Vendor-neutral

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Yes, I have called software vendors snake oil sellers. Last year I wrote, “Now social learning is being picked up by software vendors and marketers as the next solution-in-a-box, when it’s more of an approach and a cultural mind-set.” In 2005, social learning online was a fringe activity that we had to test using open source platforms like Drupal. Now everything is “social”. I remember when we ran our informal learning unworkshops in 2006 while the major enterprise software vendors ignored us or privately told us there was no market for this stuff. Now they use our words to sell their products.

Usually I represent the buyers of enterprise software, not the sellers. I have advised vendors on how to improve their products but my aim is not to make an easy market for their sales. I want to help organizations democratize while simultaneously improving their overall performance. As an independent consultant, I maintain a perspective of vendor neutrality. I do not represent any other companies.

While some people have inferred that I may be vendor hostile, let me tell you what I learned today about a software company – Socialcast. They are not my client and I do not have any stake in the company.

During a web presentation today, I saw that Socialcast gets a critical part of workplace performance right. They understand that collaboration has to be embedded in the workflow. Their “secret sauce” is the ability to integrate with a wide variety of other enterprise software applications. These are tools that workers use every day. Socialcast enables conversations around and between these systems. There is no requirement to leave the workflow to collaborate.

I’ve used Socialcast for several months and must say the learning  curve is negligible. It’s simple and effective. You are up and using it very quickly. This is a company that understands online collaboration and reduces silos instead of creating a new one.

So there you have it. If you want the endorsement of a vendor-neutral consultant, just do a good job and you’ll get noticed.

New Hire Practices

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I know that there are no “best practices” in new hire development, also known as onboarding, as each organization is unique and often rather complex. However, there are some practices that could make onboarding better in certain contexts. I’ve looked at several examples and am very interested in unique practices (outliers) beyond the corporate norm.

I’d appreciate any unique examples if you can share them.

Unemployed Girl by Kazimir Malevich (1904)

Reference: Onboarding bookmarks on Diigo

Here are some of the key themes that I found about onboarding programs across many organizations.

Personal, dedicated coaching for each new hire (Capital One, Nokia).

Connecting each new hire to to key contacts in the organization (Capital One, Nokia). Note that Nokia will even pay for new hires to travel to other locations to meet their key contacts and co-workers.

Ensuring new hires understand the shadow or informal part of the organization through the use of tools such as network maps (Jon Katzenbach, Senior Partner of Booz & Company, author of The Wisdom of Teams).

Pairing with another worker or even tripling with two experienced workers and getting to work immediately, in order to reduce formal training (Menlo Innovations)

Two actions that can begin even before a formal offer is made:

  1. Providing access to an online knowledge base.
  2. Connecting to an internal social network to connect online & ask questions.

Embedding collaboration from the start by co-developing an individualized new hire program.

Giving time for new hires to just look around and talk to people (Semco SA; New Seasons Market)

Having weekly/monthly new hire welcome breakfasts, lunches & Happy Hours which all managers attend.

Other common qualities of good programs are that they are – informal; extend over time (up to 2 years in some cases); and involve active participation by supervisors/managers

Some companies, like Zappos, will pay people ($2,000) to leave after onboarding, so that only motivated workers stay.

The Networked Workplace

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The networked workplace is the new reality. It’s always on and globally connected. This is where all organizations are going, at different speeds and in a variety of ways. Some won’t make it.

First you connect people inside the workplace, then you connect organizations, and then you connect the world. That’s where we are today.

Look at how work gets done. First, simple work keeps getting automated. Many years ago the typing pool was made redundant. Today lawyers are on the block, tomorrow it may be you.

Then complicated work gets outsourced. Complicated work is that which can be analyzed and broken down into its component parts. It’s ripe for outsourcing. That used to mean overseas, but today, overseas is getting closer to home. These shifts will continue.

What’s left is complex work, but this requires passion, creativity and initiative. These cannot be commoditized. This is where the main value of the networked workplace will be made. It’s a constantly moving sweet spot. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated work.

