This I like. I don’t however agree that this means we should face-off efficiency and responsive (the main image heading this post is taken from the current #responsiveorg slideshare, embedded below fyi). The following table, which coincidentally featured in my very last post (Doing the triple loop – profound leadership ), expains why:

Doing the triple loop – profound leadership

Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Drucker

Peter F. Drucker asserted: “What’s measured improves.” I’m a sucker for measurement and organizational learning as you can see from the posts tagged as such here – perhaps it’s something to do with my engineering training.

I advocate tapping extant business performance management process to effect the evolution towards social business (on this blog , on briansolis.com , on stoweboyd.com , in the Balanced Scorecard Report ), and that means getting to grips with the Balanced Scorecard and similar approaches.

The lexicon of performance management often involves so-called single-loop and double-loop learning, but a third loop gets less airtime in my experience. So as we debate the types of organizational design conducive to the potential and aspirations of social business – in the Future of Work , Responsive Org and Enterprise 2.0 communities for example – I thought I’d post the following table outlining ways to think about the loops.

Enterprise social networks and assimilation – resistance is futile

Wed, 16 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise social networking is perfectly suited for the so-called onboarding process.

I say so-called because no dictionary I have lists the word, which is sort of at odds with the fact that they do list the rather unlovely deplane. But I digress. I heard this same claim from Jive , SAP (Jam) and IBM (Connections) at a Eurocloud event last week courtesy of Alan and David @agile_elephant .

It seems academics prefer the phrase organizational socialization, defined as :

a learning and adjustment process that enables an individual to assume an organizational role that fits both organizational and individual needs. It is a dynamic process that occurs when an individual assumes a new or changing role within an organization.

I’ve been onboarded. Into the Mars way back in the day. Mars prides itself on high performance enabled by a strong culture, and boy were my colleagues keen that I got that culture.

The presentations last week (rather than my time at Mars, promise) prompted me to look up the Wikipedia entry for the Borg , the reason for which will become obvious by reading this if you’re unfamiliar with the species:

Employee advocacy – rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced

Tue, 08 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I described the relatively recent concept of employee advocacy in my last post as “rather uncomfortable and somewhat forced”, and I’ve been asked to qualify this description.

Firstly, it’s worth stating the obvious – the aspiration that employees might advocate the employer is hardly a new idea. But this relatively new desire to go about it more systematically is prompted by employees’ increasing social media activity. While recommending an employer down the pub leaves no discernible trace, doing so online does, and that appears to have internal comms, HR professionals and social media types hot under the dollar.

But here’s the rub. Genuine employee advocacy remains a consequence. That’s always been the case and will always remain so.

You can’t insist. You can’t take control of employee social media profiles. You can’t pick out people for failing to advocate, not without creating the kind of culture that’s counter to employee advocacy.

There’s influence in everything an organization does, and sometimes in what it does not do .

The organization (a collection of people, mostly employees) influences the participating individuals (mostly employees) who influence those beyond the payroll. The culture and policies and behaviours that sway whether that influence is constructive or destructive play out long before Fred lets fly on Facebook and Tina trills on Twitter.

Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I’m no etymologist but it seems the verb organize appeared in the 15th Century a few decades before the noun organization . Sometimes we forget that the organization, in terms of the institution or firm, is merely a means to an end, and putting legal entities to one side for the moment, an organization is simply a group of people organized around a common purpose.

Reminding ourselves of such first principles is useful when considering how we might create and nurture new forms of organization and how we might improve the current dominant ones.

Jumping forward over 500 years, let’s get bang up to date on so-called social business, aka Enterprise 2.0 , aka Responsive Organization , aka Future of Work . The question that concludes Attenzi - a social business story exemplifies the new vista:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?

The verb coalesce conveys the facility to combine, and so the facility to recombine, and re-recombine. The coalescence remains for just as long as shared value is created, and created faster than a new combination might afford. Such process appeals to free marketers for whom efficiency and utilisation are front of mind – after all why should resources be tied up in one combination when they can add greater value faster deployed in another? And there’s equal appeal to those on the left of the political spectrum who champion self-management and occupational autonomy.

