OK .. so it looks like the Web, hyperlinks and ’social’ platforms for interaction are here to stay (unless electricity grids fail or corporations and governments completely take over the Web).

For the past couple of years at least there have been increasingly numerous and strident calls for fundamental make-overs of both management and leadership.  People everywhere are clicking into the fact that yesteryear’s models and ways are less and less effective .. and yet we all labor on whilst yelling “change .. change, or die .. etc.”

World-renowned organizational effectiveness guru Gary Hamel set out the fundamental challenge(s) in his 2007 book “The Future of Management“.  Others, such as John Hagel and John Seeley Brown’s “The Power of Pull“, have weighed in with equally sharp and challenging premises and theories.  All of these pieces signal an urgent need to innovate and adapt to a new set of conditions .. conditions which are rapidly on their way to becoming ubiquitous and/or expected by the generations entering or approaching their chapter-of-life in the workplace.

It sometimes feels like this is only the next round or wave of coming to terms with rumblings and dynamics that began back in the ’60’s and ’80’s.  After all, we began hearing about the critical need for empowerment, continuous learning, flexibility, agility and resilience at least two decades ago.  Most of the pioneering work in these areas came from the soft-and-squishy (or seen to be that way) world of Organizational Development (OD), from people like Eric Trist, Fred Emery, Bill Passmore, Marv Weisbord, Peter Block, Charles Handy, Meg Wheatley and many many others.

As the years have passed since these pioneers first addressed the human issues in organizational structures and processes derived from engineering and efficiency principles, various elements of their thinking and practices have inexorably found their way into managing processes and people.  I suggest that this is entirely understandable as the increasing frequency and intensity of complicated and complex organizational activities have grown over time, and along with the evolution of peoples’ expectations about work and meaning in a modern era.

My premise is that management innovation is available  from that world of organizational development, as it’s principles and dynamics are closely aligned to Hamel’s suggestion that “activities will still need to be coordinated, individual efforts aligned, objectives decided upon, knowledge disseminated, and resources allocated, but increasingly this work will be distributed out to the periphery“.

The New Context Demands New Principles

What was yesterday called Enterprise 2.0 and today is called “Social Business” can be seen as the emergent stage of the intersection of significant advances in information technology, management science applied to business process, the analysis and control of operational activities AND the interaction and participation of people with information, opinions and knowledge to share.

These forces and factors are converging in today’s workplaces, wherein a continuous flow of information is the rule rather than the exception.  Thus, it’s essential to cast a critical eye on the fundamental assumptions of work design and how work is managed. The core assumptions embodied in widely-used methodologies today still present work as  ”static sets of tasks and knowledge arranged in specific constellations on an organization chart” (see all major job evaluation methodologies for more detail).

It’s getting clearer and clearer today that the capabilities and dynamics of what started in the consumer realm as social software … those funny things called blogs, and wikis, and widgets stitched together into and by web services … are finding (and have found) their ways into the workplace.

That they have migrated to the workplace makes sense.  People have always  (at work) been creating and building up “... knowledge through exchanging information, talking and arguing and pointing out other ideas and sources of information and ways to do things.” Such services and tools and the reasons for which people use them are the means by which general human activity (purposeful and otherwise) translates to the online environment.

So, as stated at the outset, it seems clear that we’re situated in a more interactive, less static environment.  Whether we like it or not, we are  passing from an era in which things were assumed to be controllable (able to be deconstructed and then assembled into a clear, linear, always replicable and thus static form) to an era characterized by a continuous  flow of information.  Because it feeds the conduct of organizations large and small, it is a flow that necessarily demands to be interpreted and shaped into useful inputs and outputs.

The methodologies still in use today generally did not foresee working with networked information flows, and thus the way work is designed and managed does not really address how it could or should be managed.

We need to revisit the fundamental principles of work design AND the basic rules used to configure hierarchical organizations in which the primary assumption is that knowledge is put to use in a vertical chain of decision-making.

Both Horizontal and Vertical

Horizontal flows of information and peoples’ engagement have already been put to work in a range of early Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business experiments.  But let’s be honest .. how these will work, or not, is to date less than clear.  There’s an enormous amount of inertia and habit to overcome, all whilst confronting continuously turbulent conditions seasoned with healthy helpings of ambiguity .. about economics, governance and peoples’ collective capabilities to adapt.

Hierarchy is not disappearing from the organizational landscape .. nor should it. It’s an useful construct for clarifying decision-making and accountability, and I believe it will come to co-exist with the core dynamics of networked people and information …

“a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results”

.. which, incidentally, is a fundamental aspect of all the ‘democratization’ (it’s probably too early to yet call it that, but let’s do so for the time being) we are witnessing in the recent uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East.  Would that our western governments and organizations watch and learn as they embark on the renewal of leadership and management in the 21st Century.

The implications are huge, will demand significant effort and responsibility on the part of all individuals, and may lead to very different ways of working and being in and of the world.

But clearly, we must evolve … what we have been doing looks less and less likely to be as effective as necessary in the rapidly-approaching future.

