The New “Cloud” Complete Staff Departments

April 21, 2011 at 7:52 am · Filed under Adoption, Innovation, Organizational Design, Paradigm, Workplace

One of the greatest challenges for a small and growing company is to make that shift from a small “tribe” of say 8 early employees to 15 or 25 or 35 staff.

Here is Microsoft at that moment.

The culture changes  and has to become more formal. Rules have to be made. Employment law understood. How to hire and fire learned.  You just cannot avoid this step.

You can easily outsource things like payroll and EAP. But what about HR expertise?

What kind of risk does a small organization run? Hiring is such a vital process – do you know how to do this well? With 5 employees you can rock and roll but with 25, what about the request to take time off to look after a sick relative? What about the poorly performing employee – or worse the employee who is acting out? What about Health and Safety?

But at this stage you have no money! You may pay for a good lawyer and an accountant but all your staff are coding or contributing to the business. So you often ask your PA or your book keeper to do their best.

You simply cannot hire full time the best expertise.

But now you can have access to an HR “Cloud” where you can have the kind of expertise that exists only in a very large organization with thousands of employees. Now you can have this level of expertise at a price that you can afford. Just as you can now have the level of data storage and security in the cloud.

My HR Department is a partnership of 3 of the top HR professionals in Canada. I knew them all back in the day when this was my field too – they are the cream of the crop. Their target market is the new and the small and the fast growing organization.

I think that this is the start of a new organizational structure. Just as many employees themselves are now virtual – soon most of the staff functions that used to cost so much to have in place will be virtual as well. You will “rent” the expertise when you need it – just like you will soon rent most software.

What this means of course is that an organization of 25 people can have the level of staff support of an organization of 50,000. It will make small organizations very powerful.

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The Real New Enterprise? Capitalism 2.0!

February 20, 2011 at 10:39 am · Filed under Capitalism 2.0, Emergence, Emergent, Enterprise 2.0, Organizational Design, Peak Oil

Much of our discourse about the New Enterprise seems to use the premise that our traditional business organizations will be transformed.  I am beginning to doubt that. But I think that there is a new Enterprise but that it will look more like that I propose in this post.

All the news about employment remains bad. Will the jobs ever come back? I don’t think so. Business as we know it makes less and less and in reality offers fewer roles and jobs that have any meaning or that can pay todays bills. Business  as we know it has no capacity to offer most people what they need.

I think that the real new economy is going to emerge out of desperation and out of this failure.

Here are some trends that we should watch out for. They are all  linked into the great Trinity of real needs – Food – Shelter and Surplus

Hyper Local Food - If you have no money, food becomes very important. The Food Bank model takes us no where – it relies on charity – offers shit food and does not add any impetus to the lack of work or role. People are doing better than this by making the growing of food the centre piece. Here is an example. We see already in the worst hit cities like Detroit, that people are starting to grow their own food amidst the ruins of the city. And its not just that food is grown but that real community is created. People who grow food together and then share it return to the society of our hunter gatherer past. They become Tribes. With this Trust comes the potential to do more.

Cheap Land and Real Estate – As many areas become blighted, the land and the space becomes very cheap. Offering the opportunity to get the second part of the  trinity. In the old model, people would have to pay others to make shelter or working space. But if enough Trust is created by say starting with co growing and sharing food, then “Barn Building” is possible. The “Tribes can help the members have shelter or work space. The capital that is required is less financial capital but social capital.

Surplus – But we still all need money or some way of exchanging value outside the Tribe. This is where the social web comes in. There can be a surplus of food that can be sold locally. Inner Detroit is a food desert. There are only corner stores. This is true for many urban areas. The food operation can scale and can also network with others offering in the end large scale. 1,000 mini farms in a large city can produce a very large amount of food collectively. Enough to feed most people. A real surplus is possible. Those who start to grow food to feed themselves will make a good living feeding other. With this surplus and with their social capital all sorts of new ventures then becomes possible. For the capital costs of business in this context are very low. Anything will soon be able to be made locally with very little capital. This trend is most visible in the media now. Did you know that True Grit was edited by the Coen brothers on Final Cut Pro,? The technology is here right now that can empower a small hyper local group to go even into manufacturing. Here I see the idea like Fab Labs coming into prominence. For about $25,000 a community can equip itself to make almost anything. As with a network of tiny farms, a network of tiny shops can build on a large scale. This was how in fact Germany kept its war production growing throughout WWII. To avoid bombing, all aircraft production was dispersed into small shops and the parts were assembled at the bases!