Relationships

Sometimes I define social business as relationships at scale , and not just in the CRM 1.0 way:

Good business is about cooperative and interdependent relationships, always has been, yet the humanity was lost when organizations scaled way up during the 20th Century. We want to make those relationships more human again, but the answer can’t be to scale it all back down. We have to scale something else up.

Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a conversation between Adam Pisoni , Stowe Boyd and me relating to a guest post I made to Brian Solis’ blog, Impatience is a Virtue – What’s Next for Social Business .

The conversation played out on email, which is ironic given that all three of us advocate “working out loud” unless confidentiality precludes it. I take the blame for emailing in the first place and hope to make up for the transgression by publishing it now. I have removed those conversational niceties that pepper emails, inserted some helpful hyperlinks and comments in square brackets by way of explaining some of the terms used and topics raised, and tweaked a few things to improve readability here.

[Photo of Adam by Intel Free Press . Photo of Stowe by Paul J Corney .]

Adam

Honestly, one of the most enlightening aspects of finally working within a real, big enterprise [Microsoft acquired Yammer in 2012] is the affect of performance management and budgets. Yammer loved to yell at our large customers to just change how they worked. That anyone at any level could affect change. But what you see inside large companies is that really good people will do all the wrong things either because they eventually feel pressured to optimize for what they are incentivised to do, or because their scope of power is too narrow to affect any change. This happens with budgets all the time. Two people in different parts of the org may have an idea that could make the company lots of money, but since the budgets were set up a year in advance, they can’t shift the money between them.

The social business mutuality stack

Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Can you tell by looking at a photo like this if it’s of a sunrise or a sunset? Absent knowledge of the time of day or the direction in which it was taken, I think not. Just as well I’m talking about both a start and a finish here then.

Sun-setting

First, the crap that’s finishing – that would be public relations as spin. That would be lying, or inauthentic manipulation at best. That would be attempting to build and maintain a façade in the vain hope that customers, employees, investors and partners, present and future, confuse the façade for the real thing. As the saying goes, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not so many for so long now that everyone packs a smartphone.

Enough has been written on this topic for me to hope that you’ll agree, or at least concur the trend is well established. As one of my characters in Attenzi points out :

If ‘perception is reality’ was the saying that characterized our approach to marketing and public relations before, we now have to consider that reality is perception.

Sun-rising

When I first learned of the excellence theory of public relations I was immediately attracted to it. What’s not to like? It’s constructed on the basis that we use communication to negotiate with the public, resolve conflict and promote mutual understanding and respect between the organisation and its stakeholders. It describes a management function focused on this two-way communication to foster mutually beneficial relationships.

Toward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Toward a Model of Work Redesign for Better Work and Better Life (PDF), abstract:

Flexible work accommodations provided by employers purport to help individuals struggling to manage work and family demands. The underlying model for change is accommodation – helping individuals accommodate their work demands with no changes in the structure of work or cultural expectations of ideal workers. The purpose of this article is to derive a Work Redesign Model and compare it with the Accommodation Model. This article centers around two change initiatives – Predictability, Teaming and Open Communication and Results Only Work Environment – that alter the structure and culture of work in ways that enable better work and better lives.

"Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?"

Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

During a deep and meaningful conversation recently, my interlocutor declared:

Our goal is to become a social business but how do we get the revolution started?

This post addresses two problems integral to this statement.

A means not an end

Social business is a fairly fuzzy concept at the best of times. Some consider it synonymous with terms such as Enterprise 2.0, Agile Business, Responsive Organization, and Future Work, whereas others more deeply invested in any one may argue the differences. For the record, I describe social business by way of the following challenge:

Do you help all the individuals associated with your organization (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, shareholders, etc.) build worthwhile relationships with each other and others, coalescing by need and desire, knowledge and capability and shared values, to create shared value?