Will newspapers all die? Maybe not. I am sure that, in some form, some Newspapers will live on. But for most of us – the Newspaper as a “Paper” for the masses is already dead. Will Paper Books die? Maybe not – I treasure my new Picture Book of my son’s wedding. There are few text filled books I will always treasure. But as a mass market object, books are already dead for many people as the sales of eBooks and Readers show.

The mass market distribution systems that supported newspapers and books will die soon as a result. For traditional papers and books only have to shrink by 15 – 25% to make the economic burden of running the presses and the system too much. Once these systems have gone they will be gone for ever. New systems are emerging.

I can already design and set my new book and have it printed and sent back to me – a market of one!

This is a new system quite separate from the old book distribution and publishing system. New “newspapers” such as Politico and Huffington are here. Some old ones such as the Guardian are moving to the new space. Twitter and Facebook fill in more news for me. My new “news paper” will be edited largely by me for me!

The same process is now going to affect TV. Most of the old infrastructure will die. New structure will emerge quickly. Some old structure will hybridize. The power will shift from them to me!

I have just enjoyed an Apple TV for a week with Netflix.  Now watching content via the web is easy. But the big attraction is not just that getting content online is easy. What I had not known about was how powerful the impact would be of how my habits of watching affects how Netflix adjusts its offering to me. In only a week, it has used its algorithm to begin to offer me content that I might never have noticed that I will almost certainly enjoy. What it is doing is “meaning making” of the almost infinite pool of content that is out there. This has put me in charge – I am now my own programmer. I am my own network CEO. I choose the time and I choose the content knowing that I will enjoy it. I also lose all the rubbish and all the ads.

I am constructing my own TV Network! This is the revolution that extends way beyond the web access issues. The web enables this personal customization for TV as wit will for books and news.

I am happy to pay a subscription for this. I don’t demand that this be free because it is great value for me. I will never go back to appointment TV – no matter who puts it on – a network, a cable company or public TV.

My bet is that within a year, the death of Appointment TV will be sure and a new system will be visible. Look at how TechCrunch see this right now!

• Google unveiled its Google TV platform less than 3 weeks ago. You can’t ignore Google. Hey, they just built a car that drives itself. But Thursday, in a battle that will likely become more frequent between old media and new, ABC, CBS and NBC blocked their programs fromGoogle TV. MTV, Fox and HBO are still available, but that could change. Still, one TechCrunch post declared “I’ve seen the future and it begins on my sofa with Google TV.”
• Steve Jobs bragged this week that Apple has already sold 250,000 new Apple TVs. The first Apple TV shipped in 2007. It had its fans but didn’t take off like the iPod or iPhone. The second generation of Apple TV’s launched just last month. MG Siegler really likes the device, but admitted it’s not yet the killer device in the living room. To get there, he said, would require tv network subscription packages.
• “Watch Instantly” is booming at Netflix. A shocking statistic came out this week. 20% of Internet traffic during peak times in the U.S. is coming from Netflix.
  For more on Netflix’s plans, see Sarah Lacy’s interview with CEO Reed Hastings.
• Hulu Plus will be coming to the Roku box in the fall.
  For some, the Roku box may be the first step towards eliminating cable.
• Boxee announced the new Boxee Box will ship next month, both if you pre-ordered fromAmazon or want to buy one in stores.
• Flurry reported Apple’s iOS Apps are responsible for the recent downward trend in TV ratings. The actual cause may be a bit broader.
• A TechCrunch post Friday suggested the future of TV is HTML5.

At the moment much power remains with the old powers. Netflix and Google are enduring tough negotiations with the producers of content. But why wouldn’t they take up this mantle of being the producer? Why can’t they do an HBO? Certainly today if I was a maker of documentary who cannot get space on conventional TV, I would approach Netflix and Google. Just as cable supplanted the networks, so those who provide access via the web will supplant cable and networks.

So what then for Public TV and the local Public TV stations?

If you are a producer it seems straightforward to me – you too have to approach those who shape access to the web – or add a service to the web yourself!

But that leaves the local TV stations on the beach! It does but like a local book shop, the audience is going somewhere else for the mass content.

So what to do?

Here is Doc Searls’ advice in a recent interview with me at KETC:

I think that an answer is to build the “Local Cloud” – Host the new Forum or Agora or Market. Be the host of the new/old marketplace for sharing through video.

There is not yet a really well functioning local cloud yet for video. This is a huge hole, waiting to be filled. Look at all those who are learning to use video. They are driving to HQ video. Look at the new screens that offer up a much better experience.

Take a look at your new 1080p HD TV screen. You know what the best-looking source is for that? Your new 1080p camcorder. That’s because all the TV stations, and all the cable and satellite services, compress their video, often to the point where grass fields look plaid and detail is just wiggly lines. Camcorders compress video too, but not as much.

My point here is that more and more individuals and small groups are going to be in better and better positions to produce their own video, and won’t be satisfied seeing it compressed to ugliness on YouTube. They’ll want to produce their own movies, their own documentaries, their own creative work, outside the  industrial system that YouTube comprises.

If they want to mash this video up, edit it, do CGI, do the kind of rendering that serious video requires, they won’t have the means at home. And it’s often too hard to do it out in some remote cloud provided by the likes of Amazon (which doesn’t even provide that yet — at least not exactly). They’ll need low-latency fat connections to back-end servers and rendering farms.

