Category: Social business (page 3 of 5)

12 May 2014 / 0 Comments

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

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.

When you define social business as I do, what might the clause for "non-solicitation" look like in your terms of business? How about this:

We believe our employees should be free to do whatever they consider best suits them. We do not therefore seek to apply any restrictions on their future employ. Their success is our success.

If such a declaration is representative of your wider values, you might find loyalty actually improves. By investing in our culture and award winning training and development, we felt comfortable wishing leavers the very best for the future. It felt right and served us all well.

[Image credit: Department of Coffee and Social Affairs – a fine selection of London coffee shops in which to have such conversations.]

24 April 2014 / 1 Comment

Doing the triple loop – profound leadership

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.

4 April 2014 / 4 Comments

Organization and personal reputation – from first principles to distributed autonomy

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.

28 March 2014 / 4 Comments

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

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. Read more

11 March 2014 / 0 Comments

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

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.

Leslie A Perlow, Erin L Kelly, Work and Occupations, 2014 41: 111, DOI: 10.1177/0730888413516473

Photograph of Leslie Perlow. Source, Harvard Business School.

I posted recently about my experiences curating a Flipboard magazine. One dislike is the inability to 'flip' a URL for a PDF. So in this instance, I've created this post for the sole purpose of flipping it to Social Business Design magazine.

If you missed the link to the PDF above, here it is again.

25 February 2014 / 4 Comments

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

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: Read more

Drucker

Relationships

Adam

Sun-setting

Sun-rising

A means not an end

Shared values