Books

Book reviews

Success depends on who we work with

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Here’s a description from Connected: The surprising power of our social networks and how they shape our lives, in which sociologist, Brian Uzzi, describes how creative teams (musical productions) function:

Uzzi found that teams made up of individuals who had never before worked together fared poorly, greatly increasing the chance of a flop. These networks were not well connected and contained mostly weak ties. At the other extreme, groups made up of individuals who had all worked together previously also tended to create musicals that were unsuccessful. Because these groups lacked creative input from the outside, they tended to rehash the same ideas that they used the first time they worked together. In between, however, Uzzi once again found a sweet spot that combines the diversity of new team members with the stability of previously formed relationship. The networks that best exhibited the small-world property were those that had the greatest success.

Production company networks with a mix of weak and strong ties allowed easy communication but also fostered greater creativity because of the ideas of new members of the group and the synergies they created. Thus, the structure of the network appears to have a strong effect on both financial and critical success.

As the need for creativity in the workplace increases, organizations should give some serious thought to the structure of work groups and networks. As Gary Hamel described at the Spigit Customer Summit, traditional (industrial) employee traits of Intellect, Diligence & Obedience are becoming commodities (going to the lowest bidder?). The Creative Economy requires more independent workers (like musical productions?) with the following traits that can not be commoditized:

  • Initiative
  • Creativity
  • Passion

It seems that successful creative work groups need to be just cohesive enough with some additional “friction” from new members in order to keep the passion and creativity flowing. This brings into question the rationale for practices such as:

Mass training with standard performance objectives for everyone

Predominantly full-time, salaried employment (few options for part-time work at the control of the worker)

Standard HR policies

Banning access to online social networks at work

With working life in perpetual beta, it’s time to re-think not just how we work, but with whom we work.

Social Media Marketing – Review

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My own interest in social media is from the perspective of learning and workplace performance but the lines are getting fuzzy between marketing, communications, learning and training, so Social Media Marketing may be suitable for a wider audience than just marketing. This is one of the latest books in the for Dummies series produced by Wiley.

social media marketing

In Part 1, Shiv Singh covers the overall lay of the Internet landscape comprehensively and without any hype. In reading this section, I thought that this is the kind of information I would give my own clients. It covers broader aspects, such as general trends in social media use, as well as specifics like setting up Twitter alerts.

Part 2 is the hands-on section of the book and deals with developing an online voice, reaching your audience and most importantly, dealing with criticism. Part 3 could be called “SEO in a box”, and while it’s not of particular interest to me, this is what most companies (for profit & non-profit) are looking for – how do I actually market with social media? This section includes a chapter on the fast-growing mobile media marketplace. There are lessons here that translate for the learning function as well, such as sending mobile text alerts for changing content.

The headings in Chapter 12, “Energizing Employees within Your Company for Social Influence” could just as easily be incorporated by HR/Training as Marketing:

  • Encouraging your employees to collaborate
  • Picking social software for social influence
  • Don’t try to control too much
  • Surfacing the connections
  • Taking search social, too
  • Allowing alternate access
  • Making the goal to de-structure and de-organize
  • Giving employees other choices

The final section is on best practices and common mistakes and, given the complexity and changing nature of the field, these may change. Here are my picks of those provided:

Best practice: Conduct many small tests frequently and build on each one

Common Mistake: Not being patient

Overall this is a comprehensive book for someone new to the field and is a good reference for those with experience. It’s the kind of book I would recommend or give to clients to provide us with a common point of reference.

Simplexity – review

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In Simplexity Jeffrey Kluger writes an easy-reading book on “why simple things become complex and how complex things can be made simple”.

simplexityFirst of all, this is not a book for anyone looking for a deep examination of complexity theory. Kluger is a writer for Time, not an academic or researcher. This makes Simplexity a very easy read and rather enjoyable. It’s the kind of book you want to take on a business trip, as it will give you some interesting ideas and perhaps help you look at things a little differently.