Thus we have a big opportunity for KETC and other public TV institutions, to ally with local telco and cable companies, which in most cases have the space, the conditioned power, and the direct connections to the Net’s backbone.

How much time before the Tipping Point? My feeling is 2-3 years tops. In 2-3 years time all your best audience will have made the shift to the web. This may be 30- 40% of the total. There will still be a conventional audience but it cannot pay the bills. Just as when a newspaper or a book publisher loses its best readers, it cannot pay its bills either.

The pace is change is accelerating as each new phase builds on the previous one and adds new platform power to the web. Coming right on the heels of all of this – a new web based system of education and then right after that a new web based health system. All based on the same idea – of putting you in the driver’s seat!

What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Nuno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

Email usage has dropped 28% in the last 12 months! (Matt Forcey)

A recent study by Nielsen that focused on how Americans spend their time online, unexpectedly found that email usage has dropped by 28% over the last year.  Since we’re certainly not communicating any less, what are people doing as an alternative?  Not surprisingly, the data show that social networking use increased by 43% over the same time period.  A separate analysis determined that Mobile Internet use has also increased dramatically.

When I used to have a real job, one of the things I hated about being on vacation was the dread of what woud face me in my email inbox. As it became easier to access email remotely, I began to check in every day just to keep the load and the surprises down. Today when accessing email remotely is commonplace nearly all my pals in the conventional workplace tell me that they do the same. (The full report is here)

The young, under 30, hardly use it at all – they don’t even use the phone.

But what about the rest of us who still work for and with organizations that make email the centre of the communications system? Can you push back and get more productive? Here are two well known people who have confronted this question and have won the battle.

My old pal Luis Suarez at IBM is best known for his war against email and the misuse of it that crushes productivity.

I have been consistently getting less and less email by the week, and, even more exciting, way below the 20 emails per week mark!, which surely is making a good progress from when I started 2.5 years ago. Remember, at the beginning, before starting this experiment, I used to receive 30 to 40 emails per day! And now, 2.5 years later, it’s just 17 emails per week! Yes, indeed, you are reading it right! I’m now averaging 17 emails received per week, while the majority of my online interactions are now happening through social software tools.

So, to me, it is not just a drop of 28% in the past 12 months, but way over 90% of the email I used to get! And, not sure what you would think, but that’s *huge!* Yes! Being able to state how email is no longer the only game in town for me, quite the opposite!, actually, is a good thing. It proves it can be done! It proves I am not the only one who can make it happen. And this is when it gets really exciting! When you see other folks increasingly paying more and more attention as to how they interact with their email Inboxes and how they effectively start looking for ways of reducing such email clutter.

Very exciting, indeed! Even more when you notice it’s folks around you who are starting to ask you how you can help them eliminate most of their incoming emails and instead progress towards a much more receptive adoption of social software tools for business. That’s why I’m pretty jazzed up about seeing a whole bunch of fellow co-workers who are continuing to make efforts to reduce their email workload. To the point where entire teams are figuring out strategies to make it work for them and over the last couple of weeks I have been working with a couple of them where there is plenty of promise ahead! Yay!

But it gets better! Because over the last few weeks as well I’m starting to notice how even customers want to figure out ways on how they themselves can get rid of, or reduce substantially, their incoming email. And they seem to keep finding me out there as they search how it can be done (Double yay for #lawwe), which is really good news, because I have been invited a couple of times already to go and present to them how they themselves could live “A World Without Email“.

Why and how did Luis do this? Here is a link to an excellent interview with Luis conducted by the Doyenne of the Social Media world in Canada, Nora Young at Spark (CBC Radio). The interview was almost exactly a year ago and as with this post was timed to appear as we all struggled back to work and a full email inbox.

Luis’ main issue with email is that it makes it too easy for someone else not to care or know if you are busy and to impose work upon you or to engage you in their politics at no real cost to themselves. For instance – if I was to send you a large document as an attachment – there are many steps that you must take to read it – and then it all gets even worse if you wish my comments etc. Far easier to share a document. For instance, how many times have you got a “Cover my ass” CC or BCC? When what was really needed was a real debate? How many tomes have you been really busy and have a colleague impose a deadline on their stuff on you? This is the kind of behavior that Luis objects to.

Or what about all those newsletters that you don’t have time to read? Or those missives from on high from senior management that tell you how great they are or how we all have to ull up our socks?

Luis is not the only person pushing back. Jason Fried CEO of 37 Signals has an impassioned plea about how the workplace itself crushes productivity.

Yeah, my feeling is that the modern workplace is structured completely wrong. It’s really optimized for interruptions. And interruptions are the enemy of work. They are the enemy of productivity, they are the enemy of creativity, they are the enemy of everything. But that’s what the modern workplace is all about, it’s interruptions. Everyone’s calling meetings all the time, everyone’s screaming people’s names across the thing, there’s phones ringing all the time. People are walking around. It’s all about interruptions. And people go to work today, and then they end up doing most of their real work after work, or on the weekends. So, people are working longer hours, people are tired – I’m working 50-60 hours this week. It’s not that there’s 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do, it’s because you don’t work at work anymore. You go to work to get interrupted.