Again as with food – the social web connects all of this. Producers to Buyers – Suppliers to producers – Producers to Producers. In a network  the nodes are small, but the network and so the output and the opportunity can be vast. In the old, we all depend on the MAN. In the network we are all the man. No one is going to move your urban farm to Iowa or your Fab Lab to China.

Food is the starting point I think. We all need it and if we go down this road we re-invent society. Food offers us the core of what we need and growing it and sharing it creates a real tribe. For a food model like this brings us all back together where as the old model splits us all up.

So with this wealth model come also wealth distribution. A new better form of capitalism. Capitalism 2.0?

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Travel Chaos and Twitter – Lessons for all Crises

December 30, 2010 at 7:44 am · Filed under Adoption, Air Travel, Business 2.0, Business Intelligence, Collaboration, Community, Culture, Customer Service, Emergency, Enterprise 2.0, Organizational Design, Twitter, User Revolution, Wisdom of Crowds

Millions of travellers have been stuck this holiday season. The question is what can you as a traveler and what can you as a supplier do about this kind of event.?

The lesson taken from this Christmas is surely larger than travel but also applies to any bad event – such as Skype’s system failure. You can imagine what your equivalent might be in your organization.

I can see that part of the answer is to be found in social media. Here is how the NYT ran their version of the story today:

While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.

Since Monday, nine Delta Air Linesagents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.

But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.

For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.

Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.

Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.

She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.

“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”

Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.

“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.

Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.

I recently posted about Trust and how important it is. Being silent is THE worst position. Even when you cannot offer a fix, offering an ear and the truth helps. Skype kept a running commentary about their problem and now that they have fixed it have shared the post mortem on their blog. Please look at the comments on the Skype blog – a lesson for us all.

I had been critical of Air Canada until this Christmas - but even they have upped their efforts on Twitter to work with clients and to offer sympathy when they could not help.

They still do promotion as you can see but look at the other tweets – Air Canada are starting to get how this can help their Trust levels.

Now Twitter is still an elite tool for the elite. But all new things start this way. I am thinking of all those who were in the information dark looking over their shoulder at those who were in contact and can see that it will not take long for Twitter and Social media to become the normal for how we find our way around problems. Here is a brief summary of my own travel hell. Where I reach out on Twitter and my friends help me.

This illustrates for me the next phase of using social media to navigate crisis. Right now an airline or your organization can use social media to communicate from your own perspective. But what if you could harness, as I did, the collective wisdom of the network?

In my case I could not be sure of what the roads were like in the last 4 hours of a 13 hour trip. I asked my pals for their opinion and in minutes got enough “TRUSTED” advice to make the call to stop. My pals may have saved my life. So what if an airline could use its followers to help each other look at local weather – hotel rooms – alternative routes etc – even put each other up? What would it take to have a real community of customers? For if you did – they could do this.

Again this demands a new relationship with your customer. A customer is no longer a person out there but a node in here.  If you can build up trust with an inner group, you can partner with this group in all sorts of ways.

• Marketing
• Crisis Management
• Problem Solving

Let’s play with this in later posts.

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Robin Dunbar Ends the Stupidity of Endless “Friends”

November 23, 2010 at 10:34 am · Filed under Chaord, Network Effect, Organizational Design, Robin Dunbar, Social Networking, Socialprise, Trust, Trusted Space, Work 2.0, Workplace

I saw another piece of stupidity the other day when a “Social Media Expert” claimed that his thousands of friends on Facebook and Twitter made him such an expert and that he could teach you how to have that many friends as well. In other words that having lots of Friends was the goal!

Of course people like him make these claims based on nothing.

A few of us do read and those of us who do have long known of the work of Robin Dunbar. Those who care to do some work, know that there is a lot of science that underpins how humans live in social groups and that there is an underlying math that is well known.