The book is organized into chapters that read like short stories. Topics range from “Why is the stock market hard to predict?” to “Why do people, mice, and worlds die when they do?”. My favourite chapter was, “Why is a baby the best linguist in the world?”. I learned that the first 9 months of life are essential to language learning and that a baby’s brain can do some amazing things in language acquisition. It had me questioning some of the common practices in language education.

For business professionals, the chapter on “Why do the jobs that require the greatest skills often pay the least?” is informative. The story of Beth Bechky, a workplace ethnographer, tells how she discovered that engineers in a firm would spend hundreds of hours developing blueprints to pass on to the assemblers, with the instructions, “Build to the print”.

The assemblers, in turn, accept the blueprints, shoo the engineers away – and often as not simply put the drawings aside. Never mind building to the print, many of them barely look at it. The source they turn to instead is one another. The more experienced assemblers figure out how the job should be done and tell the less experienced ones what to do. When a question arises, all of them simply consult one another.

The back cover compares Simplexity to Freakonomics and I would say that it’s a fair comparison. It’s a fun read and will make for interesting dinner conversations and may provide some insights, but it is only a shallow dive into complexity theory.

Work Smarter – informal learning in the cloud

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Just picked up my copy of Jay Cross’ latest book, Work Smarter, which sells through Lulu for a reasonable $19.99. As Jay says, this is not a traditional book. It’s an unbook and not meant to be read linearly, though you can if you want. It covers a wide variety of topics, as you can see in the preview, and features all of our colleagues at InternetTime Alliance as well as other friends of Jay.

Work SmarterThe book is also updated from time to time, so it’s always current.

This is the kind of book to keep at your desk and peruse as you need, refreshing something you know or a quick read on a new concept. The sub-title tells it all, “informal learning in the cloud”. This is a great book to hand out to clients and others who want to get up to speed on working and learning in networks.

Thanks for all the hard work in putting this together, Jay.

Role of an online community manager

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Mark Sylvester hosted a web conference today  on the role of an online community manager. Here are some highlights from my notes:

  • The session used tweetchat.com for the text chat, but this medium was very slow. Alternatives to Twitter should be used if you want online chat. An integrated chat was not available with the Citrix platform. Using Twitter as a chat tool also creates a lot of extra noise for your regular followers on Twitter (via @xpconcept)
  • CM is not a 9-5 job – uses twitter a lot, comments on blogs, uses back-channels for private communications the role changes as the needs of the community change
  • CM is a very time-consuming job and the results are not always tangible and visible.
  • There is also an internal role in explaining the role and activities in online communities to the organization, to answer, “what do you do all day other than play on Twitter?”.
  • Online communities don’t manage themselves.
  • Communities often don’t grow the way they are planned and may be taken over by a sub-group.
  • CM can bridge gap between inside & outside the organization.
  • CM doesn’t fit into any single departmental silo – role is similar to ombudsman
  • CM should not take oneself too seriously
  • “Communities don’t want to be managed” – they want to be nurtured
  • Building community means giving up control.
  • How do you get executive buy-in?
    • find someone with an existing community mindset
    • get executives into a real network experience in order to understand
  • The launch phase requires a small group that is passionate and “transacting” a lot.
  • Building community is not about collecting as many people as possible.
  • Key: crowd-source community management [my experience was this worked on Work Literacy]
  • Dynamic tension in communities: control vs member empowerment (experienced CM’s seem to be at ease with loss of control)

More: The Iceberg Effect of Community Management

Recommended Reading (from the panelists):

Linked: How everything is connected to everything else

The decision to join

Six pixels of separation

The new community rules

Groundswell

Related post of mine: The Community Manager

Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide | Review

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Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide by Amy Shuen covers many of the business aspects of Web 2.0 and is aimed at the general business reader. As Shuen says in the introduction, “you don’t need an M.B.A. or a degree in computer science” to understand the book. It starts by comparing Flickr’s business model with Netflix’s and goes on to discuss concepts such as network effects and the Bass Diffusion Curve. I found Chapter 4, Companies Capitalize Competences the most interesting, as it discusses collaboration and working across the Web:

Even in new projects, creating value often means letting some of that value flow elsewhere. The creative energy of mashups appears in large part because the companies providing the services being mashed up no longer insist on total control over their products. That flexibility allows a different dynamic than the usual system of “create, patent, and license” that has dominated intellectual property for the last few decades.