What happens is, is that you show up at work and you sit down and you don’t just immediately begin working, like you have to roll into work. You have to sort of get into a zone, just like you don’t just go to sleep, like you lay down and you go to sleep. You go to work too. But then you know, 45 minutes in, there’s a meeting. And so, now you don’t have a work day anymore, you have like this work moment that was only 45 minutes. And it’s not really 45 minutes, it’s more like 20 minutes, because it takes some time to get into it and then you’ve got to get out of it and you’ve got to go to a meeting.

Then when the meeting’s over, you’re probably pissed off anyway because it was a waste of time and then the meeting’s over and you don’t just go right back to work again, you got to kind of slowly get back into work. And then there’s a conference call, and then someone calls your name, “Hey, come a check this out. Come over here.” And like before you know it, it’s 4:00 and you’ve got nothing done today. And this is what’s happening all over corporate America right now. Everybody I know, I don’t care what business they’re in. Like when I talk to them about this, it’s like “Yeah, that’s my life.” Like, that is my life, and it’s wrong.

And so I think that has to change. If people want to get things done, they’ve got to get rid of interruptions.

Email is just part of this uncritical work culture that forces many to do their work after hours at home!

So what do Luis and Jason offer up as an alternative?

Luis still thinks that email has a place – in calendar management and in private one on one matters such as salary etc. But he has found that he can push back and negotiate a better way for nearly every category of work. Want me to work on your document – then share it with me! Have an issue to solve – open a conversation in public! Want to avoid being put upon by others – work in public so that people can see when you are busy – so if you use shared documents – people can see you are editing or drafting.

The whole point is to learn how to protect your time.

Jason has  the same advice.

So, this isn’t really a plug, but we use our product called Campfire, which is a real time chat tool. That is our office. Campfire is our office, and that’s a web based chat tool where there’s a persistent chat room open all the time. Anyone who has a question for anyone else in the company posts it there and in real time, everyone else can see it if they’re looking at it. But if they’re busy, they just don’t pay attention. And then if non one responds, then that means someone is busy. Not like, I’m going to keep calling their name until they turn around. That’s what it’s like in most offices. Or you ring someone and they’re not there and so you call their name, and they’re not there, so you go to their office and you bang on their door. If someone doesn’t respond in Campfire, it means they’re busy. And unless it’s a true emergency, where you really need an answer right now, then you just let them be and they’ll get back to you in three hours. And the truth of the matter is, there are almost no true emergencies in business. Everything can wait a few hours. Everything can wait a day. It’s not a big deal if you get back to me later in the day for me to know right now.

And the other thing about interruptions and calling people’s names, and ringing them on the phone and stuff, it’s actually really an arrogant sort of move because you’re saying that whatever I have to ask you is more important than what you’re doing. Because I’m going to stop you from doing what you are doing for me to ask you this questions that probably doesn’t matter anyway. So, we’re very cognizant of this, and we make sure that we only ping people, that’s what we call it, digitally and in ways that will not really get in their way if they’re really busy.

He uses his own tool but of course there are many tools that we can use – the tool is not the key it is the idea of working in public that is.

How do you get others to play? Well if you are Jason – it’s easy you are the CEO! But Luis is not the CEO. He publicly told the world that this was his intent. He pushes back and negotiated with his own team and colleagues – and the value of this spread out.

Here is a mind map from Luis that shows you his process and his results

The question that kicks off this short four-minute video:

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Is Social Media a Fad ?  Or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution ?

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Thanks to Euan Semple for surfacing this recently-updated (current statistics) view of the spread and penetration of social media into our daily human activities.

It’s not hard to imagine similar patterns to the growth of social computing and informal, socially-driven learning for the average organization 5 or 10 years down the road.

Organizations everywhere will have to come to terms with the ubiquity of social tools, the fundamental necessity of personal knowledge management as a core element of productivity, and more useful-and-easier ways to create effective business processes in a networked environment, whether Barely Repeatable or Easily Repeatable.
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As some FASTForward readers may know, I’ve worked with organizations on human resources, organizational/work design and organizational effectiveness issues for most of the past two-and-a-half decades.

I’ve also been reasonably deeply involved for the past decade with the evolution of the Web and networks and how they impact knowledge work, work design, collaboration, knowledge management, and individual, group and organizational learning.

I wrote this short burst of one-pagers a few years ago in an attempt to be succinct but pithy about the range of changes we all are or will be experiencing as the interconnected environment in which we carry out work contiues to spread and penetrate the inner workings of organizations.  I’ve changed a few words here and there to reflect that we’re now in 2010.

I’d love to know what you think, and what I’ve missed or need to change.

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1. Customers, employees and other stakeholders are all interconnected, and have access to most, if not all the information that everyone else has

This fact has large implications for any organization. It means that you can’t hide – anywhere.

Michael Schrage of MIT puts it very succinctly:

“Networks make organizational culture and politics explicit”

It’s essential, in this interconnected age of instant accessibility to information and knowledge, that as a leader and manager you are aware of the potent force that is contained in networks of connected information and people.

The implications are clear.