Shared values

Some pundits prefer to talk about shared purpose rather than shared values, and I think this may well be akin to Stowe Boyd differentiating between collaboration and cooperation with shared purpose relating to collaboration and shared values relating to cooperation. In his words :

Customer-centricity

Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Customer-centricity is an organizational point of view, not a customer point of view. It’s actually the organization-centric-view-of-the-customer. … Don’t you want CRM to help you and the customer mutually, allowing you both to manage the relationship? Surely the value of your understanding how influence goes around comes around is enhanced when those you interact with have similar understanding. Or would you rather propagate the status quo – CRM as a construct to manage the customer?

Stowe Boyd's manifesto and The People's Front

Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Stowe Boyd recently published “A Manifesto For A Third Way Of Work” (although the title will change ). The manifesto forms the basis of the book Stowe plans to write throughout 2014, crystallizing the perspectives and insight he has forged and assembled over the years. And if you’ve read Attenzi – a social business story then you’ll know Stowe and I think alike on many matters.

[Update 20th March 2014: the title changed to A Manifesto For A New Way of Work .]

Here are the major theses, and I have identified with an asterisk the four I have chosen to argue below.

_____

Dissensus (versus Consensus)

— active and directed dissent is a better way to counter the cognitive biases of groups and individuals, and to sidestep groupthink; essential to increased innovation and creativity truly driving business

Cooperative (versus Collaborative)

— sidesteps the politics and collectivism of consensus-based decision-making, and shifts to looser, laissez-faire cooperative work patterns

Creativity (versus Tradition)

— new solutions to problems are needed, and traditional approaches may not only be broken but dangerous

Autonomy (versus Heteronomy)

— paradoxically, as we come into a time when we acknowledge that we are more connected to each other than ever before, a great degree of autonomy will become the norm; old demands to subordinate all personal interests to those of the collective will be displaced by a personal re-engagement in our own work and a commitment to a deeper work culture that transcends any one company’s corporate culture

Why I self-published this time

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Having gone down the traditional publishing route with The Business of Influence (Wiley, 2011), I decided for a number of reasons to try a different route in 2013 with Attenzi – a social business story . Most of those reasons boil down to one simple fact, the publishing industry isn’t yet embracing social business principles. In fact, it’s perhaps a prime example of an industry continuously trying to manipulate the application of 21st Century technologies to maintain the 20th Century status quo.

Social business in 2014 and your last ever New Year's resolution

Tue, 17 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve all done it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional data driven content marketer, or some poor soul who’s been told to conjure up the December post for the company blog, the temptation to write that post about the looming New Year is, well, too tempting.

If you’re looking for real link fodder, best include a call to action and sell the idea that something may be learned and put into valuable action before Santa boots up Google Maps, post title bait such as:

You have to deal with both complication and complexity, so you'd better know the difference

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The Schumpeter column in The Economist got it wrong: “It’s complicated. Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity. ” The column comments on the recent 5th Global Drucker Forum – Managing Complexity and describes organizations as having two choices, deal with complexity or simplify.

Those that deal with complexity “may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organisation.” In contrast, “the second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity.”

But to present the situation as ’either / or’ is simply misleading, and I think it comes down to a failure to appreciate the critical difference between complexity and complication, a difference that must be well understood when redesigning the way your organisation works.

"Social business is dead!" ... "Whatever!"

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Published as a guest post on briansolis.com , Friday 8th November 2013, in response to Chris Heuer’s post “Social Business is Dead! Long Live What’s Next! ”

As he finished a game of Cut The Rope on his iPhone, my young godson asked what my phone was like when I was his age. I broke it down for him. I was in my twenties before someone offered to take north of ten thousand dollars for a basic digital camera, and not much less for a GPS device. And I got my first basic mobile phone (I explained that means just making phone calls and sending text messages) as I approached thirty.