So for those that don’t have time to read here he is in 16 minutes on Youtube offering you the science that shows why:

• Our social personal limit is about 150 people
• How this came about
• That we have layers of intimacy inside this limit
• That there are layers beyond it but that are not intimate
• That meeting face to face – is crucial to maintaining these relationships and that they degrade if not enhanced with face to face
• That men and women use two very different types of social grooming to maintain their networks – women need to talk and men need to do
• That the folks who claim to have thousands of friends are nearly all men with poor social skills in the real world

So for all you Social Media Experts and HR professionals and Organization Design Folks here is Dunbar:

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How the revolution in Media will help the revolution in Education

October 18, 2010 at 8:18 am · Filed under Adoption, Barriers, Economics, KETC, NPR, Organizational Design, Public Media, Social Media, education

After many years of thinking and talking, here Sir Ken I think nails the problem and gets the direction for the right new path correct. Helped a lot by the guys at RSA.

So what can we do with this insight?

My experience in public radio and TV – which also is at a crossroads from one culture to another – is that we must not underestimate the power of the entrenched culture. Most people inside pub radio/TV and in education are so invested in the old that they can only fight an alternative.  This is not because they are bad or stupid – it is because they are human and their identity is the system as it is. So to change it means that they have no place. So they cannot go to the new.

If you long for a better education system – you are also worried about how to breakthrough all these barriers. You don’t know how to change the system. I think that we can look at what is happening in media and find a way.

So where is the change happening in media that we might use to help us in education. As I write them I can see how these factors apply to education - can’t you?

• The long term effects of the poor economy is pressing the system
  • The school system is under huge funding pressure too
  • In higher ed – the degree also costs too much now and drives loans that canot be repaid
  • Kids will seek out new ways – they have to
  • In the next 10 years the pressure to find a new way for the money will become unbearable – thus creating the same kind of context for change that we see in media

• There are organizations like Craigslist that are killing the economics of the old and forcing economic pressure – the old way leads to economic starvation and sets a context for change
  • There are new online schools such as the Khan Academy that offer kids a wonderful alternative to school
  • Great Schools like MIT have put a lot of superlative content online
  • Kids are voting with their feet - better content will be available online for next to free as with Craigslist and personals that will ad to the economic pressure

• The web has a bunch of new tools such as Twitter, YouTube, Netflix, iTunes, Apple TV etc that are empowering new sources and new ways of finding, producing and using content
  • Same for Ed - iTunes, YouTube are already there
  • Why take Math with Miss Jones when you can get the world’s best math teachers on your time at your pace?
  • Parents will buy into this too

• There are entirely new organizations – Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Politico – Greenfield that go through no transition but start with the new model – they are forcing competitive pressure
• There are a few old leaders who get it and have enough critical mass inside to go for it now – The Guardian in the UK and NPR – they are forcing change on their system
  • Athabaska and Phoenix come to mind in higher ed – they are moving to the mainstream
  • Soon there will be Grade Schools that have the same features

• There are  few local small organizations that have the leadership to go for it too and are making enough progress to show the rest - KETC is the one I know the best.

So what to do?

Don’t think about changing the whole system!!!!! It’s too big and powerful.

Instead take advantage of these powerful forces.

If you are a learner – Explore the new world of resources – do not feel trapped in school as it is or feel that you have to wait – enough change is here for you to take full advantage now

If you are a parent – see the whole picture for you child – help line them up into that is now available that is more fitted to them and at a cost you can all afford. Vote with your feet.

If you are a school board - Learn how to make the shift from the old to the new – Do a KETC – pick a school with the right leadership and try the new in ONE place – learn from this – use this test bed to expose others to the new from their peers.

If you are a teacher – Learn how to be the new – participate in the new world – be a citizen teacher – offer content or coaching – learn how to be an entrepreneurial teacher who can hang up their shingle on the web or locally. Be the math coach or the history coach in your place or globally!

If you are a social entrepreneur - Build the new a place together so that you are the convener of the a place where kids can be together and yet be part of the a larger universe of resources that fits them!

It’s coming folks – the forces in play are too great to stop it. BUT you have to be a player now if you want to benefit.

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