At the edge of the organization, where there are few rules; everything is a blur. It’s chaotic. But opportunities are found in chaos. Value emerges from forays into the chaos. In such a changing environment, failure has to be tolerated. Nothing is guaranteed other than the fact that not playing here puts any organization at a significant disadvantage.

Two major changes are needed for the networked organization to capitalize on simultaneously working in simple, complicated, complex and chaotic environments.

First, power must be distributed. It’s a move toward democracy without losing the entrepreneurial zeal. Some companies are already there. There are no answers or cookie cutter approaches here, so don’t try to copy anyone.

Distributed power enables faster reaction time so those closest to the situation can take action. This is often the case in complex and chaotic environments where there is no time to write a detailed assessment of the situation. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted. Shared power is enabled by trust.

Second, transparency must become the norm. Transparency ensures there is an understanding of what everyone is doing. It means narrating work and taking ownership of mistakes. Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes. Of course this is very difficult for any command and control organization, with its published organization chart and sacrosanct job titles, to embrace.

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades.  There’s nothing left in the safe inner rings. It’s being automated and outsourced. But the outer rings are scary and workers can’t be controlled out there or they’ll be ineffective. Aye, there’s the rub. Deal with it, or others will.

Jobs, networks and economics

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week.

QUOTES:

@sandymaxey – “Hierarchical networks appear incestuous, perpetuate mindless incrementalism, reinforce stagnant thinking. Need inclusivity for disruption.”

Carl Sagan: “It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology.” via @MarionChapsal

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via @loyalelectron – Wow. 72% of Indians, 81% of Chinese now say economic opportunities are superior in their native countries than in US. – Wall Street Journal:

A new study by researchers at U.C. Berkeley, Duke and Harvard has found that, for the first time, a majority of American-trained entrepreneurs who have returned to India and China believe they are doing better at “home” than they would be doing in the U.S.

The new China? BMW, Daimler, VW, Siemens & IKEA go to Southern US because labour’s cheap & workers have no rights – via @CWNH

But slumming in America is fast becoming a business model for some of Europe’s leading companies, and they often do things here they would never think of doing at home. These companies – not banks, primarily, but such gold-plated European manufacturers as BMW, Daimler, Volkswagen and Siemens, and retailers such as IKEA – increasingly come to America (the South particularly) because labor is cheap and workers have no rights. In their eyes, we’re becoming the new China. Our labor costs may be a little higher, but we offer stronger intellectual property protections and far fewer strikes than our unruly Chinese comrades.

@SteveDenning: “The real jobs crisis is that most jobs suck” via @SebPaquet

This is not just a matter of keeping the workers happy. In today’s knowledge economy, the motivation of workers is a key determinant of productivity. The lack of passion in today’s workforce is a fundamental cause of the continuing sharp decline in the performance of the Fortune 500.

@nineshift: “We say teleworkers are 25% more productive than office workers”

Industry Canada reports productivity gains of up to 50% by Teleworkers. (Trade-Marks Branch)

IBM Canada had Teleworker productivity improvements of up to 50% per teleworker. (IBM, Canada)

Boeing finds that Telework helps to increase their employee’s productivity an average of 15-30% and, “The quality of the work done has improved even more!” (Boeing Case Study provided by Telecommute Connecticut)

@lemire: conventional peer review system (filter-then-publish) has disastrous consequences:

In the conventional peer review system, you seek to please the reviewers who in turn try to please the editor who in turn is trying to guess what the readers want. It should not be a surprise that the papers are optimized for peer review, not for the reader. While you will eventually get your work published, you may have to drastically alter it to make it pass peer review. A common theme is that you will need to make it look more complicated.

@etiennewenger: New paper on assessing value creation for communities and networks: A Conceptual Framework (PDF) – via @NancyWhite

We will use the term “community” as a shortcut for community of practice, which we define as a learning partnership among people who find it useful to learn from and with each other about a particular domain. They use each other’s experience of practice as a learning resource. And they join forces in making sense of and addressing challenges they face individually or collectively.

We use the term network as a shortcut for social network. The term refers to a set of connections among people, whether or not these connections are mediated by technological networks. They use their connections and relationships as a resource in order to quickly solve problems, share knowledge, and make further connections.