A few days later, as she dispatched her umpteenth snapchat of the morning, my niece asked me why I obviously enjoy what I do for a living. Imagine a whole lifetime, I replied, during which the only innovation was a tweak to the angle of the plow shear.

Scientists and engineers have been good to us. We’ve come to expect serious technological innovation with the regularity of the seasons. So, just like Chris Heuer, I’m more than ready for corresponding organizational change.

Now.

As in right now!

Having reflected briefly on the vast progression of the Internet and the web, computing, mobile infrastructure and social media services – as if you needed a reminder – let’s look at what’s changed at the typical organization during this time, my adult lifetime. Or more pertinently what hasn’t.

3M ThinkTANK conference – getting down to social business

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Edited 7th October to embed the event video and move the slidestack to the end.] http://youtu.be/UkhXr4u9 _J4 I’ve been hosted by 3M today in Minneapolis St. Paul, and what great hosts too… a fantastic team and an incredible company heritage to boot. I could have spent a whole day exploring the Innovation Center, which is so well done I’m sure it brings out the geek in just about everyone.

Gregory Gerik is 3M’s transformation social media leader, and he led the design and delivery of the 3M ThinkTANK conference today. Kicked off beautifully with a keynote by Brian Solis , we’ve been provoked, informed and entertained by:

Attenzi, in association with Social Media Today

Sun, 15 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

The first edition of Attenzi - a social business story was published May 2013. And I’m delighted that today sees the publication of the second edition in association with Social Media Today .

Joining the original foreword by Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, Adam Pisoni, is a new foreword by Social Media Today founder and CEO, Robin Carey. The book also has a new front cover and an additional chapter.

What, exactly, is social business?

Tue, 09 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m kicking off #SCRM13 in London this morning. SCRM stands for social customer relationship management, and my role today is to get some energy into the room and, hopefully, encourage delegates to look up from simply slapping “social” onto business as normal.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely what many have been charged with doing. Those with appropriate powers of persuasion will effect organizational change I’m sure, but more to the point I feel that more chief executives need to attend Luke ’s conferences, a sentiment I’m sure he’d endorse.

The meaning of social business

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Also published on Microsoft’s #bizremagined website .]

I’m fascinated by innovations in the language of innovation. Is it the inclinations of the innovator or the characteristics of the innovation that suggests new words and phrases? When and why is existing lexicon deemed inadequate? Why do we embrace some expressions yet others wither and die?

A quick browse at netlingo.com turns up such beauties as advermation, mouse potato, and idea hamster. All new to me, and for all I know dead already. I had a go a few years ago with Internetome to describe the physical manifestations of the Internet of Things, and let’s just say the word hasn’t made the Oxford English. Yet.

Enter the phrase “social business”, bandied around with increasing frequency. What is it exactly?

Well perhaps this particular turn of phrase is sufficiently nascent to mean different things to different people. The candidate meanings form a spectrum to my mind, with “an organisation that uses social media” at one end (with the hashtags #socmed and #socbiz used interchangeably), and a deep, transformative opportunity at the other. Whether or not such a profound transformation ends up being labelled social business, we’ve tried hard at Euler Partners to articulate what it might mean in less ambiguous terms.

Attenzi - a social business story

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

My new ebook is out today .

I’m really excited about it because I’m excited about its topic, social business. With a foreword by Adam Pisoni, Microsoft Yammer co-founder and CTO, here’s how the book is presented.

Attenzi – a social business story shines a light on social business that goes beyond the all too typical homages to social media. It’s a relatively short and easy read intended to help readers explore what social business means for their organization, marketplace, communities and career.

What is social business?

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally written for the CIPR Friday Roundup.]

I’ve been writing Friday Roundups for five and a half years and this is my last one. The circulation has grown from eleven to nearly eleven thousand, we merged it into the CIPR three years ago, and I’m delighted it’s carrying on in their safe hands.