People have to understand and believe in what an organization is doing, why the organization is doing what it does, and how it’s doing it.

The messages from leaders have to be clear and believable, and the culture that carries out the organization’s mandate and mission has to be flexible, responsive and open.

Fear and cynicism, being driven to perform – as opposed to being invited to contribute your best – can’t carry the day.

2. The organization chart usually reflects power and politics in the organization … more often than not, customers and employees find work-arounds to create the experiences that delight

Most organization charts reflect an organizational design that is intended to deliver a strategy developed by a small group of people sitting on the top of an organization

Evaluating and ordering jobs in terms of their size and importance is often used to implement the organizational design

Most methods of job evaluation use factors, logic and language that were developed in the 1950’s and 1960’s – perfect for the Industrial Age, less than perfect for the interconnected Information Age.

Often, reporting relationships and chains-of-command get in the way.

Why do you think the Dilbert comic strip has been so successful for so long ?

Probably because people know that lots of time, energy and effort is expended keeping bosses happy – usually at the expense of customers.

Many managers aspired to, and spent the last twenty years, learning how to become “bosses”. Do you know what prison guards are called by the inmates ?

You guessed it – Boss

3. People interconnected by the Internet and software have ways of speaking to each other – and so they do that – all day long

People communicate. That’s what people do.

They share jokes, they send around interesting e-mails and web sites, they help each other get things done.

The nature of work in the Information Age has changed – dramatically.  And it’s likely that the nature of work will keep changing.

If you want to see what work might look like – watch developments in the usability and usefulness of blogs and wikis. Watch younger people as they bring the gaming mentality into the workplace and watch how they communicate using cell phones, e-mail, and IM and the (eventual) derivatives of podcasting.

Watch, too, for developments in telepresence.

Employees are people, too. They communicate just like all the other real people, in Social Networks. They’re the ones communicating with your customers and shareholders.

It’s essential for an organization’s success, and the personal success of each and every one of those employees, that they feel proud of what they communicate. They want to be engaged in positive ways in making a meaningful contribution – to the customers, to themselves and to their fellow employees.

4. Champion-Channel-Coordinate replaces Command-and-Control

Thousands of articles have talked about how command-and-control dynamics are less than effective in the new set of interconnected conditions found in the workplaces of the Information Age.

Remember how you felt (or feel today) when commanded by a parent or other authority figure?

All too often, going to work in today’s organizations feels like re-living the adult version of that experience.

Not all organizations are like this – but fewer and fewer of tomorrow’s organizations will be able to function effectively if command-and-control remains the dominant dynamic.

Coaching has become an important response to changing this dynamic. Coaches help leaders and managers listen better, respect other people more authentically, and become more effective at striking a balance between:

Clarity and Decisiveness … and … Flexibility and Openness

As change swirls and complexity keeps on growing, champion-channel-coordinate helps good ideas and effective responses come to the surface, be examined thoroughly, and get implemented.

Effective leaders and managers know how to (or learn how to) champion, channel and coordinate.

Bosses are different than leaders and managers – as both a conceptual construct and in the lived experience found in our relationship with them.

5. Conversations are where information is shared, knowledge is created and are the basis for getting the right things done

Human beings have been having conversations since time began. That’s how we’ve figured out all of the things we’ve invented and how we govern ourselves. It’s how we’ve gotten to how we are now.

In the Industrial Age, reporting relationships, and the assumption that the dog on the top of the heap knew more than all the other dogs, were the formalized structure for conversation. It doesn’t work very well this way, anymore.

The only way to deal with ongoing change is to create and sustain effective conversations – with your customers, with and amongst employees and with everyone else.

Sharing information, and creating new knowledge, in order to respond to ongoing change, is the only way that will work from here on out.

The structure, tools and culture of organizations will have to honor this fact.

There’s no other way it’s going to work.

6. Trust, Transparency and Authenticity are the glue that holds it all together

People want to trust, they want to believe – even in the face of large amounts of evidence that the system is being manipulated in the favor of a select few

In North America, we’re still trying to shake off the disbelief about the blatant dishonesty and fraud demonstrated by some corporate (and governmental) leaders. We actively do not want to believe things may be as corrupt as they seem … institutionalized dishonesty and deceit.

We don’t want to believe that these attitudes and behavior might be more widespread than is apparent, yet somehow we have a feeling that the common corporate culture rewards and supports this possibility.

Many people – checking their 401K’s or stock portfolios, or looking back at the job(s) they’ve lost – feel at best disrespected and at worst enraged that they have been taken advantage of.

The interconnectedness of the Web has created a means for people to challenge blind authority, and to push back. If their trust is abused, many will use this to establish their own authority or fight back

Let’s understand one thing … when people who have been abused decide to get organized and push back, they become a potent force.

Interconnectedness is a potent force for creating transparency and demanding trust, and many are just now learning how to use it more effectively.

7. The Workplace of the Future will be more diverse – in terms of demographics, values, gender, race and language

In the midst of all the interconnectedness and sharing of information, the composition and shape of the workplace will keep changing.

North America and Western Europe are landscapes of a changing population – different waves of immigration keep coming, and each new generation brings fresh change to the workplace. The workplace of the near future will be a sea of people from a wide range of countries, cultures and languages – and they will all be interconnected.