We see communities and networks as two aspects of the social fabric of learning rather than separate structures.

 

Social learning for collaborative work

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The authors at Human Capital Lab say that social learning makes little sense and we should really be focused on collaborative learning:

In its simplest form, collaborative learning is a model based on the idea that knowledge can be created through the interaction and collaboration of individuals. It is not driven by a specific tool, or learning plan, but is driven by the need for information and the accountability that those engaged have to one another. Where we decided to move from the verbiage “social learning” comes from the attempt to really define the term and realized that the focus continually goes back to “social” (and often social media tools) rather than to “learning.” It’s not about the tool, it’s about the learning and collaborative method by which it is accomplished.

I disagree.

Social learning is based on the understanding that we are social animals, as described by Albert Bandura in the 1970’s:

The social learning theory of Bandura emphasizes the importance of observing and modeling the behaviors, attitudes, and emotional reactions of others. Bandura (1977) states: “Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” (p22). Social learning theory explains human behavior in terms of continuous reciprocal interaction between cognitive, behavioral, an environmental influences.

Our social networks have a significant influence on our behaviour, as clearly shown in research by Nicholas Christakis and others.

Image: Smoking in a Face to Face Network (2000) by Nicholas Christakis

Calling social learning, collaborative learning misses out on the fact that all learning happens in a social context.

We collaborate because we have a reason to do so (such as in the workplace).

We learn socially because we are wired to do so.

In a workplace context, social learning is how we share tacit knowledge so that we can work collaboratively. They go hand-in-glove but are not the same. It’s leadership’s responsibility to create structures that encourage social learning in order to do collaborative work.

We need to encourage social learning because things are changing too fast and it’s the only way we can keep up, by learning socially and working collaboratively.

Image: by Ross Dawson: Corporate Directors Understand Change (n = 500)

Network Learning PKM Workshop Notes

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The Network Learning workshop will be held in Toronto on 27 May 2011. It is focused on mastering social media for networked learning, and is based on my work with PKM (personal knowledge management) since 2005.

I use Seek-Sense-Share as an initial framework to explain how to set up a personalized PKM  process:

1. Finding things out on the Web (SEEK)

2. Keeping up to date with new Web content (SEEK)

3. Building a trusted network of colleagues (SEEK & SHARE)

4. Communicating with your colleagues (SHARE)

5. Sharing resources, ideas and experiences with your colleagues (SHARE)

6. Collaborating with your colleagues (SHARE & USE)

7. Improving your personal productivity (SENSE & USE)

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To begin, I would recommend reading Network Learning: Working Smarter, an article I wrote for the Special Libraries Association last year.

Here are some more detailed posts for anyone keen to get started early:

Sense-making (shows types of sense-making activities)

Talking about PKM (from the professional KM community)

PKM in a Nutshell (includes many links for further exploration)

Critical thinking in the organization (looking at how PKM fits into the workplace)

For those who want to dig even deeper, they can explore the PKM categorized posts here or my social bookmarks tagged PKM.

The workshop itself will be as participatory as possible, with an emphasis on skill development and enabling everyone to develop a roadmap of what they want to do next. It will also be an introduction to several communities of practice for further learning.

For workshop participants, feel free to ask any questions in the comment field or send me an email.

 

Jobs? We ain't got no jobs

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If contract work seems like the only option, then start networking with co-workers and competitors. Band together as a guild or association and help each other out. Think of it as a freelancers union and look into group health care, joint marketing and shared administration. You can’t do this working 40 hours a week for The Man. The deck is stacked with laws supporting either employers and employees but the future of knowledge work is free-agency. The powers that be, corporations and unions, won’t change to help out freelancers, we have to help ourselves.

That was my conclusion two years ago in Freelancers Unite. In many ways, it’s easier to be a freelancer than it was when I started 8 years ago. Here’s my marketing advice for free-agents.