We have covered the full gamut of PR topics in this time, but a tag cloud of the 275 roundups would probably need to render “social media” in font size 100!

Increasingly however accomplished social media practitioners are asking a most pertinent question – now what? Well, it appears the answer to that is acquiring the name “social business”, and it’s increasingly been my focus of recent times. You might say social media are the eggs in the social business cake.

I’ve tried to design one question to both convey what social business might be exactly and to give the person attempting an answer real pause for thought in relation to their own organisation. I think I’m making progress with the following question, what do you think?…

Setting the standards for influence

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a special advisor to AMEC (the Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication), wearing a CIPR hat as and when. I’m part of a working group assembling recommendations on the topic of influence for deliberation at the AMEC European Summit in Madrid this June. We have input from IPR, PRSA, Womma, SNCR, IAB and other groups, associations and institutes.

I took an action to create “something to shoot at”, and I distributed the following over the weekend. On the basis that we’re an open and transparent working group, I thought I’d post it here too. Do get in touch if you’d like to tell me what you think. Now’s the time for dialogue – particularly if you can’t attend the Madrid summit – ahead of the standards setting.

Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Originally posted to Euler Partners .]

We kicked off our New Year speaking with the eConsultancy team about the upcoming update to their successful Social Media Management Buyer’s Guide 2011 . Here’s a rundown of the questions Amy Rodgers put to us and our responses.

1) What are the most important trends occurring in this market?

Maintaining one system for external social media management and workflow, and another system for “buzz monitoring”, and another system for enterprise social networking looks increasingly disjointed. We have media to communicate, and we communicate to influence, and influence flows are the lifeblood of mutual understanding, knowledge building and decision-making. Maintaining technological islands for influence flows with one group of stakeholders (eg, customers) distinct from another island for influence flows with another group of stakeholders (eg, employees) effectively ‘misses the trick’. It fails to recognise that today’s organisations must strive to be more than the sum of the payroll.

Social business webinar with Jay Krall, Cision's Media Research Supremo

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Cision webinar on 8th November was dedicated to social business , and I was delighted to be the guest in the hot seat. It was great to be able to chat with Jay Krall and answer questions from listeners about the impact of social web and related technologies on organizational structure, culture, process and performance measurement this decade.

I’ve known Jay since we started following each other online several years ago now, and he took part in an Influence Scorecard workshop I ran in New York in 2010. His contributions were invaluable then, and London is better off for having persuaded Jay to upsticks from Chicago. And if ever there was a guy with the most fabulous radio voice…

This decade's number one revolution

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000

“Data is the new oil." So said Clive Humby back in 2006.

“Data is the new soil” said David McCandless in 2010.

In between, in 2009, Meglena Kuneva , European Consumer Commissioner, said: “Personal data is the new oil of the internet and the new currency of the digital world.”

I’ve long been excited about the advent of big data, and started posting about visualising the stuff back in 2008. If anything distinguishes the modern professional – in marketing, PR, HR, R&D, operations, etc. – from her predecessors, it’s the facility to work with data.

Internal communications discussed on CIPR TV

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The latest episode of CIPR TV went out live yesterday afternoon, with plenty of interaction from the audience. The programme’s guests are Jenni Wheller (@jenniwheller ), Internal Communications Manager at SSP UK, and Mike Grafham (@mgrafham ), Head of Customer Engagement at Yammer .

I think you’ll agree the audience’s questions and the guests’ responses make for an interesting show. Rather than repeat anything covered in the show, I’ll just take a few paragraphs here to make another observation.

Social media are the eggs in the social business cake

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A thrill of working in a fast changing market is the opportunity to innovate. A burden of working in a fast changing market is the need to bend existing language to new concepts. And of course, evoking existing language evokes existing meaning … both an advantage and disadvantage.

So, we’ve been working with social media for the past decade; as if all preceding media was anti-social. And during the past couple of years, we’ve been tasking our tongue to the topic of social business; as if business previously attracted loners.