The range of diversity brings with an equally wide range of beliefs, values and reasons for working.

This emerging mix will bring new dynamics of relationship into the workplace – both online and offline

Learning to listen, respect and champion-and-channel will be an essential competency for success.

8. New, integrated and sophisticated technologies are being developed and implemented – and the knowledge workers of tomorrow will be more interconnected than ever

Web 2.0 has found its way to the workplace – it’s an infrastructure that’s decentralized and more open … and therefore more complex in terms of human dynamics … than that which came before.

Remember Napster ? The workplace versions exist and may be coming soon to a workplace near you. Indeed, the wider conversation about blogs and the workplace is only growing, and acquiring useful examples.

Many forms of “smartware” are also on the runway, getting ready to take off.  New tools are absolutely essential to deal with the overload of information that already exists – and grows more daunting with each passing week. This “smartware” will find its way into the workplace.

Smartware will either “dumb things down” (entering information, and the system does the rest), or “smarten things up” (helping people collaborate and create new knowledge).

Many of these tools will add capability and functionality to the continuing need for effective collaboration – and so will make collaboration more and more possible.

More technology-supported collaboration will in turn increase the need for effective leadership and coaching – champion-and-channel will become more necessary than ever. The game will get sharper again.

Adapting to the new tools will require new forms of social interaction in the workplace. As change keeps coming, and work activities become more interdependent, the required adaptation will become more social and cultural in nature.

9. We’re All In This Together

The interconnected Information Age is showing us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.  Systems thinking is not new .. but the spread of networks makes it effects, impacts and challenges more visible and more immediate.

This applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key. Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

10. There’s No Going Back to “Normal” – Permanent Whitewater is the New Normal

It’s almost trite to say this – the only constant is change.

However…over the past 15 years or so, there have been enormous amounts of energy spent resisting change – waiting and hoping for things to go back to “normal”.

It won’t happen. It’s useful to acknowledge and accept this, and get started … at learning how to learn, and equipping yourself for constant adaptability.

It’s a good – but not the only – way forward.

At the same time, you won’t survive by trying to make yourself into a chameleon. You can’t be all things to all people.

Connecting to your self – your values, your ways to build and acquire knowledge, and understand and use your intuition – is in my opinion the only way to go.

5 reasons why your company should be distributed

I’ve noticed a new trend in Silicon Valley. More and more startups are beginning life as distributed companies, and investors and partners are starting to accept it as normal. Our company Automattic is distributed, and I’m ready to sing the praises of running a business in this way. BTW, I thinkdistributed (“evenly spread throughout an area”) is a better description than the more commonly used virtual (“nearly real or simulated to be real”) for a company that has people working from all over the place instead of a centralized office. In Automattic’s case, we currently have over 50 employees spread across 12 US states and 10 countries.

Here are my top 5 reasons why you should consider the distributed model for your company:

via toni.org

I think that this is indeed the future – the full text follows here

As with all good network designs – most of the direct and indirect costs of the organization go away.

The capital costs are shed and are taken up by the nodes. People work from their place. With their gear. Huge expenses off the table. Huge potential to have the best gear for the staff.

Most of those interruptions go away – who can get any work done at the office these days?

Most of those silly meetings go away.

With NO Commute – so they get hours of time back a day. Let’s say 2 hours a day. 10 hours a week. 40 hours a month. (That’s a working week). 12 weeks a year! That is a lot of dentist visits, plumber visits, time with kids and spouse, time to nap, time to do whatever. And all this time was pulled out of the air as a result of not commuting.

Then of course there are the direct costs of commuting – the car, the transport. It costs $9,000 a year to run a car fully costed. How about coffee and lunch? What do you spend today? $5.0 – $20 a day. That is $1,000 – $4,000 a year for coffee and lunch! How about clothes? I used to buy 2 suits a year as a man. Women can’t get away with that. How much does going to work cost you in clothes? $2,000 – $5,000.

Daycare – well you might still want to send your kid off to daycare but now you might be able to do this locally and walk there. You will not have that pressure at the end of the day to juggle that project and getting to daycare on time. If your child is sick, you have options. And with all the money you have saved on the other things, you can afford a good one.

They live where they want. Huge choice given back. Not only can you choose what part of town, but what town or even country.

Then firm can also hire from a market of 6 billion versus from the local pool – the full talent pool of the planet is open to you.

The costs of travel to meet and hang out now and then are tiny compared to what is spent on a conventional organization.

The communication tools that connect you all now are all but free as well. The Skype offices have big screens that are ON all the time – so you can look up and call out to a colleague in another city as if she was in the next room – for free!

So why not your office? Well if your organization is all about control, then this will never happen. if your organization is all about process and not results, this will never happen. If your organization hires people who don’t have the skills to deliver, this will never happen. If your organization is like this – why are you still there?

Posted via web from Rob’s posterous

As FASTForward readers may know, colleague Rob Patterson and I have decided to put forth a series of opinions about the HR issues that may become prominent as the implementation of purposeful social computing proceeds in the enterprise arena.