My experience with several clients over the years is that they do not understand network effects and have great difficulty ceding any control. This book would have been good for them, but then again, I’ve noticed that many business leaders do not have or make the time to read about their business or the forces that affect it. Don’t worry, I’m doing that for you ;-)

I would recommend this book as an overview of Web 2.0 with a strong business perspective and a lighter treatment of the actual technologies (fine for me). The easy-to-read End Notes provide more information for those who wish to further investigate an item. The final chapter includes a template and explanation of how to develop a Web 2.0 Business Plan, that many may find useful.

Management Rewired – Review

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Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science by Charles Jacobs covers many of the areas discussed here, such as learning, management models and democracy in the workplace. Jacobs covers a variety of studies in science and management but this book is not a dry academic treatise but a good read sprinkled with many of the author’s personal stories. Much as Gary Hamel’s The Future of Management showed the need for new business models, Jacobs shows leaders what actually works when dealing with other people. A consistent theme is to let people manage themselves, because that works:

Rather than limit decentralization to the top of the hierarchy, why not drive it down into the organization as far as possible? Modern information technology makes such “radical decentralization” much easier now than it was in [Alfred] Sloan’s day.

Such an approach enables people to control their own destinies. From a Darwinian perspective, it’s aligned with the urgings of our selfish genes. From a market perspective, it’s more efficient and effective. From a cultural perspective, virtually every organizational innovation since the Western Electric Hawthorne studies has been aimed at fostering democracy and initiative in the workplace because it’s good for both people and the business. Moving to an entrepreneurial organization is just the next step.

Jacobs shows the overwhelming evidence that “reward, punishment and feedback don’t produce the results we intend or produce the opposite” (now there’s a message for the HR department).  Methods that work are creating cognitive dissonance in order to get a shift in thinking that changes behaviour. Changing behaviour is not enough. Transforming an organization means shifting our paradigm and this is best done through stories. The most effective stories are about plans and expectations gone awry. Forget pay and bonuses, or better yet, let workers decide amongst themselves; communication is the only effective tool that leaders have.

Becoming more participative may be easier said than done, as the author shows how most 360-degree reviews have managers consistently ranking themselves as more participative than their employees do. We’re not as open as we think we are.

Management Rewired is a welcome addition to the field and should be read by anyone working in or with organizations. It’s nice to get corroboration, and a good set of reference notes, to reinforce my own work on the new nature of the firm.

What is America?

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A couple of times each week I head down to our local coffee shop and discuss politics, economics and our community with my friend Graham Watt. I’ve posted several of Graham’s articles on this blog, the latest being O Canada, so obviously I respect his opinions. For my birthday, Graham gave me a copy of Ronald Wright’s What is America?, and appended the sub-title, and why?

What is America? should be added as a text book to any course on the history of the Americas. Of course, it reads better than most text books because it is not designed to be one. Even with a degree in History and at least one US history course, I learned, re-learned, and un-learned as I read this excellent book. It would also make a fine addition to my virtual Global Civics program.

The book reminded me of Howard Zinn’s A people’s History of American Empire but with a much earlier start. Also, Wright makes sure that Canadians don’t get too smug, considering our own genocidal tendencies. What I found most interesting was the thread of history that Wright covers. First, the Americas had great cities and political systems north of the Rio Grande before the arrival of Europeans. They only became nomadic tribes after the invasions.  Early Indigenous Americans were wiped out mostly by disease (±90%), used consciously as a weapon by all Europeans.

Also, the founding principles of the US constitution owe more to the Iroquois Confederacy than any European traditions.