There seems to be a growing acceptance of freelancing as a career option, as explained in this recent GigaOm article:

Attitudes toward freelancing have shifted over the past few years, with many more people now prepared to consider it as a long-term career choice. It’s a shift that has certainly been helped by online freelance marketplaces such as Elance and Odesk, which have made it much easier for freelancers to find work worldwide. While some people may have initially tried freelancing out of necessity due to the economic downturn, many people now choose to freelance because it gives them the flexibility to pursue their lifestyle of choice.

In the USA, this shift is being called the 1099 [contract worker] Economy. William Fulton says this shift requires a different way of looking at economic development.

As a result, savvy economic developers who want to tap into the 1099 economy must recognize that they must focus on a different version of the basics. Visiting existing large businesses in the community remains important because your largest businesses are probably where your future entrepreneurs currently work. But you also have to know the subtle ebbs and flows of your local economy, especially where the clusters of small business activity are located. You have to stay in touch with your educational community, especially your community colleges, to understand what skills your labor force has and needs. And, of course, you have to read all those Craigslist ads that my daughter is reading.

In my short stint as a contract employee last year, I noted that JOB is a four-letter word.

I wrote in 2004, early in my life as a freelancer, that knowledge work requires new structures, including the concept of the job:

Perhaps the actual structure of work, especially the Corporation itself, is an obstacle to knowledge work. Instead of tweaking the mechanisms of the corporation, through job redesign or cultural initiatives, we should be re-examining the basic structure of the corporation. It is an industrial age creation, designed to maximize physical capital and may not be optimal for maximizing “knowledge capital”.

The network, with its dynamic conversations, is where a lot of knowledge work gets done, and we should be looking at new laws to recognise networks in a similar way that we recognise corporations as legal entities. Is anything like this happening?

At the end of a jobless recovery, are we now ready to make some of these changes?

Managing in a networked world

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In 2009, Anthony Poncier wrote a good post (in French) that covered the eight challenges of management in the virtual era; loosely translated as:

  1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative.
  2. Renewing the workplace social contract.
  3. Creating new modes of leadership.
  4. Creating value, not just revenue.
  5. The production of collective knowledge.
  6. Managing with both IQ and EQ (emotional quotient).
  7. A diverse community rather than a disciplined unity.
  8. Learning about the reality of the virtual.

1. Being concurrently nomadic and collaborative is becoming the norm in both large corporations and in small start-ups. The Internet Time Alliance is spread across eight time zones and we understand these challenges. One key to ensuring collaboration is through the narration of work. This fosters transparency and is something to be modelled by management.

2. Transparency becomes a catalyst in renewing the workplace social contract. Empowered workers have more responsibilities and power must be shared. This of course is a major challenge but many companies are already dealing with it, as the WorldBlu list of most democratic workplaces shows.

3. New and radical leadership models are coming forward as alternatives to more traditional, military-style command and control frameworks.

4. Creating long-term value is becoming more obvious in the business world. Dave Pollard’s Finding the Sweet Spot offers a simple guide to responsible, sustainable, joyful work:

  1. Find the sweet spot: Identify your Gift, passion, and purpose
  2. Find the right partners
  3. Research unmet needs
  4. Imagine and innovate solutions
  5. Continuously improvise
  6. Act responsibly on principle

5. I’ve said before that personal knowledge management (PKM) is our part of the social learning contract. Collective knowledge only becomes a reality when individuals engage in meaningful conversations to share their tacit knowledge. Collective knowledge is much more than databases of information.

6. The social, human side of business relationships is finally getting the attention it deserves. Once again, look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

  • Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
  • Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
  • Workers manage their own schedules
  • Each worker has a unique “competency model”
  • Customers participate in projects

7. The challenge of balancing diversity & unity is complex and requires new perspectives. Monika Hardy made this comment on my post, Emergent Value:

all levels are needed in any large organization…
isn’t that what we can do now.. seamlessly. gyrating from the vertical to the horizontal at whim, sophisticated zooming in and out, we’re in the system, we’re out of the system, we’re large, we’re small.
and without us even thinking it’s work, or that we’re doing it, or forcing it.
it’s like our reward for listening to what tech wants is that we can just be. and the freedom from just being, the extra time/money/energy from letting tech work the chaos, is allowing us to notice things we’ve been blinded to – for all the order we thought we craved. we were missing mindfulness.
emergent value and life in perpetual beta.. how lucky are we?