I believe it’s fair to say that Rob and I come by our interest in this area honestly, as we both have had significant chunks of our past careers tangled up in the world of human resources management.  Rob was Senior Vice-president, Human Resources for one of Canada’s major banks, and I spent a number of years in a relatively senior role with Hay Management Consultants, one of the well-known global HR / organizational effectiveness consultancies.

Today we are both dropouts from that career path. We both encountered the Web in its early days and decided that it would have a major impact on work, organizations and human activities, and asked ourselves the question “Do I want to belong to the past, or to the future ?” We came to the same answer, it seems.  We’ve both been blogging etc., and proselytizing its usefulness, for what seems now like forever.  I started blogging (arguably) in 2001, and if I remember correctly Rob started around about then, maybe in 2002 ?  We’ve both been intimately involved in what’s now called social media ever since.

In my opinion, nowhere is the impact of hyperlinks, HTMLx, well-designed platforms, easier-and-easier-to-use tools, etc. more apparent than in the lively and far-reaching conversations all over the Web about the tug-of-war between structured formal learning and semi-structured informal learning as bedrock for equipping employees to deliver effective performance in their work.  As my ITA colleague Harold Jarche often says,”work is learning, learning is work”.

Generally, the Learning & Development area of organizations tends to fall under the HR function, though in some instances teh Marketing department is getting involved.  And, from what I can tell, the Learning (Training) & Development industry is in an uproar these days.  More and more of the pros in that area are beginning to understand that fundamental workplace dynamics are probably forever changing in massive ways, as organizations and employees everywhere are exploring the benefits, the tools and the necessary organizational adaptations.  The implications for stimulating, supporting, managing and measuring employee performance are important, and massive.

The L&D pros are wrestling with the fact that most often one of or the core accountability of their role is for choosing, implementing and supporting an LMS whilst the utility and effectiveness of said LMS is increasingly in question.  The question of LMS effectiveness is feeling the impact of ‘work-arounds’, as of course employees everywhere are learning socially, in interaction with others on-and off-line.  And (I think) there is pressure on mainstream LMS platforms also coming from the spread of collaborative social computing platforms like the most recent version of Sharepoint (2010) and its competitors.

How and why employees learn is directly linked to setting and managing performance objectives, which in turn is related to the design of (knowledge) work and individuals’ learning contracts and the acquisition and evolution of job competencies.  Today, performance objectives tend to be developed top-down (which is necessary, as performance derives directly from an organization’s strategy and overall objectives).  But that genesis does not take into account the whole picture of an organization’s or individual employees’ information-and-knowledge ecosystem.

As both horizontal and vertical networks inside organizations (or inclusive of connections external to the organization) become increasingly interconnected and intertwined, the impact on which objectives most clearly define effective and high levels of performance needs to be explored more deeply.  This is  also, I think, connected to the ongoing debate about the ROI of social computing, the value of intangibles like relationship capital and intellectual capital, and metrics about effectiveness in a networked environment

That exploration will be the subject of my next post in this series on HR in the Enterprise 2.0 context.  If you’re interested, please stay tuned.

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Follow up on Joe’s post before this

McDonalds will offer unlimited free Wifi at most of its outlets starting today.

This move is tied into their coffee strategy – and directly attacks Starbucks. Earlier Starbucks saw that making a coffee shop into a Social and Work place was a move that fitted into the more mobile social and work world. But in their rapid expansion, they seemed to have lost their way and ended up selling a commodity transaction. It is even more ironic that the shift to the public social and work space has accelerated as Starbucks withdrew. They could have owned this.

It’s ironic that MCD is shifting from the commodity platform to the social platform. I think a lesson for us all.

So what do you sell? How do you sell? If your answer is a transactional commodity, then order your tombstone.

PORTLAND, Ore. — McDonald’s Corp. said Monday that it will soon offer free wireless Internet access at most of its U.S. fast-food restaurants as it tries to broaden its appeal still further.

“We’re not just about hamburgers,” said Dave Grooms, chief information officer for McDonald’s USA. “We are about convenience and all kinds of value.”

The company, the world’s largest fast-food chain, has offered Internet access for about five years.

In mid-January, it will lift the $2.95 fee it has charged for two hours of Internet access at 11,000 of its 14,000 U.S. locations. There will be no time limit after the fee is lifted.

“McDonald’s is about value – value in our food, value in our services,” Grooms said. “It’s a natural fit.”

It’s also a good fit with the company’s growing coffee business, which has upped the chain’s competition with Starbucks Corp., which also offers free wireless access. Coffee and the McCafe line of drinks at McDonald’s have helped drive its sales and increase its market share in the U.S.

Ed Lawler is a reknowned management thinker I have studied for years.

He was just interviewed (by Karl Moore, a management professor at McGill University) for the Toronto Globe and Mail on the need for new management models in the Interconnected Era.

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New World Needs New Management Model

Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak with Ed Lawler, who is a professor at the Marshall School [of Business] at USC [University of Southern California] and the director of the Center for Effective Organizations. Good morning, Ed.

Ed Lawler: Good morning.

KM: Ed, you told me earlier that you are thinking about a book on Management 3.0. What do you mean by Management 3.0?