The most likely theory, in my opinion, is that the word [caucus] is of Algonquian origin. An authority on Native American languages, Dr. J. H. Trumbull, suggested in the “Procedures of the American Philological Association” in 1872 that the word might be derived from an Algonquian word, “cau´-cau-as´u,” mentioned in the writings of Capt. John Smith in the 17th century. The word was said to mean “one who talks with or advises.” —Grammarphobia 2006

Furthermore, the conquest of the Americas was funded by its own wealth — crops (e.g. potatoes) and gold & silver — which fueled the European industrial revolution. Europe would not have been able to sustain the industrial revolution without these imports on a massive scale.

Wright also takes to task the cultural amnesia prevalent throughout American history:

“America could not bear to take a hard look at itself, especially the inconvenient truths of slavery, dispossession and genocide. Religion and profit, ‘jumping together,’ had little time for introspection. The slaveholder, the frontiersman and the fundamentalist all hated the historian — and anti-intellectualism has been a strong force ever since.”

The Historian by E. Irving Couse
“Digital scan of a color plate of painting. Printed with the following caption: 1902 by E. Irving Couse, A. N. A.; The Historian; The Indian Artist is painting in sign language, on buckskin, the story of a battle with American Soldiers. When exhibited at the National Academy this picture was considered one of the most important paintings of the year.” —Wikimedia Commons

Moving down-scale

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Jim Kunstler spoke to a packed audience at Mount Allison University last night, covering much of the material in his book The Long Emergency with updated data. You can watch his 2004 TED Talk on The Tragedy of Suburbia.

Kunstler opened with a most informative graph developed by C H Smith:

Yes, that’s right; sometime in the near future, oil will trade for $1,000 per barrel. In this post-peak oil period, Kunstler’s basic conclusion is that the age of continual growth (2-7%) is over. He showed how the US economy was based almost entirely on suburban development and that has now come to a crashing halt. He also predicted the collapse of the aviation industry in the next 48 months. Dwindling oil supplies and higher costs will affect every sector of society, and we will see major changes in:

  • how we inhabit the landscape as our cities & towns adapt
  • how we grow food as we are forced to be more local and use animal power once again
  • how we do business after the collapse of the industrial retail model (e.g. farmers markets vs Wal*Mart)
  • how we will make things on a more local level
  • how collector schools premised on cheap transportation will disappear

There will soon be a major down-scaling of everything we do because we will no longer have the energy to continue with our current system. Kunstler’s suggestion for a pragmatic North American project to get society motivated to tackle these huge issues is to restore our passenger rail service. It’s feasible, much-needed, requires no new technology and will employ many people. Cars (and suburbia) are dead, no matter how many hybrids we buy.

The Fourth Turning

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I picked up a used copy of The Fourth Turning (1997) as I had read some reviews, positive and negative, and for the price figured it was worth it. I won’t go into the entire premise of the book, as the reviews on Amazon give a good overview, but I find the recommendations from 1997 to prepare for the predicted crisis in the first decade of the millennium (now) most interesting:

Once the Crisis catalyzes, anything can happen. If you are starting a career now, realize that generalists with survival know-how will have the edge over specialists whose skills are useful only in an undamaged environment. Be fluent in as many languages, cultures, and technologies as you can. Your business will face a total alteration of market conditions: Expect public subsidies to vanish, the regulatory environment to change quickly, and new trade barriers to arise. Avoid debt or leverage investments, including massive student debt. Assume that all your external safety nets (pensions, Social Security, Medicare) could end up totally shredded.

Related to my post of the Cuspers going into small business are some recommendations for this generation (AKA: 13ers):

The Fourth Turning will find other generations with lives either mostly in the past or mostly in the future, but it will catch 13ers in “prime time”, right at the midpoint of their adult lives. They must step forward as the saeculum’s repair generation, the one stuck with fixing the messes and cleaning up the debris left by others.

President Obama campaigned on this fact and even Prime Minister Harper has had to discard some of his conservative principles and get down to the messy job of repair. Both are members of this generation. The Crisis is here and there’s lots of work for all of us to do.