8. Virtual relationships are real and have significant impact on organizations. A song on the Net can drop stock values and a dispersed group of individual activists with networked computers can embarrass nation states and corporations. Virtual relationships can create significant business value (to which I can attest on many occasions). Separating relationships by medium is rather fruitless, so managers need to understand the virtual very well.

Thanks again to Anthony for eight good points, still pertinent today.

"I'd just love to pick your pocket"

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Here are some of the things I learned via Twitter this past week:

QUOTE: @JeffElder: “I’d just love to pick your brain.” Saying that to a consultant is really saying: “I’d just love to pick your pocket.” – via @techherding

Mimi & Eunice: Precious Sacred Idea

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Kelly Craft (@acLuser) reflects my own feelings about Follow Fridays on Twitter, and why I decided two years ago to start Friday’s Finds instead:

I’ll also bust the ‘secret’ vault wide-open and admit I’m not a fan of #followfriday in many respects.

  • Truth be told, I really don’t want a bunch of random new followers who I might not share any common interest with.

Internal culture shows you to everyone. – What happens on the inside gets seen by the outside – via @igotan

We live in a world where it’s very difficult to keep secrets anymore.  We communicate very freely, and this causes the walls to turn into veils, and the veils to be more and more translucent.  Imagine the shower in the photo above — it’s symbolic of a new reality, so go to the gym.

Melissa Pierce (@melissapierce) creator of the film Life in perpetual Beta, discussing social media on Chicago Live

“Leaderless groups” are a myth if taken literally” ~ Rosabeth Kanter – via @minutrition

“Leaderless groups,” a phrase I heard stated with pride at Cisco in the early days of councils and boards, are a myth if taken literally. No group is actually leaderless, although it might be highly collaborative. The group might distribute and rotate leadership roles and responsibilities. There might be open discussion of decisions, even if there is a person who declares when it’s time to decided and breaks ties — in short, has the authority. But when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

The future's so bright: Workers gotta wear shades

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What is the future of the corporate model in a knowledge society?

Networked workplaces are on the rise and are challenging the large corporation model. For instance, many big web companies have comparatively few staff. They leverage their networks.

But the corporation is not going to become suddenly extinct, as most of our laws and business practises favour the corporation over the individual. Witness who legally owns the intellectual property (IP) produced by the employee [answer: the corporation]. It’s only in some universities that the knowledge worker maintains these rights.

While salaried workers may not own their IP, they own more and more of the “know-how”. This intangible know-how is the real value of knowledge – being able to do something with it. We are seeing the rise of  knowledge artisans who bring their tools; and leave with them. This is change from the bottom of the organizational pyramid.

Intellectual Property itself has minimal value and much IP isn’t worth the effort to protect it. Consider that companies like Facebook and Twitter have not built their businesses on patent applications. They’re too busy refining their business models, which are in perpetual Beta. Much business value is not in the idea or even the artifact that represents it, but in the speed and vigour of implementation.

The command and control corporate model may be forced to change when shareholders really understand that the valuation of their average corporation is getting to be more than 85% intangible assets. These intangibles are worthless without the know-how of knowledge workers. Therefore the actual value of the average corporation, without its people, is getting close to zero. So where would you put your money? In the corporation or in the people? For now, you have limited options, but who knows if this may change.

Look at Rachel Happe’s vision for the social organization, with some of these attributes:

  • Employment as a mix of commitment/free-agency
  • Managers focused on developing people or managing projects, not on pieces of turf
  • Workers manage their own schedules
  • Each worker has a unique “competency model” [farewell HR]
  • Customers participate in projects

This sounds like a wirearchy or what I would describe as a structure that fosters multi-way flows of power based on trusted relationships facilitated by networked transparency. It reflects what chaordic structures have tried to do – balance chaos and order. Between chaos and order lies complexity, and that’s what simpler, but more nimble, organizational structures can better address.

In a networked world, the future of the corporation will be different, just as the future of many countries today looks suddenly different.

Thanks to Timbuk3 for the title inspiration.