EL: Fundamentally, we need to think of a whole new approach to managing complex, large organizations. We certainly have the “command and control” era, which started way back with scientific management, and progressed over decades, really, to greater and greater levels of sophistication and expertise in how to make it run. That seemed to fit a certain kind of production-driven economy.

Clearly, starting in the 1950s, we began to say it has its limits, we have to use our workers differently, our employees differently, and I think that generated Management 2.0, which was around employee involvement, participation and moving more knowledge and information and power downward in the organization so people could add more value. And I think generally, it did impact the way most corporations operate.

The problem, of course, is that I think we are yet in another era. The economy has changed radically since then, the work force has changed radically since the sixties and seventies, and of course the economy has changed … globally, and everybody knows all those points.

So it’s kind of surprising, in many ways, that Management 1.0: command and control, or Management 2.0: high involvement or high performance, and various names for it, were [still considered] suitable.

I think we do need a Management 3.0, which recognizes the impact of information technology, different work forces, diversity in the workplace, and so forth.

So what I have been trying to do in a new book is say what that looks like, and yes, I have incorporated certainly some of the things that we did in Management 1.0 and Management 2.0. I think it really has to have a different philosophy and a different orientation with respect to both organizational design, how we treat the work force, how we think about the work force and basically how we lead in this kind of economy and in this kind of competitive environment.

KM: Ed, that is very interesting, but I need to know more about 3.0. What is it? Tell us about it so that we can begin thinking about it as managers.

EL: In many ways, to zero in on it, you can pick particular areas on how you would do that differently, or how you would manage, or general philosophy. Let me just pick one and carry it out: leadership, for example.

With the movement away from command and control management to high involvement management, we became fascinated with leaders and ascribed a lot of the effectiveness of organizations to the behaviour of leaders and so forth, and I think that has gone way too far.

We have lost a lot of the managerial blocking and tackling that people in supervisory positions have to do in order to make organizations effective. It seems to me that, if you are going to have a valid, viable 3.0, it has to include the right blend of leadership behaviours. Yes, where you inspire people by a sense of mission, sustainability, accountability – but also have a valid management approach which deals with fundamentals like goal setting and work specifications and product evaluation produced by employees. So we do not want to lose some of the key managerial skills as we have, I think, in searching for these magical leaders who are going to inspire and direct people.

KM: It is kind of a balance between leadership and management in these people: You have to be a leader but also, if you are not a manager at the same time, I think it’s Henry Mintzberg who talks about it, it’s dispiriting.

EL: Yes, I think that is exactly right, it is the balance. We have spent a lot of time training people on leadership, which some people learn and some people don’t, to be frank, and we have lost a lot of the fundamental manager skills or [they] were never developed. We still see managers doing terrible basic management – like performance reviews are done just awfully and the answer seems to be, “Well, let’s just eliminate them.” Well, to me, that is just insane. How are you going to direct and control behaviour if you do not have some kind of accountability and some sort of reviews that look at people and give them feedback and give them a sense of direction?

Just knowing that we are going to [have] sustainability as a major thrust of the company does not translate into day-to-day behaviour very easily. You need to be able to make that translation from the sense of vision and mission and so forth, to actual behaviours, and that is the managerial part of being an effective manager and leader.

KM: How about how we design organizations? How would that be different under 3.0?

EL: I think it depends substantially on what business you are in, how sophisticated the business is, and how complex it is, but I see much more self organizing, much more use of information technology, social networks, and perhaps even internal markets to create the forum and allocate financial resources within organizations, and that’s an area where there would be enormous differences.

In a book that Chris Worley and I did called Built to Change , we emphasized very strongly structures that would give people external interface with the market so that nobody is more than 2 or 3 degrees separate from the external market. I think that’s the right emphasis and we need to build on that kind of thinking because touching the market, being interfaced with the market, helps direct peoples’ behaviour internally and gives them a sense of how the business is doing and certainly motivates them to perform well.

So, I think that piece of the design is critical. What I don’t think we did enough with, in the Build to Change book, is to emphasize how organizations can be built out [using] social networks and how money can be allocated to innovations and start-up operations and how they can be converted from ideas to actual operating businesses.

KM: Is that something like the Wikipedia-tion, the LinkedIn, the Facebook-ization, if you would, of the world?

EL: Yes, I think it is, and that certainly relates to why I think it’s viable now and has not been in the past, and it has to do with a lot of people coming into organizations, partly the younger group, of course, but also more senior people are now much more familiar with those technologies and it is much more viable to use those technologies to organize.

So you are starting to see large companies, like the Ciscos and the IBMs, trying to take that technology which they have sold to consumers and say “How do we use it internally to create a more adaptable and flexible organization?” The one thing we clearly know is that Management 3.0 has to leave room for very adaptable and flexible organizations so that yesterday’s competitive advantage is ready to be today’s, yesterday’s business model is going to have to be pretty radically changed quickly, in order to keep up with the rate of change that exists today in the environment.

If there is a new normal coming out of the recession, I think it is one of change and one of innovation that companies have to be able to do that. Particularly if they are in knowledge work or situations where intellectual property and technology is the key to their business.

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Read the rest of the interview here …

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